Quotes About Empathy

This cackit place ... They poor darkies. A greeshie way to go. He clenched his fists. I'm a snool, a glaikit sumph. Nocht but rain, howdumdied all day o'boot. I've lost my noddle. Camsteerie bloody country. He gave a harsh laugh. No strunt. Any haughmagandie? Never. Dunged into the ground. ... I could greet I tell you ... He could only understand one word in three, but this time he knew how the little man felt.

The wounded, the incomplete, the unbalanced, the malfunctioning, the ill seek each other out: like attracted to like.

Love is not a feeling. It does not belong to that category of bodily experience which would include, for instance, pain.

Do we not see that we are inarticulate? That is what defeats us. It is our inability to communicate to another how we are locked within ourselves, unable to say the simplest thing of importance to one another, any of us, even the most valuable, that makes our lives like those of a litter of kittens in a wood-pile.

Their story, yours, mine - it's what we all carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.

Complaint They call me and I go. It is a frozen road past midnight, a dust of snow caught in the rigid wheeltracks. The door opens. I smile, enter and shake off the cold. Here is a great woman on her side in the bed. She is sick, perhaps vomiting, perhaps laboring to give birth to a tenth child. Joy! Joy! Night is a room darkened for lovers, through the jalousies the sun has sent one golden needle! I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.

If there's delight in love, 'Tis when I see that heart, which others bleed for, bleed for me.

He who closes his ears to the views of others shows little confidence in the integrity of his own views.

Each one of us must suffer long to himself before he can learn that he is but one in a great community of wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from the foundation of the world.

What sets our species apart is not just what men will do to other men, but how tirelessly they justify it.

We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.

I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.

We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

On the instant when we come to realize that tragedy is second-hand.

Hush, now, she said, stroking his head. Hush. Dilsey got you. But he bellowed slowly, abjectly, without tears; the grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sound.

The work of the artist is to lift up people's hearts and help them endure.

I see all the while how folks could say he was queer, but that was the very reason couldn't nobody hold it personal. It was like he was outside of it too, same as you, and getting mad at it would be kind of like getting mad at a mud-puddle that splashed you when you stepped in it.

But who knows why a man, though suffering, clings, above all the other well members, to the arm or leg which he knows must come off?

Ay, grief goes, fades; we know that–but ask the tear ducts if they have forgotten how to weep.

Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.

People. They're really innately, inherently gentle and compassionate and kind. That's what wrings, wrenches...something. Your entrails, maybe. The member of the mob who holds up the whole ceremony for seconds or even minutes while he dislodges a family of bugs or lizards from the log he is about to put on the fire.

La mejor manera de considerar a las personas, negras o blancas, es considerarlas tal y como ellas creen que son, y luego dejarlas en paz. Fue entonces cuando me di cuenta de que un negro no es tanto una persona como un modo de ser; una especie de reflejo invertido de los blancos entre los que vive.

Un hombre vivo es mejor que un hombre muerto, pero ningún hombre vivo o muerto es mucho mejor que otro hombre vivo o muerto.