Quotes About Empathy

I don't want to live in the kind of world where we don't look out for each other. Not just the people that are close to us, but anybody who needs a helping hand. I cant change the way anybody else thinks, or what they choose to do, but I can do my bit.

You know how we'd get along better? If everybody'd just remember how we're all related. White, black, Asian, skin. No difference. All the bloodlines go back to that one old mama in Africa.

Books and music saved me as a teenager because it was through them that I realized that I wasn't alone in my obsessive love for words and music.

I'm pretty much fixated on certain themes. Family, but it's family of choice as much as family of blood. Individuality, yes, but not at the cost of others' happiness. Be true to your friends. Remembering to find some wonder and hope in the world. Basically it boils down to: treat people like you'd like them to treat you, leave the world a little better than it was when you got here, respect others and stand up for those who can't stand up for themselves.

My characters seem real because they are drawn from the realities of my life. I didn't have to research their pain; I just tapped into my own.

I believe in a different kind of magic. The kind we make between each other.

As the new work fills my notebooks, I've come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed.

Witchery is merely a word for what we are all capable of -- heightened nightsight, an empathy shared with the beasts, a utilization of the more obscure abilities of our minds. Nothing that science can't explain away. Wizardry is spells and enchantments. Fairy tales.

We can't change the world for animals without changing our ideas about animals. We have to move from the idea that animals are things, tools, machines, commodities, resources here for our use to the idea that as sentient beings they have their own inherent value and dignity.

If tomorrow we decided only to desist from killing and causing suffering for sport and entertainment, the world would be significantly better for animals. Even this we have failed to achieve.

It took Christians many years to realize that we cannot love God and also keep humans as slaves. It has taken even longer for Christians to realize that we cannot love God and also regard women as second-class humans. Now is the time for Christians to realize that we cannot love God and hate the Creator's nonhuman creatures.

Had I not been thinking always of the ludicrous aspects of my own plight, or of the plight of others, I could not have survived that depressing, degrading experience without spiritual harm.

I have sincerely tried not to deride the action of men, not to lament nor to abhor them. I have done all in my might to understand them.- Spinoza

I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can't be learnt in lecture halls.

I travel around the world, experiencing every language, every religion... some places where there's just no reason to smile, because their lives are so difficult.

Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are.

No eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death. He doesn't have any real concept of other people--that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn't real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw away.

I have never in all my life considered you other people.

Only the untouched, the well-fed and contented, could possibly covet suffering like a designer jacket.

I wonder if I wouldn't have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, 'I like you'. I wonder if just enjoying your kids company isn't more important.

Maybe the greatest favour a spouse can tender is to overlook what you can't.

How much did you care about anything that went on in my head until it got out?

Discomfort begets discomfort in others.

Sometimes things end worse for one side than the other. These 'injured parties' always seem to see themselves as victims of a moral outrage. They never feel simply rejected, but also abused. I've known many women who were great believers in the curative powers of indignation.