Quotes About Empathy

There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.

I'm sorry, my child, I just find it hard to whip up an interest in the subject. It's admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat.

Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere.

That is what whores are for, after all; to put up with the ecstasies of the unlovely

Anyway, said Robert, they got a big fright. After that they started dropping pellets in the water and digging latrines and spraying for flies and bringing buckets of soap. But do you think they do it because they love us? Not a hope. They prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die. If we grew thin and turned into paper and then into ash and floated away, they wouldn't give a stuff for us. They just don't want to get upset. They want to go to sleep feeling good.

Decency: the inexplicable: the ground of all ethics. Things we do not do. We do not stare when the soul leaves the body, but veil our eyes with tears or cover them with our hands. We do not stare at scars, which are places where the soul has struggled to leave and been forced back, closed up, sewn in.

Es ist nicht die Sprache, die den Menschen zum Menschen macht, sondern die Sprache der anderen.

we can only know and understand ourselves fully through others – through the way we experience others and ourselves in relation to others, and the way others experience us. This

Do you remember Vlek, who was such a good sheepdog that she and Jakob alone could drive a whole flock past you at the counting-post? Do you remember how Vlek grew old and sickly and could not hold down her food, and how there was no one to shoot her but you, and how you went for a walk afterwards because you did not want anyone to see you cry?

Erklären heißt verzeihen, erklärt zu werden heißt Verzeihung erlangen [...]

We cannot shrink in disgust from our neighbour's touch because his hands, that are clean now, were once dirty. We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

Women are sensitive to it, to the weight of the desiring gaze.

Let me tell you then: reading is being the arm and being the axe and being the skull; reading is giving yourself up, not holding yourself at a distance and jeering.

What does he know of the force that drives the utmost strangers into each other's arms, making them kin, kind, beyond all prudence?

John no estaba hecho para el amor, no estaba construido de esa manera, no estaba construido para encajar en otro ser o para que otro ser encajara en él. Como una esfera. Como una bola de cristal. No había manera de conectar con él. Tal es mi conclusión, mi conclusión madurada.

Must it all be so cruel? Surely there is a form of cohabitation in which man and woman eat together, sleep together, live together, yet remain immersed in their respective inward explorations.

The joys of possession I have never felt very acutely. I find it hard to think of myself as the owner of anything. But I do tend to slip into the role of guardian and protector of the unloved and unlovable, of what other people disdain or spurn: bad-tempered old dogs, ugly pieces of furniture that have stubbornly stayed alive, cars on the edge of breakdown. It is a role I resist; but every now and then the mute appeal of the unwanted overwhelms my defences.

Te comportas como si todo lo que hago yo fuese parte de la historia de tu vida.

how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other!

Es esto el amor, esta generosidad natural, este sentimiento de ser comprendido por fin, de no tener que fingir?

Matar a la persona que amas: es algo que el viejo Simón no entenderá nunca. Pero tú lo entiendes, ¿verdad? Tú entiendes a Dmitri. Lo entendiste desde el primer momento.

Batwoman: What was it like growing up with him? Nightwing: When I was a kid, I idolized him. Hell... I wanted to be him. But the older I got, the more I realized that I didn't know him at all. How could I? Bruce Wayne is as much a mask as Batman. And I think the only thing behind those masks is pain. A pain he refuses to share with anyone. Batwoman: So what was it like? Nightwing: Lonely.

Most people don't know how to ask the right questions. Mondo knew how to ask questions, just at the right time, when you weren't expecting it. People paused for a few seconds, they stopped thinking about themselves and their own business, they thought, and their eyes seemed to blur, because they remembered asking those questions themselves, long ago.

Greer recognised that the direction the sexual revolution was taking was not in the interests of women. "Sex must be rescued from the traffic between powerful and powerless, masterful and mastered, sexual and neutral, to become a form of communication between potent, gentle, tender people," she wrote.