Quotes About Empathy

If you can spend enough time playing other people, you don't have to think too much about your own character motivations.

Maybe it was this: The name of a person marked for murder is just a name, but the face makes real the cost of violence, for if we have the nerve to look, we can see in any face our own vulnerability.

A cynic once said that the most identifying trait of humanity is our ability to be inhumane to one another.

The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.

Sometimes it seems that to exit this world, they must go through my heart, leaving me scarred and sore.

I had remained hopeful that, among the millions on this Earth, there might be a few who could summon the courage to know me for what I am and have the self-confidence to still walk part of this life with me.

She is a girl who feels things strongly, and though cynics might mock her for that, I never will, as it perhaps the best of graces: to feel deeply, to care profoundly.

She is a girl who feels things strongly, and though cynics might mock her for that, I never will, as it is perhaps the best of graces: to feel deeply, to care profoundly.

Sympathy is a nobler feeling than pity. But if sympathy is the principal reason that one person is drawn to another, there will always be an unbridgeable chasm between friendship and genuine love.

It's not right that gentleness meet horror.

A story is a wedding in which we listeners are the groom watching the bride coming up the aisle. It is together, in an act of imaginary consummation, that the story is born. This act wholly involves us, as any marriage would, and just as no marriage is exactly the same as another, so each of us interprets a story differently, feels for it differently.

The first time I went to an Indian restaurant in Canada, I used my fingers. The waiter looked at me critically and said, Fresh off the boat are you? I blanched. My fingers which had seconds before had been taste buds savoring the food a little ahead of my mouth, became dirty under his gaze. They froze like criminals caught in the act. I didn't dare lick them. I wiped them guiltily on my napkin. He had no idea how deeply those words wounded me. They were like nails being driven into my flesh.

That is the greatness of literature, and its paradox, that in reading about fictional others we end up reading about ourselves. Sometimes this unwitting self-examination provokes smiles of recognition, while other times, . . . it provokes shudders of worry and denial. Either way, we are the wiser, we are existentially thicker.

There's nothing, absolutely nothing, more important than your life. And your life isn't more important than other people's lives.

When you can't find a remedy for your pain, you look for someone to blame.

When a woman starts fussing over some physical defect, deny, deny, deny. Particularly if she says, "Tell me the truth.

Getting old," I said with some restraint, "means to be done with compassion.

In the end, the only truly intimate relationships are those between two people.

And I can't complain. After all, only women are able really to love

Oh, to be laughed at when I have the courage to speak my heart. I don't want to live in a world like this. -from Diary of My Sixteenth Year

One can't stop and suddenly speak to a complete stranger, can one?......When it happens I could die of sadness. I feel somehow empty and drained....

De mon côté, je t'en ai beaucoup voulu, et puis je me suis fait des reproches, mais dans cette vie misérable que nous menions, nous, Japonais, je me suis aperçu qu'il fallait avoir de l'empathie pour notre propre jeunesse.

Ciudate mai sunt lacrimile oamenilor!

Animalele nu sunt lipsite de sentimente… Dac? n-aÈ™ avea lâng? mine ceva viu, care s? se miÈ™te, n-aÈ™ putea suporta singur?tatea.