Quotes About Empathy

Everybody looked down on someone else. It didn´t matter that everybody shared the same sidewalk to spit on and suffered the same fast-moving diarrhea. We all had the same stink, but everybody complained someone else smelled the worst.

Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.

I read to escape to a more interesting world, not to be locked up in a sweltering prison and find myself vicariously standing among people who are tortured beyond the limits of sanity.

Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had souls

Even though I did not understand her entire story, I understood her grief. In one small moment we had both lost the world, and there was no way to get it back.

Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy.

I looked at her and saw she was crying. And I also began to cry again, that this was our fate, to live like two turtles seeing the watery world together from the bottom of the little pond.

Jane Eyre taught me that loneliness had more to do with being misunderstood than being alone.

Ahora sabes por qué razón es inútil llorar. Tus lágrimas no se llevan tus penas, sino que alimentan la alegría de otros. Por eso has de aprender a tragártelas.

When you read about the lives of other people, people of different circumstances or similar circumstances, you are part of their lives for that moment. You inhabit their lives, and you feel what they're feeling, and that is compassion. If we see that reading does allow us that, we see how absolutely essential reading is.

Pero yo estaba muy mimada por su culpa. Nunca me había enseñado a tener en cuenta sus sentimientos y por ello el ama sólo era para mí alguien que me ofrecía comodidad, como un ventilador en verano o una estufa en invierno, una bendición que sólo aprecias y quieres cuando ya no está presente.

Why did I need to see someone else's bad luck? To feel glad it was not mine? To scare myself into thinking it still might be?

Now you see why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy.

I hope you don't suffer forever from keeping love from your heart

My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more.

It doesn't matter, I say, and I start to pick up the broken glass shards. I knew it would happen. Then why you don't stop it? asks my mother. And it's such a simple question.

She didn't understand people who thrived on argument and being right all the time. Her mother was that way, and what did that get her? Nothing but unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and anger.

He simply translated what was in LuLing's heart: her better intentions, her hopes.

Once the story captures my senses, I am no longer conscious of the act of reading words. I am in the story.

What happened in Nanking, I couldn't claim that as my tragedy. I was not affected. I was not killed.

But how can anyone truly understand another's suffering unless he has felt the wound being made and the moment trust died?

Hugging and being hugged by everybody in moments of sadness and triumph, because hugging is something that never came naturally to me, and now it does.

My friend, my editor, still had the cancer. Each day she had to cross a terrible chasm, a bottomless hole of not knowing what to hope or believe. I tried to imagine what she saw, but I did not have her perspective.

But why didn't I flood in the same way? Why was their happiness tenfold what I felt? Did I lack the proper connection between the senses and the heart? And then I realized that this was my habit. To hold back my feelings.