Quotes About Empathy

Once or twice a year I attended the English Romantic conferences held throughout Europe, brief gatherings perhaps not dissimilar in feeling for the participants than the feeling Jews have when they get off the plane in Israel: the relief of at last being surrounded on all sides by your own kind--the relief and the horror.

No sé qué decir de él sino que me ha conmovido del modo en que uno desea que lo conmueva cada libro que empieza a leer. Quiero decir que, de algún modo que casi no sabría describir, me ha transformado.

Deslizó los dedos por su espalda de arriba abajo, sobre la fina blusa y, durante un momento, se olvidó del peligro, agradeciendo que el mundo marque divisiones, para que podamos superarlas sintiendo la dicha de acercarnos al otro más y más, aun reconociendo en el fondo, con tristeza, que hay diferencias insuperables.

These mistakes were heart-breaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen , because they didn't go around with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said., they were used to interrupting each other to ask if they'd understood correctly. Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say, Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I have always been right to love you.

He watched the old man sleep and felt the vast loneliness of the world, the loneliness passed from person to person like a beach ball at a rock concert, kept aloft at all costs, and this was his moment to shoulder it. Or maybe it was his own personal loneliness, a solitary, errant longing no one else could ever know, and the knowledge of this stoked the already existing loneliness, made it widen and blur at the edges until it included everything.

No es que hayamos olvidado por completo el lenguaje de los gestos (…) cuando está oscuro y no podemos ver, sentimos la necesidad de tocar el cuerpo del otro para hacernos entender".

There were other refugees around him experiencing the same fears and helplessness, but Litvinoff didn't find any comfort in this because there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone. Litvinoff preferred to be alone.

It was OK to need people; she was learning that. You just had to be careful.

Bad experience is more bearable when you are not the only sufferer.

As soon as you feel yourself against me you have ceased to understand my position and consequently my arguments! You have to be the victim of the same passion!

Where one can no longer love, there one should pass by.

What is love but understanding and rejoicing that another lives, works, and feels in a different and opposite way to ourselves? That love may be able to bridge over the contrasts by joys, we must not remove or deny those contrasts.

Zarathustra, however, answered thus unto him who so spake: When one taketh his hump from the hunchback, then doth one take from him his spirit—so do the people teach. And when one giveth the blind man eyes, then doth he see too many bad things on the earth: so that he curseth him who healed him. He, however, who maketh the lame man run, inflicteth upon him the greatest in him — so do the people teach concerning cripples

but it cannot be a mistake to have cared...it cannot be an error to have tried....it cannot be incorrect to have loved.

Black Poetry is not for Black People…it is for everybody

It is called education because it is learned. You do not have to have had an experience in order to sympathize or empathize with the subject. That is why books are written: so that we do not have to do the same things. We learn from experience, true; but we also learn from empathy." A Theory of Patience

what this decade will be known for there is no doubt it is loneliness

I don't think I'm allowed to kill something because I am frightened.

All we can do, I believe, is take the love and give the love and try to remember who dreamed dreams of us. And try to be faithful to that.

This is for equality ... men and women ... blacks and whites ... jews and arabs ... oriental-occidental ... dreamers and the blind ... brilliant and the dumb ... all equal because we have decided ... they are equal ... it's a good system ...

We need to watch For the scared and the vulnerable One day it may be Us

What we now want most is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth and the elimination of that fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride, which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife.

Its not the love you make. It's the love you give.

One day I was handed a few volumes of new literature unlike anything I had ever read before and so captivating as to make me utterly forget my hopeless state. They were the earlier works of Mark Twain and to them might have been due the miraculous recovery which followed. Twenty-five years later, when I met Mr. Clemens and we formed a friendship between us, I told him of the experience and was amazed to see that great man of laughter burst into tears.