Quotes About Empathy

love is the only emotion that expands intelligence

I'm surprised you holy people talk to me," Wolfie said suddenly, "after what I done." He swayed there a moment, frowning. "As a Catholic priest, I must accept men's frailty. And as a European I am too old and tired to expend emotion upon matters I can do nothing about.

The point of life is to help others through it

Self-confidence is being able to say to another, I am what I am, and as long as I am not physically harming you or your property, your not liking what I am is your problem.

That's it. I'm asking you, I'm really asking you—how is it possible that we aren't in a permanent state of mourning?

if you tried to take into account all the heartbreak behind the lighted windows of a single city on a single night, your head would explode clean off your neck. [Ineffectual Tribute to Len]

And she'd apologize for what what she remembered and what she forgot. A lot depended on what they both forgot. [Montreal]

Banks wondered if that was a psychopath's trait, along the lines of lack of conscience, no sense of humor and zero human empathy.

She was one of those rare girls that you just felt you wanted to be always happy, even if you weren't going to be the source of that happiness.

Putting yourself in the place of others...is what thinking ethically is all about.

Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.

If doing the most you can for others means that you are also flourishing, then that is the best possible outcome for everyone.

If it is so easy to help people in real need through no fault of their own, and yet we fail to do so, aren't we doing something wrong? At a minimum, I hope this book will persuade you that there is something deeply askew with our widely accepted views about what it is to live a good life.

The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?5

What we must do is bring nonhuman animals within our sphere of moral concern and cease to treat their lives as expendable for whatever trivial purposes we may have.

But pain is pain, and the importance of preventing unnecessary pain and suffering does not diminish because the being

If we could see our lives objectively, we could see that they are not something we should inflict on anyone.

The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

I guess basically one wants to feel that one's life has amounted to more than just consuming products and generating garbage. I think that one likes to look back and say that one's done the best one can to make this a better place for others. You can look at it from this point of view: What greater motivation can there be than doing whatever one possibly can to reduce pain and suffering?

Either the animal is not like us, in which case there is no reason for performing the experiment; or else the animal is like us, in which case we ought not to perform on the animal an experiment that would be considered outrageous if performed on one of us.

If we shrug our shoulders at the avoidable suffering of the weak and the poor, of those who are getting exploited and ripped off, we are not the left.

Animal Liberation is Human Liberation too.

The capacity for suffering and enjoyment is, however, not only necessary, but also sufficient for us to say that a being has interests—at an absolute minimum, an interest in not suffering. A mouse, for example, does have an interest in not being kicked along the road, because it will suffer if it is.

If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering—insofar as rough comparisons can be made—of any other being.