Quotes About Empathy

Since every death diminishes us a little, we grieve - not so much for the death as for ourselves.

Are you the sum total of your worst acts?

Honest listening is one of the best medicines we can offer the dying and the bereaved.

You never really feel somebody's suffering. You only feel their death.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem too insignificant for our concern? Yet in my heart I never will deny her, Who suffered death because she chose to turn.

For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.

It is the doctors who desert the dying and there is so much to be learned about pain.

If we're bringing up kids that are so stupid that they kill themselves because of a song, what good are the kids in the first place ?

Like many people, I feel like celebrating. Remember this feeling. It is human, and can help us understand when others express bloodlust.

It is so much easier to grieve for the dead than to care for the living. At least in death we are all perfect.

The real question is, do you root for the fox in that song? Or are you horrified that the goose and the duck are being dragged off to their death, which is described in detail?

I am convinced that much more emphasis should be placed on history. The purpose of history is to learn how human beings react when exposed to the danger of wounds or death.

Death is a mercy, and I have enough mercy to go around.

No mother should lose her child.

If you talk to any cop, however hardened, and say, "Has anything that's ever bothered you", they'll tell you about the death of a child that they had to deal with.

The friend who cares makes it clear that whatever happens in the external world, being present to each other is what really matters. In fact, it matters more than pain, illness, or even death.

Are you always attracted to damaged women?" "I didn't know there were any other kind.

To a dying person you can repeat yourself forever. They don't care. Just so they can still hear you talking.

Rosa was kneeling next to the bed now, stroking his scalp with one of her warm little hands. "Sick?" she asked. "Low self-esteem.

The sight of a coffin going into the ground can effect a great change of heart—all at once you find you are not so disappointed in this person who is dead—but what the sight of a coffin does for the mind in its search for the truth, this I don't profess to know.

That people were manifold creatures didn't come as a surprise to the Swede, even if it was a bit of a shock to realize it anew when someone let you down. 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.

what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration.

It's not your fault that you don't know what Gentiles think when they read something like this.

There are a hundred different ways to hold someone's hand. There are the ways you hold a child's hand, the ways you hold a friend's hand, the ways you hold an elderly parent's hand, the ways you hold the hands of the departing and of the dying and of the dead.