Quotes About Empathy

Do you do them in that old-fashioned code,like daffodils mean I'm sorry I was late, daisies mean sorry I embarrassed you in front of your friends, these things here fanned out mean just thinking of you?Or did you just have them throw whatever was pretty together?

It's one thing for forgive yourself a mistake. But if you knew it was a mistake at the time, how do you forgive yourself then?

You can't mind these things, you just can't, for to dislike what makes a person human is to dislike all humans.

You have to love the whole person, if you are truly in love.

Love makes the world go round, the hit songs collectively tell us, and the world is full of people you don't know and might as well be nice to because they won't leave.

To stop staring at you, I kept fiddling with the sugar until you stopped my hand with yours.

You have to love the whole person, if you are truly in love. If you are going to take a lifelong journey with somebody, you can't mind if the other person believes they are leaving for that journey an hour earlier than you, as long as truly, in the real world, you are both leaving at exactly the same time.

This is what happens. You meet people who are in pain, in life and love, and you forgive them for behaving the way they do.

the world is full of people you don't know and might as well be nice to because they won't leave.

If you are going to take a lifelong journey with somebody, you can't mind if the other person believes they are leaving for that journey an hour earlier than you.

Why is there mean, when there are better things than mean, love particularly?

It's one thing to forgive yourself a mistake. But if you knew it was a mistake at the time, how do you forgive yourself then?

It is natural, this heartbreak which arrives first when you are young and never leaves your house no matter where you move, but still everyone wants the kid to stop the fussing and shut up.

people who read literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) were better able to detect another person's emotions, and the theory proposed was that literary fiction engages the reader in a process of decoding the characters' thoughts and motives in a way that popular fiction and nonfiction, being less complex, do not.

a close friend is someone with whom we can allow ourselves to enter the daydreaming attentional mode, with whom we can switch in and out of different modes of attention without feeling awkward.)

Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.

Even a feeble-minded man wants to be like other men.

By shutting out the real world we can live peacefully in ours. We know that a world without pain is a world without feeling… But a world without feeling is a world without pain.

Downhill. Thoughts of suicide to stop it all now while I am still in control and aware of the world around me. But then I think of Charlie waiting at the window. His life is not mine to throw away. I've just burrowed it for a while, and now I'm being asked to return it.

No, you don't understand because it isn't happening to you, and no one can understand but me. I don't blame you. You've got your job to do, and your Ph.D. to get, and-oh, yes don't tell me, I know you're in this largely out of love of humanity, but you've got your life to live and we don't happen to belong on the same level. I passed your floor on the way up, nad now I'm passing it on the way down, and I don't think I'll be taking this elevator again. So let's just say good-bye here and now.

Whatever happens to me, I will have lived a thousand normal lives by what I might add to others not yet born.

I started out the evening with every intention of being pleasant and making friends. But these days I have trouble getting through to people. I don't know if it's me or them, but any attempt at conversation usually fades away in a minute or two, and the barriers go up. Is it because they are afraid of me? Or is it that deep down they don't care and I feel the same about them?

People think it's funny when a dumb person can't do things the same way they can.

intelligence and education that hasn't been tempered by human affection isn't worth a damn.