Quotes About Empathy

Ich liebe dein Schweigen, es ist wie meines. Du bist das einzige Wesen, in dessen Gegenwart ich mich wegen meines eigenen Schweigens nicht beunruhigt fühle. Du besitzt ein ungestümes Schweigen, man fühlt, dass es von Inhalten erfüllt ist. Es ist seltsam lebendiges Schweigen, wie der geöffnete Deckel eines Brunnens, aus dem man das geheimnisvolle Murmeln der Erde vernehmen kann.

There are times when nobody can help you, not even the one you love. You have to be alone. You have to be ill, and wallow in your illness. Your soul needs it.

Él cuenta con que yo entenderé, porque yo, como él, soy escritora. He de saber. Debe estar claro para mí. Para su sorpresa, le digo exactamente lo que tú dices: «No es lo mismo.» Hay un mundo eternamente cerrado para él, el mundo que contiene nuestras conversaciones abstractas, nuestros besos, nuestros éxtasis.

Pouvoir, au milieu de la folie, redevenir humaine et pitoyable.

Además, dado que es inteligente, comprende que a aquellos que son como yo no se les puede seducir sin ilusión. Y él no puede molestarse en crear ilusiones.

My friends—a Spanish painter, a guitarist, the tenor who has been staying with Joaquin, a poet, a homosexual, a Roumanian painter, an American composer, etc. etc.—they are all pained, injured, that I should defend Lawrence. Una mujer tan ideal, que lastima!

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born

É monstruoso dizer-se que o artista não serve a humanidade. Ele foi os olhos, os ouvidos, a voz da humanidade. Sempre foi o transcendentalista que passava a raios X os nossos verdadeiros estados de alma.

I always try to soften what happened by understanding.

So I'm sad. I throw my vanity aside. I'm questioning myself. If the day on which you happen to read this letter proves to be one in which you're depressed, I know I'll get one kind of answer. Another day another.

You must not get trapped in humanity and its struggles. You must keep alive your contact with all things, your relationships to all kinds of people. When you are too much invaded by others' discords, when you are driven by scruples or guilt to retrogress in order to help others live, and when they try to crystallize you in one role, you lose your ability to maintain and sustain the flow, you arrest the turning of the bigger wheels, you get caught in the spokes.

Every other illness is understood, shared with other human beings. Not this one. It is mysterious and solitary, it is as ineffectual and unmoving to others as the attempted crying out of a mute person. Everybody understands hunger, physical pain, illness, poverty, slavery. But no one understands that this moment at which I crossed the street is more annhiliating than a concrete catastrophe. Anxiety is a woman screaming without a voice, out of a nightmare.

I love the sharing. I feel with extraordinary vividness your presence, as if you were reading with me. I actually experience again the sensation of my leaning over your shoulder and kissing your hair and neck while you are reading or writing.

She would have liked to be like him, near to everyone, anyone, but she could not. It saddened her.

We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.

It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.

recently came across a saying by the Scottish writer Ian Maclaren. "Be kind," he wrote, "for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

Someone recently said to me that it is easier to be clever than it is to be kind, and I think that is very true. So I add to my list of regrets the times I have not been kind, choosing instead to be clever, usually at someone else's expense.

If you needed anything, all you had to do was say, 'Mom, I need this,' and my mom would be at my house with it," she says, crying. "And now it's like, if I need something, who do I call?

is a difference between being open to constructive criticism and letting jealous strangers say cruel things to you that make you feel bad about yourself. As

whatever problem you have with someone, project yourself into the other person and see it from their point of view. When you do this, good and evil shuffle into patterns and you are capable of forgiving trespasses. When you understand from whence the good or evil came, and the other person's actions or motivations, only then can you forgive and let it go. Most children believe that