Quotes About Empathy

But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? Anybody can say charming things and try to please and to flatter, but a true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain. Indeed, if he is a really true friend he prefers it, for he knows that then he is doing good.

For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time. That is not such a tragic thing as possibly it sounds to you. To those who are in prison tears are a part of every day's experience. A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not a day on which one's heart is happy.

My friend is not allowed to go out today. I sit by his side and read him passages from his own life. They fill him with surprise. Everyone should keep someone else's diary; I sometimes suspect you of keeping mine.

Do you think that I would not have let you know that, if you suffered, I was suffering too: that if you wept there were tears in my eyes also: and that if you lay in the house of bondage and were despised of men, I out of my griefs had built a house in which to dwell until your coming, a treasury in which all that man had denied to you would be laid up for your healing, one hundredfold in increase?

LORD GORING: ... All I do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may.

I must remember that a good friend is a new world.

Poor? What does that matter? When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window.

Who are you? he said. I am the Happy Prince. Why are you weeping then? asked the swallow; you have quite drenched me.

The brotherhood of man is not a mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.

I made your sorrow mine also, that you might have help in bearing it.

In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn?

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbor with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us.

When he [Christ] says 'Forgive your enemies', it is not for the sake of the enemy but for one's own sake that he says so, and because Love is more beautiful than Hate.

I would sooner lose my best friend than my worst enemy. To have friends, you know, one need only be good-natured; but when a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him.

Jemanden zu beeinflussen bedeutet, ihm eine fremde Seele zu geben.

And they are unjust to us often, for when they find life bitter they blame us for it, and when they find it sweet we do not taste its sweetness with them.

How dreadful! cried Lord Harry. I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.

I have also learnt sympathy with suffering. To me, suffering seems now a sacramental thing, that makes those whom it touches holy.

Let those who have not walked as we have done, In the red fire of passion, those whose lives Are dull and colourless, in a word let those, If any such there be, who have not loved, Cast stones against you

What is a sensitive person?" said the Cracker to the Roman Candle. "A person who, because he has corns himself, always treads on other people's toes," answered the Roman Candle in a low whisper; and the Cracker nearly exploded with laughter.

There is something very morbid about modern sympathy with pain.

One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders.

Why is it that I can't feel this tragedy as much as I want to?

All those who come in contact with his [Christ's] personality, even though they may neither bow to his altar or kneel before his priest, in some way find that the ugliness of their sin is taken away and the beauty of their sorrow is revealed to them.