Quotes About Empathy

Those who believe their suffering has been valuable love more readily than those who see no meaning in their pain. Suffering does not necessarily imply love, but love implies suffering

Belonging is one of the things that makes life bearable, and it can be tough to look at a binary world and choose against both sides.

She looked at me – I was crying, though she was not – and she took on a tone of gentle reprimand. 'Don't think you're paying me some kind of tribute if you let my death become the great event of your life,' she said to me. 'The best tribute you can pay to me as a mother is to go on and have a good and fulfilling life. Enjoy what you have.

I realized that I had demanded that my parents accept me but had resisted accepting them.

Love, no matter what.

What to say? That I would have loved to make the trip but was busy staying out of the mental hospital? It's so humiliating—so degrading. If I knew I wouldn't get caught, I'd love to lie about it—invent an acceptable cancer, that recurs and vanishes, that people could understand—that wouldn't make them frightened and uncomfortable.

So many people have asked me what to do for depressed friends and relatives, and my answer is actually simple: blunt their isolation. Do it with cups of tea or with long talks or by sitting in a room nearby and staying silent or in whatever way suits the circumstances, but do that. And do it willingly.

That is, perhaps, the greatest revelation I have had: not that depression is compelling but that the people who suffer from it may become compelling because of it.

If something or someone doesn't work, it's in a state of grace, progress, and evolution. It will attract love and empathy. If it does work, it has merely completed its job and is probably dead.

I'll tell them all the good things and some difficulties. The parents may never accept what happened to them and yet accept their child. They're two separate things, the parental loss, and the actual person they will almost always end up loving.

when describing children with Down's Syndrome, he called a child 'heart spontaneous'.

The parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances.

People around depressives expect them to get themselves together: our society has little room in it for moping. Spouses, parents, children, and friends are all subject to being brought down themselves, and they do not want to be close to measureless pain.

I could not bring myself to believe in any love enough to imagine that the loss of me would be noticed, but I knew how sad it would be for him to have worked so hard at saving me and not to have succeeded

When I said that I had a history of mental illness, I was told that in that case I could not well expect anyone to take my views on these things seriously. "I'm a trained professional and I'm here to help you," the doctor said. When I said that I was an experienced patient and knew that what she was doing was in fact injurious to me, she told me that I had not been to medical school and would just have to proceed according to what she judged an appropriate protocol.

I believe that the emergency room policy in which saying "I have had severe psychotic depression exacerbated by extreme pain" is treated much the same as saying "I have to have a woolly teddy bear with me before you can use sutures" is unacceptable.

Most people don't like one another's unhappiness very much. Few can cope with the idea of depression divorced from external reality. Many would prefer to think that if you're suffering, it's with reason and subject to logical resolution. A

I went to Cambodia to be humbled by the pain of others, and I was humbled down to the ground.

I was fascinated to hear of the suicide of an octopus, trained for the circus, that had been accustomed to do tricks for rewards of food. When the circus disbanded, the octopus was kept in a tank and no one paid any attention to his tricks. He gradually lost his color (octopuses' states of mind are expressed in their shifting hues) and finally went through his tricks a last time, failed to be rewarded, and used his beak to stab himself so badly that he died.

The monolithic problem of depression cannot be expressed with a monolithic response; depressions are contextual and must be interpreted within the contexts in which they occur.

You can't fit in with people by pretending to be just like they are; you fit in by engaging in a dialogue about your differences, and by putting aside the assumption that your way of life is in any way preferable to theirs.

There's always somebody who wants to confiscate our humanity. And there are always stories that restore it

Andrew Solomon

The cliche about autism is that the syndrome impedes the ability to love, and I began this research interested in how much a parent could contrive to love a child who could not return the affection. Autistic children often seem to inhabit a world on which external cues have limited impact; they may seem to be neither comforted by nor engaged with their parents are not motivated to gratify them.