Quotes About Empathy

People are inherently dignified, and they are only made undignified if they are placed in situations that are demeaning.

A good working relationship with the doctor and health care team of the person being cared for is probably the single most important thing that caregivers need.

The egocentricity which motivated it was not that of the spoiled, but of the too little spoiled; the lonely. Had she been an artist she would have painted a self-portrait; instead she decorated two rooms, charging them with objects which some visitor, some day, would recognize and understand. And through that understanding he would divine all the capacities and longings she had found in herself and was unable to communicate.

Some people feel more deeply than others. And I don't consider that a liability. In fact, those people tend to be even stronger. They have to be in order to survive.

easy for people who aren't in risky jobs to pass judgment—and come to a lot of wrong conclusions—when someone pulls back.

One small gesture of compassion can have a life-changing impact.

Sometimes he's most evident in small gestures of kindness. And those gestures can be found even in the worst situations.

If you are struck by a bus, someone may steal your purse or wallet while you lie injured, but many more will come to your aid, trying to save your precious life. One person will call 911, and another will race down the street to alert a police officer on his or her beat. Someone else will take off his coat, fold it, and place it under your head, so that if these are indeed your last moments of life you will die in the small but real comfort of knowing that someone cared about you.

What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.

I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.

When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.

Love is the Extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real

You don't understand people like me, like us, the other ones. You're like a bird that flies in the air, a fish that swims in the sea. You move, you look about you, you want things. There are others who live on earth and move just a little and don't look--

Don't tease me. Everything wounds me now except perfect kindness.

Why do I always have to be helping people . . . and getting no help myself?

Those who occasion loss of dignity are hard to forgive.

She was not just a wild creature, she was a wounded creature.

How easily one is hurt. Or is it only I who am so stupidly vulnerable.

Disapproving of things is all right. But you mustn't disapprove of people. It cuts you off.

You see, nobody cares about me except you. You don't know what that's like. You've always had people who cared. You've always had people . I've never had anybody. No wonder I feel frustrated.

I want to be cut off from people like Marloe. Being a real person oneself is a matter of setting up limits and drawing lines and saying no. I don't want to be a nebulous bit of ectoplasm straying around in other people's lives. That sort of vague sympathy with everybody precludes any real understanding of anybody . . . And it precludes any real loyalty to anybody.

Forgive me for not being able to be with you.

The lover readily imagines that he and his mistress are one. He feels he has love enough for both and that his loving will can swathe the two of them together like twin nuts in a shell. But what one loves is, after all, another human being, a person with other interests, other pains, in whose world one is oneself an object among others.

Well, we all three loved and comforted each other. We were poorish and lonely and awkward together.