Quotes About Empathy

We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over so in a series of kindness there is at last one which makes the heart run over.

I'm not as angry as I used to be. But I can get in touch with that anger pretty quickly if I feel my space is being invaded or somebody is not treating me with the respect that I think I want.

God's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.

I have no race prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.

My wife, poor wretch.

this disease making us more cruel to one another than if we are doggs.

When you learn another tongue, you learn the way another people see the world, the universe.

You give me so much pleasure, why should I ever want to hurt you?

You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express—and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn't hurt anymore: that's my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.

I saw a bunch of the weirdest, oddest people I had ever met in my life, who thought different, and acted different, and even made love different. And they made me laugh, and get angry, and be happy, and be sad, and excited, and even fall in love a little myself." He glanced up at the sphere of the wrestling arena aloft in the bar. "And they didn't seem so weird or strange anymore.

All the misunderstandings that tie the world up and keep people apart were quivering before me at once, waiting for me to untangle them, explain them, and I couldn't. I didn't know the words, the grammar, the syntax. And

You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express—and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn't hurt anymore: that's my poem.

That horse dick he got swinging between his legs is just full of that there compassion

Loving someone... I mean really loving someone... means you are willing to admit the person you love is not what you first fell in love with, not the image you first had; and you must be able to like them still for being as close to that image as they are, and avoid disliking them for being so far away.

The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.

You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express, and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn't hurt any more: that's my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.

Married people should not be quick to hear what is said by either when in ill humor.

Nothing in human nature is so God-like as the disposition to do good to our fellow-creatures.

Gomers are human beings who have lost what goes into being human beings. They want to die, and we will not let them.

This is the basic human story. We are all on the same journey. Every one of us will suffer—there's no way around it. The crucial question is not how to avoid suffering, it's how we move through it.

I realized with alarm that I hadn't learned how to save anyone at all, not Dr. Sanders or Lazarus or Jimmy or Saul or Anna O., and that what I was thrilled about was learning how to save myself.

I make them feel like they're still part of life, part of some grand nutty scheme instead of alone with their diseases, which, most of the time and especially in the Clinic, don't hardly exist at all. With me, they feel they're still part of the human race.

To look forward to whatever flowed through the doors. To save a life? Two lives? I felt proud. The burden of treating the intractable, untreatable, unplaceable, unwanted, had been replaced by the fantasy of being a real doctor, dealing with real disease.