Quotes About Empathy

a really good friend, the kind of friend who - when they were together both of them were more able to be who they really were.

You should have spoken up sooner." her grandmother answered. "No need to bear pain unless you have to.

In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female.

Neither harsh reviews, the contempt of equals nor the indifference of superiors can affect those who have once tapped the great heart of suffering humanity and found out what a goldmine it is.

When we have ceased to love the stench of the human animal, either in others or in ourselves, then are we condemned to misery, and clear thinking can begin.

The relationship with a live audience seems to me to count for more.

Da quando sono qui da sola, ho la sensazione di passeggiare tenendo i miei morti per mano. Facciamo un giro, mi confortano e mi hanno paura allo stesso tempo. Mi raccontano la stessa storia, tutti i giorni.

Love means to learn to look at yourself the way one looks at distant things for you are only one thing among many.

It was as if solidarity with them– with people– was pushing me toward the edge, and I could be with them only by falling.

Forget the suffering You caused others. Forget the suffering Others caused you. The waters run and run, Springs sparkle and are done, You walk the earth you are forgetting.

Unable to restrain himself, driven by sheer love for the animal, he fired. It was a young one, so slender that what he had taken for a squirrel was not a squirrel but the shimmer of color deposited in its wake. Its body bending and unbending on the moss, it clutched its chest with its tiny paws, at the bloody patch on its little white vest. It didn't know what death was; it was trying to remove it, as if it were a spike on which it had been impaled and around which it could only pivot.

poetry has always been for me a participation in the humanly modulated time of my contemporaries.

I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.

One doesn't know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one's friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one.

Paranoids are people, too they have their own problems. It's easy to criticize, but if everybody hated you, you'd be paranoid too.

Peace should not depend on force.

Books are people,'' smiled Miss Marks. ''In every book worth reading, the author is there to meet you, to establish contact with you. He takes you into his confidence and reveals his thoughts to you.

It is curious but true that those who make a habit of saying unkind things are often the most easily hurt and offended when their victims retaliate.

It is curious, isn't it, that things you know well never look dirty and dilapidated—other people's old furniture looks shabby and moth-eaten. "I would never have that horrible old couch in my room," you say. But your own old couch is every bit as bad and you are not disgusted with its appearance; it is your friend, you see, and you remember it when it was new and smart. Friends that you have known for a long time and love very dearly never seem to grow old.

We're going about it the wrong way … Passing laws and trying to make people happy and good … there's only one way in which it can be done and that's from inside outwards; starting with the individual and spreading outwards to others. Some people have power in them and could do a lot, others could just do a little, but everybody could do something … even if they just made one house a happy place.

The storyteller has always been a valuable member of society. Even in prehistoric times when men hunted wild beasts and lived in caves they sat around the campfire at night and listened to stories. Your profession is one of the oldest in the world and one of the most useful... And we need stories more than ever now. We need stories to entertain us, to help us to forget our troubles, to fill our lives with colour.

If we hate people it does not hurt them at all... it hurts ourselves.

She saw, more or less, how the whole thing had happened, for she had the gift—which is often a doubtful blessing—of being able to see the other person's point of view, of being able to put herself in the other person's place.

Children are ruthless because they have not learned pity, they are inconsiderate because they have never experienced pain. When Philip had written the letter he had not seen his father receiving it, Philip had just sat down and written exactly what he was feeling with absolute honesty...