Quotes About Empathy

I have learned that men live not by selfishness, but by love.

and if one loves, one loves the whole person as he or she is, and not as one might wish them to be.

Come, what did I say, repeat it? he would ask. But I could never repeat anything, so ludicrous it seemed that he should talk to me, not of himself or me, but of something else, as though it mattered what happened outside us. Only much later I began to have some slight understanding of his cares and to be interested in them.

He suddenly felt that the very thing that had once been the source of his suffering had become the source of his spiritual joy, that what had seemed insoluble when he condemned, reproached and hated, became simple and clear when he forgave and loved.

Levin had long before made the observation that when one is uncomfortable with people from their being excessively amenable and meek, one is apt very soon after to find things intolerable from their touchiness and irritability.

The vocation of every man and woman is to serve people.

She danced the dance so well, so well indeed, so perfectly, that Anisya Fyodorovna, who handed her at once the kerchief she needed in the dance, had tears in her eyes, though she laughed as she watched that slender and graceful little countess, reared in silk and velvet, belonging to another world than hers, who was yet able to understand all that was in Anisya and her father and her mother and her aunt and every Russian soul.

I love everybody and pity everybody.

As if tears were the necessary lubricant without which the machine of mutual communication could not work successfully, the two sisters, after these tears, started talking, not about what preoccupied them , but about unrelated things, and yet they understood eachother.

Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.

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

I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on.

Pay bad people with your goodness; fight their hatred with your kindness. Even if you do not achieve victory over other people, you will conquer yourself. —HENRI AMIEL

Pierre's madness simply meant that he didn't wait, as in days gone by, for people to show personal qualities, what he might call virtues, before loving them. With his heart overflowing with love he loved people for no reason at all, and then had no trouble discovering many a sound reason that made them worth loving.

We should always try to find those things which do not separate us from other people but which unite us. To work against each other, to be angry and turn your back on each other, is to work against nature. —MARCUS AURELIUS

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.

For the first time I envisaged the idea that we - that is, our family - were not the only people in the world, that not every conceivable interest was centered in ourselves but that there existed another life - that of people who had nothing in common with us, cared nothing for us, had no idea of our existence even. I must have known all this before but I had not known it as I did now - I had not realized it; I had not felt it.

In order to forgive, one must have lived through what I have lived through, and may God spare her that.

He felt what a murderer must feel, when he sees the body he has robbed of life. That body, robbed by him of life, was their love, the first stage of their love. There was something awful and revolting in the memory of what had been bought at this fearful price of shame. Shame at their spiritual nakedness crushed her and infected him.

Here's what the happiness is: it's living for the others.

In order not to give myself up to the desire to kill him on the spot, I felt compelled to treat him cordially.

I wanted feeling to guide us in life, and not life to be the guide to feeling.

The most important and necessary human deed, for both doer and recipient, are those of which he does not see the results.

He did not know that Levin was feeling as though he had grown wings. Levin knew she was listening to his words and that she was glad to listen to him. And this was the only thing that interested him.