Quotes About Empathy

I believe that treating other people well is a lost art.

I will always be there in the wings saying, 'You need to be good to people. You need to take your work seriously. You need to have integrity. You need to work with what you've got.

If someone doesn't ask, you don't have a moral obligation to say every thought that pops in your head.

the "curse of knowledge" is a constant obstacle to clear communication: once you know a subject fairly well, it is enormously difficult to put yourself in the position of someone who doesn't know it.

Premature enumeration is not just an intellectual failure. Not asking what a statistic actually means is a failure of empathy too.

Love is the commitment of my will to your needs and best interests, regardless of the cost

Hold onto your dicks." "We don't all have dicks, dickhead," Kasyanov muttered.

We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.

And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life.

I learned that words make a difference. It's easier to cope with a kicked bucked than a corpse; if it isn't human, it doesn't matter much if it's dead.

They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak.

Stories can save us.

Fakat ÅŸu da doÄŸru; hikayeler bizi kurtarabilir.

They would repair the leaks in their eyes.

Peace of mind is not a simple matter of pursuing one's own pleasure; rather, it is inextricably linked to the attitudes of other human beings, to what they want, to what they expect.

Henry Dobbins made the washing motion with his hands. You're right, he said. All you can do is be nice. Treat them decent, you know?

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

But listen. Even that story is made up. I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.

Martha shut her eyes. She crossed her arms at her chest as if suddenly cold and said she was glad he hadn't tried it. She didn't understand how men could do those things. What things? he asked, and Martha said, The things men do. Then he nodded. It began to form. Oh, he said, those things.

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

Go where you will; commit what crime you may; fall to what depth of degradation you may; you can never commit any crime that will shut my door, my arms, or my heart to you. As long as I live you shall have one sincere friend.

what is the lesson of history, if not that we owe each other more bread, more friendship, fewer lies, less cruelty.

You can hide in someone else's rage - it blinds them

And you can't help but worry for them, love them, want for them - those who go on down the close, foetid galleries of time ad space without you.