Quotes About Empathy

He had been bruised so badly that the eyes of strangers lacerated him like salt.

We are happy, even, that we have food for Daniel, who eats peacefully, not knowing that we are laughing, but sensing that something wonderful has happened to us, which means that wonderful things happen, and that maybe something wonderful will happen to him. It's wonderful, anyway, to be able to help a person to have that feeling.

He had been bruised, so to speak, so badly that the eyes of strangers lacerated him like salt.

Women don't see men the way men want to be seen. They see all the tender places, all the places where blood could flow.

I know I can't help you very much right now—God knows what I wouldn't give if I could. But I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends.

It's always at the hour of trouble and confrontation that the missing member aches.

The writer trapped among a speechless people is in danger of becoming speechless himself. For then he has no mirror, no corroborations of his essential reality; and this means that he has no grasp of the reality of the people around him.

The burden of his salvation seemed to be on me and I could not endure it.

One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free.

But what I mean about being a woman is, we might get married now and stay married for fifty years and I might be a stranger to you every instant of that time and you might never know it.

For the first time in her life she hated it all. The white city. The white world. She could not that day think of one decent white person in the whole world. She sat there and she hoped that one day God with tortures inconceivable would grind them utterly into humility and make them know that black boys and black girls whom they treated with such condescension, such distain and such good humor had hearts like human beings too, More human hearts than theirs.

If one can live with one's own pain then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.

People are continually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized account of the American failure does not console me and it should not console anyone else.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one's head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain.

We had our arms around each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find.

Let us say, then, that truth, as used here, is meant to imply a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment; freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted.

Malcolm—the world's much more like me than it is like you. People recognize me. They see me in their mirror. But they don't hardly ever see you. You're not in the mirror with them.

I had never seen the love and respect that men can have for each other. I've had time since to think about it. I think that the first time a woman sees this--though I was not yet a woman--she sees it, first of all, only because she loves the man: she could not possibly see it otherwise.

He didn't like his sisters and I didn't have any brothers. And so we got to be, for each other, what the other missed.

The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not.

For, without love, pleasure withers quickly, becomes a foul taste on the palate, and pleasure's inventions are soon exhausted. There must be a soul within the body you are holding, a soul which you are striving to meet, a soul which is striving to meet yours.

There were lots of people around us, but I still felt this terrible lack of friendliness

I was there, then, for the , in a way that hadn't nothing to do with me. I was there, then, for them, like Fonny was present, like my baby, just beginning now, out of a long, long sleep, to turn, to listen, to awaken, somewhere beneath my heart.

Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.