Quotes About Empathy

Teju Cole writes, "There are no refugees, only fellow citizens whose rights we have failed to acknowledge.

You take in things you don't want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition.

How to care for the injured body, the kind of body that can't hold the content it is living? And where is the safest place when that place must be someplace other than in the body?

Another friend tells you you have to learn not to absorb the world. She says sometimes she can hear her own voice saying silently to whomever--you are saying this thing and I am not going to accept it. Your friend refuses to carry what doesn't belong to her. You take in things you don't want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus.

What happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only. - Claudia Rankine (cited near the title page of 'An American Marriage' by Tayari Jones)

Why are we here if not for each other?

I learned early that being right pales next to staying in the room.

Charlotte: Racism exists outside of reason. Black people have never been human. Charles: That is so hopeless. Charlotte: Go further into that hopelessness, and then we can really begin to see each other.

I was allowing myself to have too much presence in his imagination,

All living is listening for a throat to open-- The length of its silence shaping lives. When he opened his mouth to speak, his speech was what was written in the silence, the length of the silence becoming a living.

Just us, just people, the same people, but what is it that the just people are feeling or wanting or being? The brouhaha so brutal, rising, rising up, rise up. What rises up within, between us? What comes up because we are the history within us?

Pearl…every night I pray to God that you can rest. Seeing what this has done to you….it hurts me more than any man can bear. I'd give you anything—everything—if only I knew you'd take it.

In my ideal world, no child would suffer. Charitable instincts would prevail. There would be global acceptance of all different types of people.

Love others and as you do, that love will return to you.

the only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people.

I'd done my practicum in one of the city's biggest shelters, witnessing the kinds of trauma no human would survive. The one lesson in all that? Animals feel. They're just as sensitive as we are, maybe more.

We are drawn to the Renaissance because of the hope for black uplift and interracial empathy that it embodied and because there is a certain element of romanticism associated with the era's creativity, its seemingly larger than life heroes and heroines, and its most brilliantly lit terrain, Harlem, USA.

I told the good Father that if he and I were going in the future to some wonderful Elysian Field and the animals were not going to go anywhere, that was all the more reason to give them a little better shake in the one life they did have.

I have read a great deal about what animals dream, but none of it has ever really satisfied me. I believe they dream exactly the way we dream, and about everything in their lives--that they have good dreams and bad dreams in almost direct proportion, as we do, to whether their lives have been more good than bad. Unfortunately, because the majority of animals have it so much tougher than we do, I believe that the majority of dreams, except in the most fortunate petdom, are bad.

What this world needs is a new kind of army — the army of the kind.

As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human kind.

The people that set one animal against another haven't the guts to be bullies themselves. They're just secondhand cowards.

I have been extremely positive with almost all new people. And why, let me ask, shan't I be? When you think, you have a lot of to say for someone you know for a short time.

Man's inability to understand and appreciate the thought and viewpoint of another man would be a stumbling block which no amount of mechanical ability could overcome.