Quotes About Empathy

And there's no better way to thaw a face, as it turns out, than with another face.

Mercy breeds mercy as slaughter breeds slaughter. We can't expect the world to be better than we make it.

There is intimacy in pain. Anyone who has comforted a sufferer knows it—the helpless tenderness, the embrace and murmur and slow rocking together as two become one against the enemy, pain

He had loved the library, and had felt, as a boy, as though it had a kind of sentience, and perhaps loved him back.

It was the worst kind of silence, but a good kind of closeness. These weren't her folk, but...they were, and maybe that meant that anyone could be anyone's, which was a sort of nice thing to think, with the world falling apart.

Here was the radical notion that you might help someone simply because they needed it.

But how do you stop someone from crying? How do you lead them out of fear? Can hate be reversed? Can revenge be diffused?

It's the fuel for everything our people have done to each other since the beginning. That's what makes peace seem impossible. How can you blame someone for wanting to kill the killer of their loved ones? How can you fault people for what they do in grief?

Hay intimidad en el dolor. Cualquiera que haya consolado a alguien que sufre lo sabe —la indefensa ternura, los abrazos y susurros, y el lento balanceo conjunto mientras dos se vuelven uno contra el enemigo, el dolor—.

There is intimacy in pain.

It hadn't occurred in the physical realm, that much was true. His hand had not touched her hand. But... his mind had touched her mind, and that seemed to him a deeper reality and even greater intimacy.

Había descubierto que la clemencia era capaz de una alquimia increíble: una sola gota podía diluir un lago de odio.

Me temo que se han enamorado —dijo él, preocupado—. No quieren abandonarte (...) Sé exactamente cómo se sienten.

The function of hate, as Sarai saw it, was to stamp out compassion--to close a door to one's own self and forget it was ever there.

She looked across the street at herself—as seen, remembered, and conjured by the dreamer—and she didn't see obscenity, or calamity, or godspawn. She saw a proud, smiling girl with beautiful blue skin. Because that was what he saw, and this was his mind.

But… if they'd been embraced instead, and raised with love," he said, "they wouldn't have become tormentors.

I admit, I prefer an open mind to a closed one.

You think good people can't hate?" she asked. "You think good people don't kill?

with the staring lack of empathy that belongs to murderers and small children.

The function of hate […] was to stomp out compassion - to close a door in one's own self and forgot it was ever there.

Don't be such a human

To be accepted, honored, loved, like someone's child. And since they couldn't have any of it, it all took the form of spite. Anyone who has ever been excluded can understand what they felt, and no one has ever been quite so excluded as they.

Barmhärtighet föder barmhärtighet, på samma sätt som blodsutgjutelse föder blodsutgjutelse Vi kan inte förvänta oss att världen blir bättre än vi gör den (s. 193).

Hay intimidad en el dolor. Cualquiera que haya consolado a alguien que sufre lo sabe