Quotes About Empathy

There is no boogeyman. Just a bunch of flawed humans, some more flawed than others, but more or less cut from the same human mold.

That's the lovely thing about having an animal. You might not want to get up for your own sake, but you will bring yourself to do it for them.

Don't you wonder sometimes why so much gets heaped on certain people?" I almost told the truth. That truth being, "I wouldn't dare." I wouldn't dare dwell on a thing like that. I try to look forward in my life. Because what's behind me is a little hard to take.

young. Love is when you can make the following statement, and mean it: 'What's best for her, even if it doesn't include me.' Otherwise you just love the way you feel when she's around, and you want to be selfish with that—hang on to it at all costs, even if it harms her.

But you have to let people go through whatever it is they have to go through. Just be there for your friends. That's all we can really do for each other sometimes.

I just feel like it's our job to take care of them. You know? And when you take care of someone, you should love them the way they are. Not try to make them different.

No happy marriage was, in his estimation, ever based on thoughtless, automatic untruths and exclusions. And the best way to make someone unhappy, if not downright unbalanced, is to tell her that what she sees with her own eyes is not there at all.

we are bound by a common love, a stronger bond now, as it extends to a common loss.

No good deed goes unpunished, she thought as she stepped into the outer office. Somehow it had fallen to her not only to teach the boy to read, but to heal his traumatic life. And all she had wanted was to buy a few cartons of unusually fresh eggs.

I see my privilege because I have lived both with it and without it. The jury did not even see. They did not even see, Raymond. What can you do with a world where people do not even see?

The things you have to do to handle them. The tagging and roping and throwing them down and castrating them. And then knowing you're sending them off to be slaughtered. I just suddenly didn't have the heart for it anymore.

not how it works. People with really good self-worth think they're the same size as everybody else, and they never make anybody else feel small. Any time somebody tries to act like they're more than you are, deep down they're afraid they're less.

Not that I don't get where she's coming from. But when you're nervous and somebody else is nervous, too, you feel like you want them to help you stay calm. Maybe it's not a reasonable request, but you do. Otherwise their nervous kind of stands on the shoulders of your nervous, and then the whole nervous thing is so big and tall that it gets to be too much nervous for anybody to bear.

got that when a person is rude and abusive to me, it's not about me at all. They can say something terrible to me or about me, but they're revealing themselves, not me. It has nothing to do with me. They're just showing me the landscape on the inside of themselves as they project it out onto somebody else. Does that make sense?

First I think, how weird is this? Sitting in the park holding hands with a complete stranger. Then I decided that there are a lot of weird things in the word, and this is not the very worst of them.

Because when you really love someone, you want them to be happy. Even if it can't be with you.

The people with the least to give always give the most. Haven't you noticed that?

I'd say, yes, the horse has a way of communicating pain without words. I can't always put my finger on how.

t's like people who want to feel only happy but not sad," she said. "It never works. You either feel things or you don't. You don't get to pick and choose..

Thirty-six years. I'm not saying I know it all. In one way, we've all just got the time since we got up this morning. But I've seen a lot of people walk a lot of roads. Some not so happy. And it makes them what they are. So if you run around putting a pillow under people to cushion their fall . . . well, I'm just not sure it's quite the favor we think it is.

But people do plenty of harm when they didn't mean any. It happens all the time.

I worked on smiling at her, so she'd smile back. But it was an effort for me, a trip into the unfamiliar. It made me think of the tin man in The Wizard of Oz,

There was something familiar in her energy. And yet I didn't want to use that word, because it sounded too flaky and new-agey, and I didn't even know if I believed that people had an energy. But there's something in a person you can feel, so that you know a little bit about him before he even opens his mouth. I just wasn't sure what to call it.

If you listen to people, they'll tell you a lot, even when they don't mean to.