Quotes About Empathy

I'm just saying, Odie, that nobody's born mean. Life warps you in terrible ways.

1. The world is hard. Be strong. 2. Love is for only a few. Don't expect it. 3. Life isn't fair. But some people are. Be one of them.

I'll pray for you, Emil,' he said. / 'About as useful as throwing a penny down a wishing well, Nathan.

there's going to be lots in this world you're going to feel bad about. Save your regret for the important things, okay?

I comfort myself with something Henry once told me. He said we all stumble in the dark, but that's why the Great Mystery gave us voices, so that we can call out, seeking others in the dark. And we were given hands so that we can reach out to help one another. Alone, the darkness swallows us. But together, we help each other through. So, when things seem bleakest, I tell myself to soldier on. I try to remind myself to call out. I do my best to be ready to offer a hand.

He must recruit others like him—those willing to hunt the Legion by becoming what they hated most.

I had discovered a terrible vulnerability I myself which I think of not as cowardliness but as an ability to imagine too much.

It's as if your parents have to die before you really understand who they are.

I have an idea that is is what enduring love really means, Your memories of a girl at seventeen become as real and vivid as the middle-aged woman sitting in front of you. It is a happy sort of double vision, this seeing and remembering. To be seen this way is to be known.

My childhood ended that summer. I learned the word murder. But it is not enough to be told a word as big as that...You have to live with it, carry it around with you. You have to...see it from different angles, at different times of day, in different light, until you understand, until it enters you.

Before, she had this way of focusing on whomever she spoke to, so that you felt you were the most impossibly captivating person in the room; now, her eyes wandered and she seemed not to be in the room herself.

Every criminal is still a man, a complex of good and bad, fully deserving of our empathy and mercy.

Parents of murdered children have it worst, and to me the fathers have it even worse than the mothers because they are taught to be stoic, to "act like a man.

You can't do it alone, that's the thing. You have to remember there are other people out there who have gone through it, who know what you're going through.

Ricky's genuine presence, his new capacity to feel deeply, to ache—had come about only as a product of her dying. It was a joke she would have appreciated.

Her left hand dangled from the armrest, her long fingers and beautiful clear nails. She always had lovely, elegant hands; my own mother's fat-fingered scrubwoman hands looked like dog's paws beside Laurie's. I reached across to take her hand, lacing my fingers in hers so that our two hands made one fist. The sight of her hand in mine made me briefly sentimental. I gave her an encouraging look and jostled our knotted hands.

narcissistic personality disorder. This is the one you probably know something about. Its primary characteristics are grandiosity and lack of empathy.

Sometimes you only saw yourself clearly in the eyes of those you've left, and what you saw was a horror.

IF YOU WANT A DOG TO STOP KISSING YOU, turn your head away silently like another dog. —Jack Kerouac Some of the Dharma

IF YOU WANT A DOG TO STOP KISSING YOU, turn your head away silently like another dog.

Never, therefore, allow yourselves to despise those who do not follow your rules of life: but force your hearts to love them, and pray to God for them; and let humility be always whispering it into your ears, that you yourselves would fall from those rules to-morrow, if God should leave you to your own strength and wisdom.

Be daily, therefore, on your knees, in a solemn deliberate performance of this devotion, praying for others in such forms, with such length, importunity, and earnestness, as you use for yourself; and you will find all little, ill-natured passions die away, your heart grow great and generous, delighting in the common happiness of others, as you used only to delight in your own.

Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind. We love the land of our nativity, only as we love all other lands. The interests, rights, and liberties of American citizens are no more dear to us than are those of the whole human race. Hence we can allow no appeal to patriotism, to revenge any national insult or injury. (Declaration of Sentiments, Boston Peace Conference (28 September 1838))

William Loren Katz