Quotes About Empathy

Being condescending, rude, or insulting says more about you than your intended target. Your words boomerang right back at you--and you're the one who looks like a fool.

So often people look at me and see something else. I wish I could take the time to present everyone in the world with the real me and explain myself, because I do want people to like me. Too often people look at you and see their own reflection staring back.

Where exactly do you put your hands on somebody who hurts everywhere?

What kind of damage is done to our ability to love or understand and thus fully judge one another when daily we're encouraged to forget that people are people and view them instead as so much pasteboard, scenery, clutter, generalized instances (of murder, of rape, of embezzlement, etc.)?

We are more intimately bound to one another by our kindred doubts than our brave conclusions.

I wish I could explain things better, to make you understand. But I can't. It's just too hard to find the right word.

La véritable fonction de la littérature est de nous maintenir en vie dans un monde brutal. [Interview de Charles Dantzig par Josyane Savigneau à l'occasion de la publication de Pourquoi lire ?, 15 oct. 2010, journal Le Monde]

There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.

Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

When a man merely speaks to, or just notices, his dog,we see the last vestige of these movements in a slight wag of the tail, without any other movement of the body, and without even the ears being lowered. Dogs also exhibit their affection by desiring to rub against their masters, and to be rubbed or patted by them.

Die Tiere empfinden wie der Mensch Freude und Schmerz, Glück und Unglück.

Further on, he adds, that dogs, when feeling affectionate, lower their ears in order to exclude all sounds, so that their whole attention may be concentrated on the caresses of their master! Dogs have another and striking way of exhibiting their affection, namely, by licking the hands or faces of their masters.

The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute to a man.

Nevertheless many a civilized man, or even boy, who never before risked his life for another, but full of courage and sympathy, has disregarded the instinct of self-preservation, and plunged at once into a torrent to save a drowning man, though a stranger. Such actions as the above appear to be the simple result of the greater strength of the social or maternal instincts rather than that of any other instinct or motive.

En realidad, dudo de que la compasión sea una cualidad natural o innata.

It is not necessary to teach others, to cure them or to improve them; it is only necessary to live among them, sharing the human condition and being present to them in love.

Seeing his disappointment, I hastily resolved never to come between a man and his pun again. It's worse than interfering between husband and wife.

It's a good thing war is so terrible or else we'd get to liking it too much.

V has finally learned that sitting calm within herself and waiting is often the best choice. And even when it's not, those around you become uncomfortable because they think you are wise.

I sometimes imagine meeting my seventeen-year-old self. She's still here inside me somewhere. Maybe one morning in the mirror, there she'll be. I look at her with affection and understanding and hope. She sees me and backs away in horror while I try to explain why I made the choices I made.

had that to understand each other by, though otherwise they could not have been more alien to each other. In short

I do know that however hard you try, you can't see the inside tangle of somebody else's love—or whatever uglier word applies—not deep enough to make sense of it.

It does your mind good to talk to people different from you.

Charles J. Shields