Quotes About Empathy

people understood for the first time [...] that in the end the salvation of human beings came from other human beings and not from things, no matter how large and imposing – and even magical – those things might be

But great tragedy is universal

Literature's view of human nature encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself, but the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness

I'm the caring type also. I care aggressively. That's just who I am.

The curse of the human race is not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.

by your example you have taught me kindness, and shown me that it expands to include all people, not only the true believers but the unbelievers and other-believers also, not only the virtuous but also those who know not virtue

To be thin-skinned, far-sighted, and loose-tongued," he said, "is to feel too sharply, see too clearly, speak too freely. It is to be vulnerable to the world when the world believes itself invulnerable

Things – even people – have a way of leaking into each other,' I explain, 'like flavours when you cook. Ilse Lubin's suicide, for example, leaked into old Aadam and sat there in a puddle until he saw God.

Anyone in the vicinity of a dying man was utterly at his mercy. Punches delivered from a deathbed left bruises that never faded.

I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well.

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. I told you that.

Another lesson to be learned: never underestimate your fellow man. One man's ceiling is another man's floor.

That's the least of it. The most of it is, he was always careless with people's hearts. He never took any responsibility for what he broke.

I will learn that the deepest meaning of love is renunciation, giving up one's own dream to fulfill the dream of the beloved.

Proximity to calamity released the human capacity for love.

When we are born, we are not automatically human beings. We have to learn how to be human beings. And some of us get there and some of us don't.

To know one man's story you have to swallow the world.

to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others.

When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives—about how they appear, their reputations, or their prospects in the world.

It may not be coincidental that [you] use phrases like 'self conscious' when you really mean that you are conscious of others being conscious of you.

Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected. But the one lied to almost never shares this view. The moment we consider our dishonesty from the point of view of those we lie to, we recognize that we would feel betrayed if the roles were reversed.

Every person you have ever met, every person you will pass in the street today, is going to die. Living long enough, each will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?

One of the most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not--that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation. Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral--that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings.