Quotes About Empathy

Just sort of relax your mind and say yes, it does hurt, I know.

Just sort of relax your mind and say yes, it does hurt, I know. Don't try and shut it out.

Witches and their dæmons felt no cold, but they were aware that other humans did.

The thought came to Will and Lyra at the same moment, and they exchanged a tear-filled glance. And for the second time in their lives, but not the last, each of them saw their own expression on the other's face.

Lyra encouraged, bullied, hit, half-carried, swore at, pushed, dragged, lifted tenderly, wherever it was needed, and Pantalaimon (by the state of each child's dæmon) told her what was needed in each case.

Serafina said, 'Have you been married, Mr Scoresby? Have you any children?' 'No, ma'am, I have no child, though I would have liked to be a father. But I understand your question, and you're right: that little girl has had bad luck with her true parents, and maybe I can make it up to her. Someone has to do it, and I'm willing.

But he was a human being, or part of one, and he felt just as Lyra did: unhappy, and guilty, and wretchedly lonely.

I heard a baby cry. And this blood-splattered thing was put in my arms. My child. And, at that moment, it was like a gigantic plug appeared and - POW! - I was plugged into humanity in a way I'd never been before. Never could be. I was part of all mothers and all births from the beginning of time. I was a woman in a mud hut in Africa, in an igloo in the Arctic, a wigwam in America, a cave, a skyscraper, a spaceship. I was part of a flow and that flow was blood -

This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.

I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that, in the long run, nobody is a picnic and that I was no picnic myself.

You don't have to work in a mental hospital to know about husbands and wives.

He calls his brother. it is the wrong brother from whom to seek consolation, but what can he do? When it comes to consolation it is always the wrong brother, the wrong father, the wrong mother, the wrong wife, which is why one must be content to console oneself and be strong and go on in life consoling others.

I can't really tell objectively how sorry I should feel for myself. I don't give the same credibility to my being that other people give to theirs. Everything feels acted." "Everything is acted." "Whatever. With me there's some glue missing, something fundamental to everyone else that I don't have. My life never seems real to me.

Why can't Jews with their Jewish problems be human beings with their human problems?

È mai possibile che questi individui siano attrezzati di tutto il macchinario necessario, un cervello, una spina dorsale, e le quattro aperture per le orecchie e gli occhi - attrezzatura, Signora Nimkin, che può sbalordire quasi quanto la Tv a colori - eppure viversi tutta l'esistenza senza la minima idea di quelli che sono i sentimenti e i desideri di una persona qualsiasi al di fuori di loro stessi?

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.

It was the first time I saw my father cry. A childhood milestone, when another's tears are more unbearable than one's own.

I'm looking at myself," he said, ecstatically, "except it's you.

No one gets through unmarked by brooding, grief, confusion, and loss. Even those who had it all as kids sooner or later get the average share of misery, if not sometimes more.

What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for.

Don't be against yourself. There's enough cruelty in the world as it is. Don't make things worse by scapegoating yourself.

Die wirklich wichtige Freiheit erfordert Aufmerksamkeit, und Offenheit und Disziplin und Mühe und die Empathie, andere Menschen wirklich ernst zu nehmen und Opfer für sie zu bringen, wieder und wieder, auf unendlich verschiedene Weisen, völlig unsexy, Tag für Tag.

Everyone around us could see the way Lyndon hung on the sound of his wife's voice, saw the tiny curtsies, her social motions, as though each movement of Lady Bird gently burst a layer of impediment between her and him.

Helping them eliminate the error involves drumming into student writers two big injunctions: (1) Do not presume that the reader can read your mind — anything that you want the reader to visualize or consider or conclude, you must provide; (2) Do not presume that the reader feels the same way that you do about a given experience or issue — your argument cannot just assume as true the very things you're trying to argue for.