Quotes About Empathy

A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.

Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy.

Maybe the word forgive points in the wrong direction, since it's something you mostly give yourself, not anyone else: you put down the ugly weight of old suffering, untie yourself from the awful, and walk away from it.

I look over at my hero shelf and see Philip Levine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, Shunryu Suzuki, Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda, Subcomandante Marcos, Eduardo Galeano, James Baldwin. These books are, if they are instructions at all, instructions in extending our identities out into the world, human and nonhuman, in imagination as a great act of empathy that lifts you out of yourself, not locks you down into your gender. ("80 Books No Woman Should Read")

We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.

To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.

Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met.

We are all the heroes of our own stories, and on of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another's story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather that be told by them.

To feel for someone enlarges the self and then the self shares risks and pains.

It's tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after.

To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.

Why is it that white people find it easier to think like a mountain than like a person of colour?' Carl Anthony quoted by Rebecca Solnit

We live inside each other's thoughts and works.

Who drinks your tears, who has your wings, who hears your story?

I got something most women got, an experience of staring at women across a distance or being in worlds in which they barely existed, from Moby-Dick to Lord of the Rings. Being so often required to be someone else can stretch thin the sense of self. You should be yourself some of the time. You should be with people who are like you, who are facing what you're facing, who dream your dreams and fight your battles, who recognize you.

Discrimination is training in not identifying or empathizing with someone because they are different in some way, in believing the differences mean everything and common humanity nothing.

Not to know yourself is dangerous, to that self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and from their own emotion, and their internal landscape fills with partitions, caves, and minefields, blank spots, pit traps, and more, a landscape turned against itself, a landscape that does not know itself, a landscape through which they may not travel.

The unexamined life is not worth living, as the aphorism goes, but perhaps an honorable and informed life requires examining others' lives, not just one's own. Perhaps we do not know ourselves unless we know others. And if we do, we know that nobody is nobody.

To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put ourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.

the outsiders stick together because their differences from each other are insignificant in the face of their differences from a hostile mainstream.

We're fighting for a society in which everyone is important.

Stories like yours and worse than yours are all around, and your suffering won't mark you out as special, though your response to it might.

Some men told me they wished someone would sexually harass them, because they seemed to be unable to imagine it as anything but pleasant invitations from attractive people. No one was offering the help of recognizing what I was experiencing or agreeing that I had the right to be safe and free. It was a kind of collective gaslighting.

Mutual aid [called this in Kropotkin's 1902 Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution means that every participant is both giver and recipient in acts of care that bind them together, as distinct from the one-way street of charity. 86