Quotes About Empathy

Violence occurs when people see no means of undoing or preventing their own humiliation except by humiliating others; indeed, that is the underlying purpose of inflicting violence on others.

The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.

I want to lead a government humble enough to know its place where I will always strive to be and that is on people's side.

Ask them, then. ...Ask them when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask them when their engines stop. Ask them, when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You want to know something? They won't want us to ask them. They'll just want us to get it.

takes a whole lot of empathic effort to step into those of black people and see the world through the eyes of African Americans.

The most sensitive whites merely said: "We deplore the riots but sympathize with the reason for the riots." This was tantamount to saying: "Of course we raped your women, lynched your men, and ghettoized the minds of your children and you have a right to be upset; but that is no reason for you to burn our buildings. If you people keep acting like that, we will never give you your freedom.

Sympathizing and selfish people are alike, both given to tears.

If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.

Over the years I knew her she always looked at me like that - as though I was a quite pleasant but amusing object - and it always did the same thing to me. It's difficult to put into words but perhaps I can best describe it by saying that if I had been a little dog I'd have gone leaping and gambolling around the room wagging my tail furiously.

We approach people the same way we approach our cars. We take the poor kid to a doctor and ask, What's wrong with him, how much will it cost, and when can I pick him up?

Words are like pillows: if put correctly they ease pain.

What door is opened into soul through our wounds.

The right mixture of caring and not caring - I suppose that's what love is.

If you forgive people enough, you belong to them, and they to you, whether either person likes it or not - squatter's rights of the heart

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." - Maya Angelou

The intellectual normally values reason above all, Dover demonstrates that reason divorced from emotion becomes cold, clinical and ahuman.

So does being cool mean you get to go around calling other people names?

You don't have to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend to know love. Just open up your heart and let the world in. Your heart is bigger than you can imagine, and so is the world, and so, granddaughter, are you. —Addie's grandmother

Maybe this is what it's like for all only children: To love the family that isn't almost as much as the one that is.

Kids who get called the worst names oftentimes find each other. That's how it was with us. Skeezie Tookis and Addie Carle and Joe Bunch and me. We call ourselves the Gang of Five, but there are only four of us. We do it to keep people on their toes. Make 'em wonder. Or maybe we do it because we figure that there's one more kid out there who's going to need a gang to be part of. A misfit,like us.

Because when you get down to it, thinking of somebody as 100% human seriously gets in the way of hating them.

What a sight the poor make in the moonlight!

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 becoming partly a dog.

Empathy is about seeing the world through someone else's eyes. It's about an implicit sense of what an experience is like, what people value, and what emotions are involved