Quotes About Empathy

How do you explain to someone else why a thing matters to you if it doesn't matter to them? How can you put into words how a book slips inside of you and becomes a part of you so much that your life feels empty without it?

But I was beginning to see how she must have thought she was doing something good for us, even though she was wrong.

Silly to you, maybe. All reasons are silly to someone else, and we think the challenges to the books already removed are silly. What makes one person's reason any sillier than another person's reason?

She felt that at some point she must finally and formally talk to Louisa about Hubert, and ask her to acknowledge that the worst possible thing had happened to her as well.

Can't really say?' Nick said, and heard, as he sometimes did, his own father's note of evasive sympathy. It was how his family sidled round its various crises; nothing was named, and you never knew for sure if the tone was subtly comprehensive, or just a form of cowardice.

When you talked you involved other people . . . you crept back out of the unbearable loneliness of experience.

It's what you're reading that matters, and how you're reading it, not the speed with which you're getting through it. Reading is supposed to be about the encounter with other minds, not an opportunity to return to the endlessly appealing subject of Me.

I must warn you," he says. Whatever persecutions the Christians have experienced, and whether it has been Jews or pagans or heretics who have mistreated them, Christians must not avenge themselves. Cyprian places himself among them: "We should not hasten to revenge their pain with an angry speed.

The best friendships do not require that anyone keep the upper hand.

You can get everything in life you want if you just help enough other people get what they want.

If a bloke gave you a hundred quid for a book you can bet your life it's his way, but if all the poor and suffering people raise their hats to you for writing it - that's different; it makes it worthwhile then.

THE SINGLE, INTEGRATED inner experience of caring for, respecting, and bonding to another is love. The object of your love is one whom you care about even more than you are concerned for your own self. You would do or give what the other needs without the slightest feeling that what you have done or given is a sacrifice at all. Those acts and gifts are the fulfillment of love, and life.

WHAT WE CALL LOVE is actually a deep interweaving of beings. The emotion we feel is actually a marker that the other person or thing has become part of ourselves; we are no longer separate from the other. This explains why losing someone or something we love hurts so much. It is not just "as if" something has been torn from us. When we enter love, a part of ourselves merges with the other and when we lose love, a part of ourselves is torn away.

Compassion is the feeling of empathy which the pain of one being of itself awakens in another; and the higher and more human the beings are, the more keenly attuned are they to re-echo the note of suffering which, like a voice from heaven, penetrates the heart.

ONE'S COMPASSION SHOULD extend to all creatures, and one should neither despise nor destroy them, for the wisdom above extends to all of creation—inanimate objects, plants, animals, and humans. —RABBI MOSHE CORDOVERO (1522–1570)

SOMEONE WHO WANTS to be greater than others should not dig a pit for his friend; rather he should build a hill for himself. —RABBI YISRAEL SALANTER (1810–1883)

A day should not pass without acts of loving-kindness, either with one's body, money, or soul.

BEFORE A PERSON gives up his portion in the next world for others, let's see if he is willing to forgo some of his share in this world for others. —RABBI YOSEF YOZEL HURWITZ, THE ALTER OF NOVARDOK (1849–1919)

When a deep injury is done us, we never recover until we forgive.

I have always found that actively loving saves one from a morbid preoccupation with the shortcomings of society.

But there is only one thing that has power completely, and this is love. Because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power.

Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret. But I have learned that kindness and love can pay for pain and suffering.

There is a hard law. When an injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive.

There is only one way in which one can endure man's inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one's own life, to exemplify man's humanity to man.