Quotes About Empathy

When you care more if someone else lives than you do about yourself- is that what [love is]?

Would you give up your vengeance against someone you hate if it meant saving someone you love? Would you want your dreams to come true if it meant granting your enemy's dying wish?

Doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you.

Power isn't about doing something terrible to someone who's weaker than you, Reiner. It's having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.

That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?

I once heard someone on a bus say that this guy had gotten under her skin. And it struck me as a remarkable thought - that someone would affect you so deeply they'd always be a part of you.

And that was the greatest heartbreak of all- no matter how spectacular we want our children to be, no matter how perfect we pretend they are, they are bound to disappoint. As it turns out, kids are more like us than we think: damaged, through and through.

My whole life was about her, what if her whole life wasn't all about me?

What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did.

I don't understand why it's a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.

You didn't get past something like that, you go through it -- and for that reason alone, I understood more about her than she ever would have guessed.

Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are. —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

The best relationships were the ones where both sides went out of their way to make sure the other wasn't disappointed.

She shrugged. You can be happy for someone else's good fortune, but that doesn't mean you forget your own bad luck.

I knew her well enough to understand that when Delia pushed you away, it was her way of making sure she didn't get shoved first.

Some people don't know what to do with an act of kindness.

She stared at Peter, and she realized that in that one moment, when she hadn't been thinking, she knew exactly what he'd felt as he moved through the school with his backpack and his guns. Every kid in this school played a role: jock, brain, beauty, freak. All Peter had done was what they all secretly dreamed of: be someone, even for just nineteen minutes, who nobody else was allowed to judge.

Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?

Adults, light-years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, this too shall pass - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.

Add love, and all the lines between right and wrong were bound to disappear.

I pointed to the wound. It's missing, I said. My grandmother smiled, and that was all it took for me to stop seeing the scar, and to recognize her again. Yes, she said. But see how much of me is left?

On the surface, we're polar opposites. Under the skin, though, we're the same: people think they know what they're getting, and they're always wrong.

Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else's. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back.

Be kind to others before you take care of yourself; make whoever you're with feel like they matter.