Quotes About Empathy

We are happy, even, that we have food enough 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.

people love different people in different ways—

Es un milagro darnos cuenta de que alguien nos quiere.

Somebody," said Jacques, "your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour—and in the oddest places!—for the lack of it.

One cannot argue with anyone's experience or decision or belief.

what the very young inevitably undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying.

You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people's pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.

Whoever debases others is debasing himself. That is not a mystical statement but a most realistic one...

We're all bastards. That's why we need our friends.

We're all bastards. That's why we need our friends.

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

One had to make one's way carefully here, for all these people were blind.

Neither love nor terror makes one blind; indifference makes one blind.

I will smile at you when you wake up.

If the world wasn't so full of dead folks maybe those of us that's trying to live wouldn't have to suffer so bad.

Giovanni," I said, helplessly, "be careful. Please be careful." He gave me an ironical smile. "Thank you," he said. "You should have given me that advice the night we met.

I have never reached you, said Giovanni. You have never really been here.

I have been alone so long—I do not think I would be able to live if I had to be alone again.

dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing. One watched the lives they led. One could not be fooled about that; one watched the things they did and the excuses that they gave themselves, and if a white man was really in trouble, deep trouble, it was to the Negro's door that he came.

When a dark face opens, light seems to go everywhere.

I feel that I want to be forgiven; I want her to forgive me. But I do not know how to state my crime. My crime, in some odd way, is in being a man and she knows all about this already. It is terrible how naked she makes me feel, like a half-grown boy, naked before his mother.

And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.

If the hope of giving is to love the living, the giver risks madness in the act of giving.

p.92) I felt very close to him, and really wished to be able to love and honor him as a witness, an ally, and a father. I felt that I knew something of his pain and fury, and, yes even his beauty. Yet precisely because of the reality and the nature of those streets - because of what he conceived as his responsibility and what I took to be min - we would always be strangers, and possibly one day, enemies.