Quotes About Empathy

Wasn't that what all stories said?You felt it, like a pang in your heart, when something was happening to someone you love

There are people we treat wrong and later, we're prepared to treat other people right.

It was a belated realization to have, but it occurred to me that perhaps this was how grown-up conversations worked—not that your communication didn't falter, but that you both made good-faith attempts to rectify things after it had.

Aren't we all just looking for someone to talk about everything with? Someone worth the effort of telling our stories and opinions to, whose stories and opinions we actually want to hear?

I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate.

Was this what marriage was, the slow process of getting to know another individual far better than was advisable? Sometimes [his] gestures and inflections were so mercilessly familiar that it was as if he were an extension of me, an element of my own personality over which I had little control.

Liz felt the loneliness of confiding something true in a person who didn't care.

I decided that I wanted to say to Sin-Jun, I like your skirt. But sometimes speaking is so hard! It's like standing still, then sprinting. I kept rehearsing the sentence in my head, examining it for flaws.

if he didn't fully understand where I came from, he understood who I was now -- he knew how well done I liked my steak, knew the color of my toothbrush, the expression I made when I realized I'd forgotten to roll up my car window before it rained.

Could it be that Noah was one of those rare guys who didn't essentially dislike or mock women, and who also didn't ignore our existence, and who also didn't see us primarily as objects of lust? That he was weirdly, disarmingly fine with us?

I knew all this, I understood the rules, but still, nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny.

It was one thingfor a person who didn't really know me to act distant, but it was quite another for someone to get to know me and then back away.

Puteam continua sa fiu vechea Lee, cea buna si incompetenta, Lee cea draguta si plina de fisuri, un Labrador flocos si auriu, care nu poate sta departe de nicio balta si se tot intoarce acasa cu blana uda si mirosind neplacut.

A lesson I learned from Bill, a lesson that perhaps should be obvious, though there's evidence that most other people don't know it, either, is that direct and sincere compliments are shockingly effective—that they feel wonderful. What in theory should sound saccharine or manipulative rarely does in practice, so long as you believe the other person really means it. And we crave praise not, I think, because most of us are egomaniacal. It's because we're human.

It was one thing for a person who didn't really know me to act distant, but it was quite another for someone to get to know me and then to back away.

Liz had tried not to experience the doubly insulting sting of being excluded by a person she didn't care for.

she was at times most able to enjoy her family members when she could sense their presence nearby without actually interacting with them.

People recognized you or they didn't, and it was unrelated to knowing you. Knowing you could just be your name or the street you lived on, your father's job. Recognizing you was understanding you had thoughts in your head, finding the same things funny or excruciating, remembering what you'd said months or even years after you'd said

When you are the object of a person's affection, do you naturally credit him with a sympathetic heart and an understanding of the world? Perhaps your impression is right only insofar as it applies to you; in his presence, he is indeed possessed of these qualities for the very reason that you are the object of his affection. He is not observant so much as observant of you, not kind so much as kind toward you.

She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant and contradictory place, and it had made me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.

Part of the problem with just empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had lots of empathy; we've had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible." I

Liz felt the loneliness of having confided something true to a person who didn't care.

I believed that a seventeen-minute critique was an act of love, and the truth is that I still do, but the difference between who I was then and who I am now is that now I never assume that anyone I encounter shares my opinion about anything.

Early on, I'd occasionally wept in private after seeing an abused child. But quickly my tears had come to seem not just unprofessional but self-indulgent.