Quotes About Empathy

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 it.

We have to make mistakes. It's how we learn compassion for others." She paused.

I often messed up with people, it was true, but it rarely happened because I was reading them wrong; it was because I got nervous, or because I could see too clearly that I was not what they wanted. And, in fact, it was in falling short that I truly excelled.

And now I knew myself to be generous with encouragement only when I either did not want the thing the other person sought of did not believe the person would really get it.

And the things you said, the walk from chapel to the schoolhouse, your backpack, tests, these were a bridge running above the rushing water of what you actually felt. The goal was: learn to ignore what's down below. Fine if you met someone else who was the same as you, but you had to realize that nothing another person could do would make you feel better about any of it.

This was the problem with me - I didn't know how to talk to people without asking them questions. Some people seemed to find me peculiar and some people were so happy to discuss themselves that they didn't even notice, but either way, it made conversation draining. While the other person's mouth moved, I'd try to think of the next thing to ask.

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.

To mourn is to touch directly the substance of divine compassion.

To be a good writer, become a good listener.

I felt sorry for Yoko, who must have longed for her daughter, but at the same time I wondered whether John had made some kind of odd pact with her—I won't see my child until you see yours. It was the only explanation I could think of for his neglect of Julian.

kids with special needs are kids. They may have unusual challenges in their lives, but they have the same needs as other children—to be part of the group, to have friends, to play, to feel successful.

Poor Melody, he thought again, because she saw love as something that gets you what you want. She didn't understand at all.

And so I was. I can put on the cloak of the world I find myself in, however I happen to find myself in it. I can sing any man's tune, and you'd believe me. That's my gift." Birle knew this wasn't a gift he honored.

Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love.

She thought his sarcasms were unnecessary.

It was as if thousands and thousands of little roots and threads of consciousness in him and her had grown together into a tangled mass, till they could crowd no more, and the plant was dying. Now quietly, subtly, she was unravelling the tangle of his consciousness and hers, breaking the threads gently, one by one, with patience and impatience to get clear.

For even satire is a form of sympathy.

No creo que le haga más daño a una mujer por dormir con ella que por bailar con ella... o incluso por hablarle del tiempo. No es más que un intercambio de sensaciones en lugar de ideas, conque ¿por qué no?

DEMOCRACY OF TOUCH - instead of a democracy of pocket.

I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.

Tão sensíveis que nós somos àquilo que se espera de nós.

Having suffered so much, the capacity for suffering had to some extent left him.

That's it! When you come to know men, that's how they are: too sensitive in the wrong place.

And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first.