Quotes About Empathy

Everyone has a past, and everyone's past matters.

For a moment, there was no age difference between the two of them, no crossed purposes, no opposing forces. They were just two women trying to chisel a happy life out of giant hulk of rough-edged circumstances.

I want to learn how to look deep to see what people are really like. I want to be the kind of person who plunges past the surface and seeks to know the inner thoughts of the people I am around.

Why do people hurt other people? I murmur. Lila laughs. Because they can, sweetheart. I look at the face in the mirror, at that sad face. That can't be the reason Lila leans in. Her face is next to mine.... ...Sometimes they just can't help it, she says. They don't mean to hurt anyone. It just happens. And there's nothing you can do about it. Nothing ? Not unless you've got a magic wand, love.

How we treat one another is what we are still able to do something about.

with courage and resolve and the refusal to allow those without voices to remain unheard.

This is what makes us sublimely human, isn't it? Not unsullied genetic perfection, but when we stubbornly love and honor one another. Just the way we are.

what we will hate. We decide what we will do with the love and hate. Every day we decide. It was this that revealed who we were, not the color of our flesh or the shape of our eyes or the language we spoke.

You don't have to say everything you're thinking, Elise," he said.

she is in the company of women who have given what help they could.

We shouldn't think for a moment that just because their lives are short they shouldn't be here.

a hunger that is more than simply material connects the human who feeds the chickens to the chickens that feed the humans.

Because of her gender she is banished—first to the sidelines, and then from the tent altogether. Her empathy with tramps and gipsies reveals that, even in her position at the tent flap, she feels transitory, impoverished, powerless.

Although I have always rejected this fear of the other, and the racism that it inevitably fuels, I have learned from experience that it is a deeply rooted need in the human psyche. at the slightest provocation we will put distance between ourselves and those we cannot or do not want to understand

The capacity to return hate with love wipes reason off the map, at least for a while. I cannot understand it any more than I can understand how, knowing that story, black churches across America continue to open their doors and their hearts to white strangers again and again. What love and courage. What courage and love.

Clearly the students had been learning about racism—far away, and in another country

DeWaal and others have shown that primates have the capacity most basic to moral development: the ability to put yourself in others' shoes. The feeling of sympathy, the capacity for gratitude, the sense of justice all start right there.

Forget the past and move on isn't even helpful in the realms of individual psychology; as political advice, it is worthless. When pasts fester, they become open wounds.

What can other countries learn from the German experience? "To look at your own country as if it were a foreign one. It's crucial to have a broken relationship to your past, to be ready to see your own history with shame and horror.

If you invite representative voices, shouldn't you listen to them, even when their claims are at odds with what you want to believe? West German beliefs about East Germany are so tenacious that the subjects of concern went unheard. In America, when white people tell black people how to feel about their own history, it's called whitesplaining. There isn't a word for it in German.

You may never learn the names of any of the people you talk to in a dog park, even after many, many hours spent there with them, and many hours of conversation. But if - knock on wood - anything should ever happen to your dog, these nameless non-strangers will rally, sympathize, offer to help, and hold your hand. I know this from experience.

My ace in the hole as a human being used to be my capacity for remembering birthdays. I worked at it. Whenever I made a new friend, I made a point of finding out his or her birthday early on, and I would record it in my Filofax calendar.

This is why I wanted to write this book, to tell about a place I love that doesn't belong to me but feels like it is mine, and how that feels marvelous and exceptional. All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library's simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.

I was losing her. I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it.