Quotes About Empathy

It's not your business to decide if a woman you love should, or should not, marry you. It's her business. Tell her all about yourself and leave the decision to her. God knows it's trouble enough having to make one's own decisions in life without having to make other people's too.

you don't have to know just what people are doing and feeling to be of assistance to them. Your own life seems to you like a very small lighted room, with great darkness all around it, and you can't see out into the darkness and know what is happening there. But light and warmth from your room can go out into the darkness if you don't have the windows selfishly curtained, keep a brave fire burning, and light all the happy candles you can.

One is seldom unchanged by the death of those one loves. It gives me a deeper knowledge of them, and so of oneself in regard to them.

She felt for the first time in her life, a sense of likeness with another human creature, and a sense of safety, not so much physical safety as the safety of understanding that comes between those who are two of a sort.

Is a man less of a man, because he's learned to hold his tongue?

There are some people who don't realize what it is they are doing to others until they are paid back in their own coin. But those are not the worst. The worst are those whose unkindness is calculated.

I mean, you may cause others a spot of bother by your weaknesses, perhaps, but coping with you may possibly increase their strength and sympathy. But if you sin deliberately, even if it seems only against yourself--well--you won't be the only one to suffer. You may even be the one who suffers least.

She knew little about herself and consequently little about others.

Proud folk separate themselves from others, judging them... To criticize others we must hold them from us, at arm's length so to speak. And then before you know where you are you've pushed them away and you're the poorer.

Those upon whom her eyes rested immediately thought the world of themselves, for it was obvious that she saw with one glance all the good in them to which their own families seemed so strangely blind.

now her compassion had been pierced and set flowing; it felt as though her life's blood were running away.

This was probably one of those many queer experiences that human beings could not speak of to each other, because though words could be formed into a casket to hold visions, and could be at the same time the power that liberated them, they seemed of little use when one tried to use them to explain to another person what it was they had set free. Words were queer things, Stella decided, to be at once so powerful and so weak.

Very well then' said the doctor, and he leaned back in his chair, stuck his feet on the fender, and opened to Zachary, as to so many before him in this room, the comforting depth of his comprehending silence.

These were the best moments of marriage, these times when the surface irritations fell away and each gave to the other what the other needed.

He saw now that [compassion] was the very first necessity, always and everywhere, and should flow between all men, always and everywhere. Men lived with their nearest and dearest and knew little of them, and strangers passing by in the street were as impersonal as trees walking, and all the while there was this deep affinity, for all men suffered.

Though they were life of her life she regarded her adored grandchildren with a certain detachment. The gulf of time was so wide between them that she could not fully share their thoughts or their outlook, their torments or their battles, which were of their generation and not of hers; she could only love them and tend them and make for them a refuge to which they could fly when those same thoughts and struggles had wearied them beyond endurance.

The desolation in her voice seemed to open a sort of pit at Nadine's feet. She was shamed. Women like herself, sheltered, indulged, secure, beloved, and yet they dared to find life hard; they dared to pity themselves because the path they trod was strewn with pink rose petals when their own choice would have been crimson. She hated herself. Her hatred choked her and she could not speak.

That was the trouble with Mrs. Hepplewhite's kindness. Once let loose it was like a roaring cataract and one had to be very strong to stand against the current and live.

This is the unspoken contract of a wife and her works. In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin—consideration for their feelings. And it usually turns out this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.

In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin — consideration for their feelings. As it usually turns out this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.

Women want to wear what they do because of what goes on in their heads. Their size and shape have practically nothing to do with it.

When you take things personally, she knew, the world becomes very small. It is you and nothing is smaller. When you manage not to do that, the world opens wide.

Jim enjoyed watching people take sides. It increased the drama and he loved the drama. Yet it worried him too, since he wanted people to like each other and he wanted to be on the right side, the brave and exciting side.

Nobody can see pain. They have no frame of reference for pain that's happening to someone else. They can only see inactivity - which they interpret as laziness.