Quotes About Empathy

They are sad books, filled with sad and skinless people. There are some who do not like such books. The world, too, is crowded with the sorrowful and the sensitive. There are many who do not like such a world.

After all, the poor boy's doing the best he can. Probably he grew up in the hill country, and never had no larnin'. I bet they had to throw him on his back to get shoes on him.

There was a rose that faded young; I saw its shattered beauty hung Upon a broken stem. I heard them say, What need to care With roses budding everywhere? I did not answer them. There was a bird, brought down to die; They said, A hundred fill the sky-- What reason to be sad? There was a girl, whose lover fled; I did not wait, the while they said, There's many another lad.

She went to bed thinking more about another person than about herself. This goes to prove that even minor poetry may have its practical uses.

She would have lacked that inner warmth which somehow survives despite the relentless drudgery and constant proximity to human suffering. Her patients to her would have been flesh, bones, blood, not people.

Identity is not inherent. It is shaped by circumstance and sensitivity and resistance to self-pity.

He had been taught that bread unshared is bread unblessed when someone else is hungry, whether man or beast, friend or stranger.

Because if you don't know someone all that well, you react to their surface qualities, the superficial stereotypes they throw off like sparks... But once you fight through the sparks and get to the person, you find just that, a person, a big jumble of likes, dislikes, fears, and desires.

George Herbert said, "He who cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself.

It probably takes many years of monastic practice to equal the spiritual growth generated by one sleepless night with a sick child.

A healthy perspective really is the foundation of joy and happiness, because the way we see the world is the way we experience the world. Changing the way we see the world in turn changes the way we feel and the way we act, which changes the world itself. Or, as the Buddha says in the Dhammapada, With our mind we create our own world.

When we take the perspective of others, we can empathize with them.

There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.

Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.

It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else's point of view without the proper training.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

What I need... is a strong drink and a peer group.

It is folly to say you know what is happening to other people. Only they know, if they exist. They have their own Universes of their own eyes and ears.

It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion on them. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.

Ok, he said, I don't like to disturb you at what I know must be a difficult and distressing time for you, but I need to know first of all if you actually realize that this is a difficult and distressing time for you.

The kakapo is a bird out of time. If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, thought you know that it probably will not be.

It's reassuring to realize that everybody is as stupid as you are and that all we are doing when we are standing in the kitchen wondering what we came in here for is woking.

Why can't people just learn to live together in peace and harmony?" said Arthur. Ford gave a loud, very hollow laugh. "Forty-two!" he said with a malicious grin. "No, doesn't work. Never mind.