Quotes About Empathy

I had a very, very difficult relationship with my mother, who was supremely self-centred. She was hilariously self-centred. She did not really take interest in anything that didn't immediately affect her.

Os homens, de modo geral, não sabem o quanto destroem seu próprio prazer quando esquecem o respeito e o carinho devidos a nosso sexo, mesmo aquelas que vivem apenas para agradar-lhes.

Tolerance implies a respect for another person, not because he is wrong or even because he is right, but because he is human.

She will want to know all you do," said the old man. "All that has happened to you during the day. Every word of it. She will want to know what you are thinking about, why you smile suddenly, why you are looking sad." "That is love!" cried Alan.

Let us have but one end in view, the welfare of humanity and let us put aside all selfishness in consideration of language, nationality, or religion.

To hate a man because he was born in another country, because he speaks a different language, or because he takes a different view of this subject or that, is a great folly. Desist, I implore you, for we are all equally human...Let us have but one end in view, the welfare of humanity.

Behind every statistic there is an individual, there is a story.

I am sorry," I whispered. "I am sorry for all of the ways that I failed you. I am sorry that I was not there to save you, or to die alongside you. I am sorry that I have kept you with me for so long, trapped in my heart, bound in sorrow and remorse. I forgive you too. I forgive you for leaving me, and I forgive you for returning. I forgive you your anger, and your grief. Let this be an end to it.

The nature of humanity, its essence, is to feel another's pain as one's own, and to act to take that pain away,. There is a nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness.

No, all that David could think about was the head of the deer-girl, for her face rubbed against his as they rode, her warm blood smeared his cheek, and he saw himself reflected in the dark green mirrors of her eyes.

Sometimes we need our pain. We need it to call our own.

Men and men, men and women, whatever the permutation, in the end one partner usually feels more than the other and that partner usually suffers for it.

David could tell, by looking at her face as she read, whether or not the story contained in the book was living inside her, and she in it, and he would recall again all that she had told him about stories and tales and the power that they wield over us, and that we in turn wield over them.

And Frank was right: they were both fathers who had lost children, and somehow they had come through that loss—not without ongoing pain, and not without fractures, but they had endured

It's good that you have someone that cares for you. It doesn't make it easier, but it sure doesn't make it harder.

After all, no relationship could function or survive under the burden of total honesty.

Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world.

Samuel understood at last why this being hated men and women so much: he hated them because they were so like himself, because the worst of the was mirrored in them. He was the source of all that was bad in men and women, but he had none of the greatness, and none of the grace, of which human beings were capable, so that by only by corrupting them was his own pain diminished, and thus his existence made more tolerable.

but David did not want to mix with them, and they in turn saw something sad and distant in him that kept them away.

Why are you so worried about him, after all that he's done to you?

wants to accept that someone close might have taken his or her own life. Too much blame accrues to those left behind for it to be accommodated so easily.

Most people are not bad. Oh, they do bad things sometimes, and we all have a little badness in us, but very few people are unspeakably evil, and most of the bad things they do seem perfectly reasonable to them at the time. Perhaps they're bored, or selfish, or greedy, but, for the most part, they don't actually want to hurt anyone when they do bad things. They just want to make their own lives a little easier.

He is not bitter. Never that. Babe would have said it was not worth becoming bitter, and Babe would have been right. But he is sad, sad that they do not care as much as he does.

We see our own mortality only through the prism of the mortality of others.