Quotes About Empathy

But do the Lords of War in fact hate the world? That would be easy to bear, if so. If they hated their children and the flowers that grow in the warming light, that would be easy to bear. For then we could hate the haters and be right. What is hard is to imagine the Lords of War may love the things that they destroy.

We don't need much imagination to imagine that to be free of hatred, of enmity, of the endless and hopeless effort to oppose violence with violence, would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of indifference would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of the insane rationalizations for our desire to kill one another-that surely would be to have life more abundantly.

One morning when he was about thirteen, Den and I were in the barn doing the before-breakfast chores. I was in the milking stall, Den in the driveway. He must have been thinking about Maury, for after a while he said, Dad, Maury Telleen is not very tall. Did you ever notice that? Yes, I said. And probably I was about to tell him he should mind his manners, but he wasn't finished. He said, But you never think of him as a little man. Did you ever notice that? Yes, I said. I have noticed that.

Ask yourself:...Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth...

But if nobody can ever quite be nothing to you in Port William, then everybody finally has got to be something to you.

Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.

No matter what laws or governments say, men can only know and come to care for one another by meeting face to face, arduously, and by the willing loss of comfort.

As I buried the dead and walked among them, I wanted to make my heart as big as Heaven to include them all and love them and not be distracted. I couldn't do it, of course, but I wanted to.

But we had a year when even to look at one another would make us grieve.

Wheeler served them as their defender against the law itself, before which they were ciphers, and so felt themselves—and he could do this only as their friend.

There is also the Territory of historical self-righteousness: if we had lived south of the Ohio in 1830, we would not have owned slaves; if we had lived on the frontier, we would have killed no Indians, violated no treaties, stolen no land. The probability is overwhelming that if we had belonged to the generations we deplore, we too would have behaved deplorably.

It is a serious fault in a man to dislike a boy

I had heard it all before—most of us had—but John T. had never heard any of it, because he usually didn't listen to anybody but himself. He was shocked. For almost a full minute, Sam having spoken to his satisfaction and John T. unable to speak at all, they just looked at each other.

In a conversation, you always expect a reply. And if you honor the other party to the conversation, if you honor the otherness of the other party, you understand that you must not expect always to receive a reply that you foresee or a reply that you will like.

The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't. Burley Coulter

Sometimes he would be finished talking before we had started listening.

Nothing takes you out of yourself the way a good book does, but at the same time nothing makes you more aware of yourself as a solitary creature, possessing your own particular tastes, memories, associations, beliefs. Even as it fully engages you with another mind (or maybe many other minds, if you count the characters' as well as the author's), reading remains a highly individual act. No one will ever do it precisely the way you do.

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.

Nothing nice you ever do for anyone is for no reason.

Why do you like books so much?" he asked. Miles answered without taking his face away from the window. "You never know what you'll learn when you open one. And if it's a story, you sort of fall into it. Then you live there for a while, instead of, you know, living here.

For me, reading that scene never fails to bring on a brief, scalding instant of recognition in recalling exactly what it was like to be a tiny little kid, your whole sense of being so lumpy and vulnerable that the smallest things were everything, and the everything could be so unspeakably wonderful, and the wonderful could be snatched away in an instant, leaving a big ragged hole in your universe just like the one in Laura's dress.

think I have sort of an odd aversion, almost like a chemical sensitivity, when it comes to other people's enthusiasm.

The philanthropist who could not pass a beggar without parting with his money, the nature lover who felt he did not have the right to stamp on a spider let alone mistreat a horse, the humanitarian who opposed slavery because it was the "absolute dependence of one man upon another," was utterly convinced he had every right to keep a young woman subject to his total command and groom her to meet his desires

Let me speak of Son of Sam. He has been called a mad dog. He is not a mad dog ?- he is a mad human being, perhaps only a step removed from the rest of us. One has to acknowledge him as a human being and to respect his dignity even in his madness. Otherwise, there is the danger that people may start to kill each other like mad dogs.