Quotes About Empathy

Even Charles Darwin, that human decoder ring of bizarre behavior, found the idea of saving a stranger's life to be a total head-scratcher.

I let go usually by talking to many people in different areas, in different realms of life that make me look at what I'm dealing with as being small fries stuff, you know?

I spend most of my life just listening to people.

When a person is down in the world, an ounce of help is better than a pound of preaching.

It's well we cannot hear the screams we make in other people's dreams.

As the survivors returned to Confederate lines, Lee met them and sobbed, "It's all my fault this time."158 It was.159

He that cannot forgive others, breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself; for every man has need to be forgiven.

She herself feels unequal to the world's sufferings and fears that by narrowing her focus on the world to make it manageable, she has trivialized it.

All that rescues us is love.

The poet would befriend and comfort himself, if only he could.

In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semihuman. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.

There often seems to be a playfulness to wise people, as if either their equanimity has as its source this playfulness or the playfulness flows from the equanimity; and they can persuade other people who are in a state of agitation to calm down and manage a smile.

In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.

Did you have to understand life to plunge in? Even kindness, when he encountered it, was a riddle half the time. If you walked into a door and bloodied your nose, it was one thing, but empathy for handicaps had never been his thing when he himself had none. Empathy had been for people of good cheer.

Hard-bitten had a double meaning: bitten hard by life, like her, or clamping meanly down on other people. But, as though belying his thoughts, she said, "I hope your days are good." "If only. My eyes, you know, are like Swiss cheese, the doctor says. I see through the holes.

God is so cruel," she murmured reflectively, as though answering him. "Yes," he admitted, from the vantage point of going blind. "Though maybe people are kinder if He made them that way." "You've run with a different crowd. Rich people are nicer to rich people." "Sure. Yes. That's why I've washed up here. Rich people couldn't have been nicer to me.

These kids are already hard. They don't need to be made harder. The issue is softening them up. They need to learn how to care about life again. They've lost that. That's what we need to give back to them.

Education is a vacine for violence.

It's hard not to empathize with the mayor's anger, given the injustices he'd suffered, but righteous anger rarely leads to wise policy.

One finds that constant quiet sympathy is not only one of the most lovable qualities, but one of the very rarest.

The stability of the planet – and the presumption of restraint – will have to rest in the hands of Xi Jinping and other powerful leaders. To forestall disaster, the rest of the world will have no choice but to try to put themselves in Trump's shoes.

It would also require a conscious effort to look at the world from unfamiliar standpoints and admit that the West has no monopoly on truth or virtue.

Your reflex to help others starts to control you if you don't understand what's happening and take steps to prevent it.

Kindness makes kids grow, and adults as well.