Quotes About Empathy

How easy it is when you like someone to be blind to the possibilities of ugliness in them, of weaknesses too deep to be passed over with tolerance.

It was embarrassing to be obliged to watch grief one cannot help.

Crime must be paid for, but not all sins or mistakes need be made public and explained for everyone to examine and remember. And sometimes victims were punished doubly, once by the offense itself, and then a second and more enduring time when others heard of it, pored over it, and imagined every intimate detail.

Every one of them had been somebody's son, somebody's friend. Grant rubbed his hands over his face and drew in a long breath, letting it out in a sigh. "Perhaps Tallis did go mad, poor bastard. I hate this more

Before you pity yourself, take a great deal closer look at others, and then decide with whom you would, or could, change places, and what sacrifice of your nature you would be prepared to make in order to do so. Knowing you as I do, I think precious little.

I have seen my share of cruelty, injustice, and grief. I do not need to be treated like some flower that will bruise if you touch it.

That it's easy to forgive those you like? That is the test, isn't it…forgiving those you don't like? Especially those who have hurt someone you love. Anyone can do the easy things.

When you live in another land, Mr. Pitt, no matter how strange it may seem at first, it is a very short time until its people become your own, and their grief and their laughter touches you as deeply. All the differences on earth are a shadow, compared with the sameness.

to care for any person or issue enough to sacrifice greatly for it was the surest sign of being wholly alive. What

treatment—presumably

What is it? That you are imperfect, too? Like the rest of us? Victor, did you suppose I did not know you've made errors, mistakes, and perhaps worse? If not, what would we have in common? You might forgive my flaws, but you would never understand them. There would always be blemishes you would prefer were not there. Can you really forgive, if you have no need to be forgiven?

When Christ commanded us to love our neighbor as ourselves, the 'self' part was just as important. We forget that at a terrible price.

What you see, and allow without a fight, is what you become yourself. What is the moral difference between the man who burns his neighbor to death, and the man who stands by and watches him do it?

It's actually happening: all sorts of people seen as misfits, dealt with as if they were a disease. And the Germans get away with it, because most people simply can't believe it would ever happen to them.

You wanted a peaceful, comfortable Christmas, with all reminders of poverty, injustice, or other people's griefs well out of sight, so as not to disturb your pleasure. That isn't what Christmas is about, Wallace. Christmas is about offering hope to all people, not just those like ourselves. Christmas is about everyone: rich or poor, friend or stranger. The moment you exclude anyone, you exclude yourself.

When there is so much tragedy and pain in the world that we cannot help, it seems incomprehensible that we should bring even more upon ourselves. Sometimes I despair of mankind.

Be kind. Always if you have a choice, be kind.

Do you know what I think about crying? I think some people have to learn to do it. But once you learn, once you know how to really cry, there's nothing quite like it. I feel sorry for those who don't know the trick. It's like whistling or singing.

The human heart is my school.

The greatest create of power you have on earth, whether you are an angel, a spirit, a man or woman or child is to help others.

I knelt and prayed, and the strongest truth came over me. Didn't matter if God in his heaven was a Catholic or a Protestant God, or the God of the Hindus. What mattered was something deeper and older and more powerful than any such image - it was a concept of goodness based upon the affirmation of life, the turning away from destruction, from the perverse, from man using and abusing man. It was the affirmation of the human and the natural.

You never know the palette of the one you kill until the mind disgorges its finest colours.

For what can the damned really have to say to the damned?

We are not damned. We never were. Who under the sun has the right to damn any living breathing creature?