Quotes About Empathy

though I said to Harry that I didn't know as what his wife wanted made much difference to John—

I might 'a' known she needed help! I tell you, it's queer, Mrs. Peters. We live close together, and we live far apart. We all go through the same things—it's all just a different kind of the same thing! If it weren't—why do you and I understand? Why do we know—what we know this minute?

We all go through the same things—it's all just a different kind of the same thing!

For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.

The story of one life cannot be told separately from the story of other lives. Who are we? The question is not simple. What we call the self is part of a larger matrix of relationship and society. Had we been born to a different family, in a different time, to a different world, we would not be the same. All the lives that surround us are in us.

There is a circle of humanity, he told me, and I can feel its warmth. But I am forever outside.

I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from each other, the earth, ourselves.

At the center of/ all my sorrows/ I have felt a presence/ that was not mine alone.

Marie de Hennezel, a French psychologist who works with the terminally ill, believes that "the person who can say to someone else 'I am going to die' does not become the victim of death but, rather, the protagonist in his or her own dying.

If there weren't so many damned umlauts in Pema's last name—it is a royal pain to find the damned symbol list—she might be worth consulting and quoting, for she believes that "when we encounter pain in our life we breathe into our heart with the recognition that others also feel this." Can I learn to deepen compassion by realizing that my distress is shared, that there are many other people all over the world feeling pain worse than mine?

The novelist Ian McEwan, who credits fiction with providing the possibility of "imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself," argues that this process is "the basis of all sympathy": "Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination.

It is a lonely existence to be a child with a disability which no-one can see or understand, you exasperate your teachers, you disappoint your parents, and worst of all you know that you are not just stupid.

When Society allows a dyslexic to sink, through ignorance or prejudice, it is not only the dyslexic who loses.

I looked at the book lying on a table. Though not a great reader myself, I knew that those who were - even Nora - could grow testy when one came between them and their books.

lonely, very lonely to have a past no one else can share.

Think of me as the porter . . . and consider the possiblity that life might be less exhausting if you unloaded some of your bags on to my empty trolley.

You've asked enough questions about evil. But you never asked once about love." So I asked him to tell me about it, but of course his definition lay beyond words. He just went on sitting with me in the dark and taking the weight of my pain.

An offspring's sigh of tedium is inaudible to all human ears except a parent's. Boring your child who, at one point in his or her life, found you unspeakably delightful is humbling.

Everything became a metaphor, a talisman, a sign that I was still actually connected to people—that I wasn't so completely on my own.

Measuring someone is borderline invasive. You have to touch them and record their physical presence in the world. It's a pretty specific way to understand someone.

once we get to know individuals who may be different from ourselves, it is less likely we will be wary of them. And maybe, just maybe, we will learn a little more about ourselves.

Nothing says "I love you" more than patting your boyfriend's back as his head is in a toilet, barfing up warm Bud Light.

I am a chronic apologizer. It doesn't matter if I think I've done something wrong or not.

your needs mean nothing to me. Just as history has proven that my needs mean nothing to you.