Quotes About Empathy

When you're scalded, touch hurts, it makes no difference if it's kindly meant. Now

It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men. So they get themselves drawn into situations that are harmful to them. I have seen this happen many, many times. I have always had trouble finding a way to caution against it. Since it is, in a word, Christlike

But instead I would comfort them by saying we would never knoew what their young men had been spared. Most of them took me to mean they were spared the trenches and the mustard gas, but what I really meant was that they were spared the act of killing

her father was soothed by these attentions, as if pain were an appetite for comforting of just this kind.

I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.

Perhaps, pious as they were, these ladies did not wish to see me pass into that sad and outcast state of revelation where one begins to feel superior to one's neighbors.

It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity.

Well, but how deeply I regret any sadness you have suffered and how grateful I am in anticipation of any good you have enjoyed. That is to say, I pray for you. And there's an intimacy in it. That's the truth.

When Jesus describes Judgment, the famous separation of the sheep from the goats, he does not mention religious affiliation or sexual orientation or family values. He says, I was hungry, and ye fed me not (Matthew 25:42).

It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor

We human beings do real harm. History could make a stone weep.

How we think about ourselves has everything to do with how we act toward one another.

might be about the difference between love and loneliness, and how people on either side can't understand people on the other.

walking along beside him that night, along that rutted road, through that empty world—what a sweet strength I felt, in him, and in myself, and all around us.

So began a long instruction in whatever he could trust her to forgive.

Keeping his distance was a favor, a courtesy, to all those strangers who might, probably would, emerge somehow poorer for proximity to him.

He imagined her sitting in that overstuffed chair in the evening lamplight, reading while he read, listening while he told her how long the days would be if he did not almost believe she was with him there.

Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it.

This came to my mind because remembering and forgiving can be contrary things.

But the child just lay against her, hoping to stay where she was, hoping the rain wouldn't end. Doll may have been the loneliest woman in the world, and she was the loneliest child, and there they were, the two of them together, keeping each other warm in the rain

And I'd pray for them. And I'd imagine peace they couldn't expect and couldn't account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams.

I think communication starts when words are not present at all. I think we put so much emphasis on language, actually silence is so much more important.

The perception is that an artist has to suffer. I've suffered enough in my lifetime.

If you remember the pleasure of hearing a story many times, and you will remember that while you were listening you become three people. There is an incredible fusion: you become the storyteller, the protagonist, and you remember yourself listening to the story.