Quotes About Empathy

Then I understood that when someone begins to tell you her story, you are entwined together.

Why should you not speak to me / And why should I not speak to you?

In truth, she didn't care for rules of any sort; rules made little sense to a person who had grown up in a world without compassion or pity, where there was no moral code by which to abide.

She could recognize the change in the air when anybody in her family, anywhere in the house, began to read. The air was roomier, because the reader was elsewhere.

so your husband's home with the little ones?—it'll be good for him, let him see what it's like with kids all day, right? men never understand until you ask them to do it and then they say, Well, the kids only act like this with me, it has to be much easier when you're with them, isn't that the truth? They're really thinking, You can't possibly put up with this day after day, can you?

I'm sorry this happened to you, Marie,' he said wearily. 'There's a lot of cruelty in the world.' And then he waved his hat to indicate the paths through the park and all the people on them. 'You'll be lucky if this is your worst taste of it.

She saw how the skim of filth, which was despair, which was hopelessness, fell like soot on the lives of the poor.

Mr. Persichetti called his patients God's mistakes. He pressed

Le monde manifeste autant d'indifférence aux amoureux qu'aux pauvres et aux malchanceux.

The story she then told was as all attempts at sympathy are: an effort to match in form and size and detail what another has known: to hold one experience next to another the way lovers and children match fingers and hands, as if these two, side by side, are linked by their likeness, are both identical and unique.

A system of morality tells us what to do and what not to do, but it cannot tell us what we should feel. Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated.

Nobody is born evil.

They recount their earliest memories without any sympathy for the child they once were

Not to take one's own suffering seriously, to make light of it or even to laugh at it, is considered good manners in our culture.

We don't yet know, above all, what the world might be like if children were to grow up without being subjected to humiliation, if parents would respect them and take them seriously as persons. In any case, I don't know of a single person who enjoyed this respect as a child and then as an adult had the need to put other human beings to death.

These people have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for a child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If

It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person.

The reason why parents mistreat their children has less to do with character and temperament than with the fact that they too were mistreated and were not permitted to defend themselves.

A person is not likely to conceive something monstrous if he does not know it somehow or other from experience. We simply tend to refuse to take a child's suffering seriously enough.

empathic and open, understanding and understandable, honest and available, helpful and loving, feeling, transparent, clear

My conviction is that therapy is only successful if it can change this perspective and the thought patterns connected with it. If people genuinely succeed in feeling how they suffered from their parents' behavior as children, they will usually lose their empathy for those parents with hardly any inner conflict at all.

They are able to listen, to identify with others; they are outgoing, concerned, and usually less prone to illusions than the figures we see them encountering. As they have experienced honesty and unconditional affection in their early years, they are better able to cope with their lives than those who are fed on illusions and later have to fight to find out the truth about themselves, like Claudia, Anika, Helga, or Lilka.

And this succeeded so completely because children want to love their parents and prefer not to look the truth in the face. The truth is too awful for these children to bear, so they avert their eyes. But the body remembers everything, and as adults those children unconsciously and automatically rehearse their parents' sadism on their own children, on their subjects or employees, on everyone dependent on them.

But that can only be possible when mothers and fathers no longer unconsciously assume that their children have been brought into the world to alleviate the frustrations and repair the damage they have suffered in their own lives.