Quotes About Empathy

Perdona siempre a tu enemigo. No hay nada que le enfurezca más»)

Life changed you, and the people you thought you could not stand suddenly made sense to you.

No true friendship takes account of credit and debt. It gives freely, without thought of compensation or reward.

It's different for the sociopaths, of course. They're just along for the ride.

A wonderful privilege it was to be thus admitted into the soul of a man of genius, to be allowed to share the ecstasies and the agonies of his inmost life.

In the evening I came home and read about the Messina earthquake, and how the relief ships arrived, and the wretched survivors crowded down to the water's edge and tore each other like wild beasts in their rage of hunger. The paper set forth, in horrified language, that some of them had been seventy-two hours without food. I, as I read, had also been seventy-two hours without food; and the difference was simply that they thought they were starving.

Dieve--but I'm glad I'm not a hog.

Don't complain about our coffee; someday you may be old and weak yourself.

Lanny, climbing the hill, carried a thought which by now had become his familiar companion: Why, oh, why did men have to make their lives so ugly? What evil spell was upon them that they wrangled and scolded, hated and feared? He

but no, if she had been here, he would have been driven to take the side against her. This wasn't perversity, he would insist; he was trying to see the problem from all of its many sides, and argued against all persons who wanted to see only one side.

find out how to save the world from hatreds and delusions which are the root of wars.

He smiled gently, being sorry for her. "Mother dear, I am one of those unlucky people who have to stand in the middle and get the brickbats from both sides. I see the good in both and I see the evil. But if you point that out the fanatics on both sides want to kill you.

For Lanny's then stepfather had been not merely a painter, but a student and thinker. When he painted the ancient ruins of Greece and Rome he tried to make you feel the sorrow of great things vanished forever. When he painted a Greek shepherd in his rags or a Biskra water carrier in his gray burnoose, Marcel was not just getting something exotic and unusual; he had a heart full of pity for lonely men who lived hard lives and did not understand the forces which dominated them.

He had managed to get the good things in life, somehow—but why at least could he not go off and enjoy them, without coming to taunt the poor with their misfortune?

A strange plight for art lovers, who trained themselves to be receptive and then didn't dare use their faculties except upon imaginary things! Divide your mind in half, and build an emotion-tight compartment between the two; be sensitive to art and insensitive to life; learn to follow the example of that Russian countess who wept for the woes of the tenor in the opera while her coachman froze to death on the box outside!

the souls of none of them were dead, but only sleeping; now and then they would waken, and these were cruel times.

How can you be too friendly?

And what she hated more than anything that moment was for all the differences between people to matter no more - no more differences in size and belief- differences that became justification for destruction.

And what to embrace.

But not everyone looked away when injustices happened to others. When little Fienchen Blomberg was stoned in front of the Weilers' grocery store by six older boys, Frau Weiler let out a howl, grabbed her broom, and whipped from the store.

Cuba is painful for me, too. It hurts to always feel like a foreigner, with your roots exposed, with this feeling that everything is temporary, that life is back there in a future that never seems to get here. What has happened to us is very hard, but there are so many who have it so much worse.

His attitude, since he had begun to feel towards a character, was that I owed him something, simply because I seemed willing to help.

I felt his pain as an extra pressure on myself. I mentally added his pain to mine, made it part of my own.

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. You refer to yourself in order to understand other people. That's the novelist's gift, isn't it?