Quotes About Empathy

One thing I have discovered since I've been ill, though, is that nobody ever knows anybody, and maybe least of all the people who are closest to them. Sort of a business of not being able to see the trees for the woods. We all live in isolated prisons of our own bodies and there's no real contact with any other human being. That's what sex is, in a way, isn't it, a desperate striving for contact? With which cheerful Thought for Today, I will bid you good afternoon.

people don't have to explain things nearly as much as you think they do.

To heal would be to open the wound,examine it and forgive

There is no use in God's earth being upset by the things that other people do, only what you do yourself.

would want if she were able to speak, Nora

Now that her childbearing years were over he had discovered that he wanted to be a father. And he expected her to understand all this. Possibly even be glad for him. Louis Gray must be a man without any sensitivity at all. He must be lacking in any real brain as well. Perhaps he was a bit simple. Maybe that lopsided smile and those deep eyes were empty, meaningless things, not an indication of a loving soul.

I'll tell you what's brought it on – the behaviour of a man who has acted like a selfish bastard. You've thought of nobody but yourself, Louis, all the time … self, self, self.

Mary Paula had severe morning sickness and was in no mood to console him. He had to be particularly consolatory to her.

It matters that you care enough about yourself and about the people you meet to present yourself well

He has, Anges sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child's suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child's stead so that the boy might live.

If you can read, you don't ever have to be lonely.

Stop searching yourself trying to understand why someone else treated you the way they did. The answer is not inside you; it's inside them, out of reach.

By making love conditional, tough love undermines familial affection, removing the one refuge where people can ordinarily assume they are loved for who they are, not what they do.

But how could you measure your own pain against the pain of the world?

Benjamin called it "estro-lock," the way the two women could talk for hours and lose track of time. They ended up in conversation across any table, screening out noise from kids and men. They could talk about shallow things without judgment and deep things without self-consciousness.

Soon enough it will be me struggling (valiantly?) to walk - lugging my stuff around. How are we all so brave as to take step after step? Day after day? How are we so optimistic, so careful not to trip and yet do trip, and then get up and say O.K. Why do I feel so sorry for everyone and so proud?

But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don't recognize that, then that's the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else's fate to some extent.

Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.

The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls practical intelligence. To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for for maximum effect.

Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else's and says, angrily, 'I don't buy it.' Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.

The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly it will crumple under our feet... The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.

We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy. If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy.

Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade...It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head - even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you're really like to be.

Don't look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger's world.