Quotes About Empathy

And that's an even greater love: to love somebody when he's a little...worn at the edges. —Teddy Bear

It was strange how closely we returnees clung together. We were like a family of orphaned children, split by an epidemic and sent to different care centers. That feeling of an epidemic disease persisted. The people treated us nicely, and cared for us tenderly, and then hurried to wash their hands after touching us. We were somehow unclean. We were tainted. And we ourselves accepted this. We felt it too ourselves. We understood why the civilian people preferred not to look at our injuries.

But thats not love, he thought, thats not what she wants, nor what any of them want, they do not want you to find yourself in them, they want instead that you should lose yourself in them. And yet, he thought, they are always trying to find themselves in you.

You dont have to forgive something you love. You forgive the ones you dont love.

once in a dream somewhere, sometime, someplace, they had managed for a moment to touch another human soul and understand it.

I am proud to be an emotionalist.

I resent violence or intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due installments plans. It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak a different vernacular, so to speak.

You cruel creature, little mite of a thing with a heart the size of a fullstop.

If we were all suddenly somebody else.

He imagined that he stood near Emma in a wide land and, humbly and in tears, bent and kissed the elbow of her sleeve.

When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once...

Tell me. Tell me with your eyes.

We are foolish, comic, motionless, corrupted, yet we are worthy of sympathy too.

Neden sürekli gülümsediÄŸini ve dudaklar?n?n neden o kadar tükürükle ?slanm?? olduÄŸunu merak ettim. Sonra onun felç olduÄŸunu ve benim de onun günah?n? ba???lamak istermiÅŸ gibi hafifçe gülümsemekte olduÄŸumu fark ettim.

O, you poor fellow! Out there in the rain all that time! I forgot that.

If I've learned anything at all from my years, it's the simple lesson that human beings are always more complicated, brave, long-suffering, and, ultimately, heroic than we ever guessed, and that none of us completely understands another, no matter how intimate we are with them.

We gain no wisdom by imposing our way on others.

I had to feel sorry for Bubba's wife. In AA we called it denial. We take the asp to our breast and smile at the alarm we see in the eyes of others.

When you love somebody, you give up making decisions just for yourself.

Many years ago I learned that we discover the best and worst in people when they're under duress. I think that principle has certainly borne out with my pitiful friend. I wish I had not been witness to it. I take his car keys and drive him to my home and keep him there until he's sober. He weeps in shame before he drives himself home.

Why don't you try to make me feel bad?

what do you say to people who are doing their best when their best is not enough?

Certain kinds of loss are forever. Not many people understand that.

Sometimes the father poured a sack full of dry rice on the floor and made Clete kneel on the kernels until sunrise; sometimes he sat on the side of the bed and gently touched Clete's face with a hand that was as callused as a carpenter's; sometimes he lay down beside Clete and wept as a child would.