Quotes About Empathy

What do we get out of entering other people's suffering in art, when we often avoid it in life?

A novel is a letter you write to someone you don't know.

We complain and complain in the villages, and then take us out and it's all we can talk about. Aren't people that way everywhere: Amina said. I mean, when they lose something?

If it hadn't been for that, I'd have gone on to the end, never seeing any of you. But that did something to me, and I've been so lonely since! You can't know. Not close to a single soul. Never anyone to really talk to.

Always there where children die stone and star and so many dreams become homeless.

We are so stricken We are so stricken that we think we're dying when the street casts an evil word at us. The street does not know it, but it cannot stand such a weight; it is not used to seeing a Vesuvius of pain break out. Its memories of primeval times are obliterated, since the light became artificial and angels only play with birds and flowers or smile in a child's dream

If you feel you belong to things as they are, you won't hold up anyone in the alley no matter how hungry you may get. And you won't write anything that anyone will read a second time either.

Never have sex with a woman who has more problems than you do.

How many people from the Mideast take a cultural sensitivity class before they come to America? Why is it always us who have to be sensitive to other cultures? Works both ways.

Every veteran since the first war got fucked big-time. Maybe you should stop feeling sorry for yourself. There's no war long enough or bad enough to mess up your head as bad as you messed it up yourself.

Why do I piss people off? What is wrong with me?

People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had, she said quietly, staring into the embers. They don't know what it was like, not being in a camp.

He is a good man, and will climb up to the Six Blissful Seats. He has known sin and trouble and it has not made him bitter; he has known sorrow and it has not made him sad. In these last months that have been granted to him he is trying to do good, not

Before she had been a year at Ford Janet came to look forward to her next pass with something close to apprehension; it was pitiful to see her mother ageing and be unable to help her, to see her father turning into just another poor old man.

If a man looks upon any other man and estimates that man as less than himself, then he is stealing from the other. He is stealing the other's birthright - that of equality.

For all the suffering that you've put me through I'd suffer more if I resented you—

There are people to whom one need not show off. It's a great comfort sometimes.

Machiavelli asks "whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved?" He answers that "one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with.

Some [surrendering Germans] would crawl on their knees,' recalled one British soldier, 'holding a picture of a woman or a child in their hands above their heads but everyone was killed. The excitement was gone. We killed in cold blood because it was our duty to kill as much as we could.

Hemos olvidado profundamente en todas partes que el Pago Monetario no es la única relación entre seres humanos... No es el único nexo del hombre con el hombre' —Thomas Carlyle

the pairing instinct is the great remover of the limits between individuals

There can be no understanding without that sympathy which puts us, through the imagination, and (another's) situation.

and you just keep saying, uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah, because you've heard all this before, you've already been where he's been, because he's telling you about a town you know like the back of your hand.

Just as artists who draw landscapes get down in the valley to study the mountains and go up to the mountains to look down on the valley, so one has to be a prince to get to know the character of a people and a man of the people to know the character of a prince.