Quotes About Empathy

They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort.

I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.

It is no use trying to sum people up.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself.

But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was almost impossible to dislike anyone if one looked at them.

As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.

You're the only person I've ever met who seems to have the faintest conception of what I mean when I say a thing.

Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.

For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.

Among the tortures and devestations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories.

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.

For we think back through our mothers if we are women.

Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred.

I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. --Bernard, The Waves

To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently.

The people we are most fond of are not good for us when we are ill.

It is strange that we, who are capable of so much suffering, should inflict so much suffering.

His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at their feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet.

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the think veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bend her head as if to let her pelt f jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked.

My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves.

What is nobler, she mused, turning over the photographs, than to be a woman to whom every one turns, in sorrow or difficulty?