Quotes About Empathy

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.

A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.

I'll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister. Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first.

And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand, The hand that held the steel: For only blood can wipe out blood, And only tears can heal

Where there is no love there is no understanding.

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.

we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others

I don't know how to talk. Oh! talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.

All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon.

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves.

Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.

I hate people who talk about themselves, as you do, when one wants to talk about oneself, as I do. 

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking other people to live as one wishes to live.

I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts.

So many things are unexplainable, and how is it that we know a life, except that we know our own, and it is brought into focus by the death of those around us. (less)

one of the principal qualities of pain is that it demands to be defeated first, then understood.

There is nothing more substantial to place against the cruelty of the world than language.

He was aware, he said, that humiliation was a deep wound. We are Semitic, both of us, Israelis and Palestinians together.

People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one knows except the person who carts it around her own self.

Hillel the Elder, author, in the first century before Christ, of the ethic of reciprocity: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.

Pain's nothing. Pains what you give, not what you get.

As I have always said, it's a disaster to discover the humanity of your enemy, his nobility, because then he is not your enemy anymore, he just can't be.

the hope that war will end is not chimerical. What was needed was to establish, by common consent, a central authority that would have the last word in every conflict of interest. Beyond that, anything which creates emotional ties between human beings inevitably counteracts war. What had to be sought was a community of feeling, and a mythology of the instincts.

We stumble on, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.