Quotes About Empathy

The simplest and shortest ethical precept is to be served as little as possible . . . and to serve others as much as possible.

Anna smiled,as people smile at the weaknesses of those they love. . .

I know now that people only seem to live when they care only for themselves, and that it is by love for others that they really live. He who has Love has God in him, and is in God - - because God is Love.

In Varenka, she realized that one has but to forget oneself and love others, and one will be calm, happy, and noble.

Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and one another?

Some one dear to one can be loved with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with divine love.

Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone.

Every man, knowing to the smallest detail all the complexity of the conditions surrounding him, involuntarily assumes that the complexity of these conditions and the difficulty of comprehending them are only his personal, accidental peculiarity, and never thinks that others are surrounded by the same complexity as he is.

At that moment it meant nothing to him who might be standing over him, or what was said of him; he was only glad that people were standing near him and only wished that they would help him and bring him back to life, which seemed to him so beautiful now that he had today learned to understand it so differently.

Yes, there is something in me hateful, repulsive," thought Ljewin, as he came away from the Schtscherbazkijs', and walked in the direction of his brother's lodgings. "And I don't get on with other people. Pride, they say. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have put myself in such a position".

As often happens between people who have chosen different ways, each of them, while rationally justifying the other's activity, despised it in his heart. To each of them it seemed that the life he led was the only real life, and the one his friend led was a mere illusion.

vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism.

Davout looked up and gazed intently at him. For some seconds they looked at one another, and that look saved Pierre. Apart from conditions of war and law, that look established human relations between the two men. At that moment an immense number of things passed dimly through both their minds, and they realized that they were both children of humanity and were brothers.

As though tears were the indispensable oil without which the machinery of mutual confidence could not run smoothly between the two sister, the sisters after their tears talked, not of what was uppermost in their minds, but though they talked of outside matters, they understood each other.

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.

Art should cause violence to be set aside and it is only art that can accomplish this.

Love them that hate you, but you can't love those you hate.

He felt that now over his every word, his every deed, there was a judge, a judgment, which was dearer to him than the judgments of all the people in the world. He spoke now, and along with his words he considered the impression his words would make on Natasha. He did not deliberately say what would be please her, but whatever he said, he judged himself from her point of view.

If a man aspires to a righteous life, his first act of abstinence if from injury to animals.

I understood that men only think that they live by caring only about themselves: in reality they live by love alone.

He was not thinking that the Christian law which he had wanted to follow all his life prescribed that he forgive and love his enemies; but the joyful feeling of love and forgiveness of his enemies filled his soul.

One may deal with things without love...but you cannot deal with men without it...It cannot be otherwise, because natural love is the fundamental law of human life.

So you make a sacrifice!' he threw special emphasis on the last word. 'Well, so do I. What could be better? We complete in generosity--what an example of family happiness!

This is dreadful! Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity—that of sympathy and pity toward living creatures like himself—and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life!