Quotes About Empathy

Words are not that important when you recognize intentions.

All too often, others with whom we come in contact do not reason as we reason, or do not value the things we value, or are not interested in what interests us.

Unless thinkers carry their respect for cause and effect into the field of human relations, they may not have much awareness of people.

they [thinkers] can remember how feeling types respond to sympathy and appreciation; a little of either will greatly tone down a necessary criticism, but the thinker must express the sympathy or appreciation first.

In any marriage, a type difference may at times produce an outright conflict [...] When this happens [...] One or both can assume that it is wrong of the other to be different - and be righteously indignant [...] They can assume that it is wrong of themselves to be different - and be depressed [...] Or they can acknowledge that each is justifiably and interestingly different from the other - and be amused.

I began to wonder if what makes men walk so lordlike and speak so masterfully is having the love of women. If that was it, Sarah and I would make lords of each other.

In my friend, I find a second self.

Yeah, well, there's this thing about love. You aren't one hundred percent invested in what you want anymore. It becomes at least half about the other person.

Is there someone who will stand naked with you in the shower and hold you and comfort you?" he had once said in a hoarse whisper, his words seeming to tumble over one another. "If you can't do that with the person you're with, then you're not really in love

Give of yourself, not yourself.

Is there someone who will stand naked with you in the shower and hold you and comfort you?" he had once asked in a hoarse whisper, his words seeming to tumble over one another. "If you cannot do that with the person you are with, then you're not really in love?

We are, all of us, poor wretches, and those who prefer not to understand this are even worse off than the rest of us.

Art is not necessary at all. All that is necessary to make this world a better place to live in is to love --to love as Christ loved, as Buddha loved.

Perhaps he was a bit different from other people, but what really sympathetic person is not a little mad?

What one has not experienced one will never understand in print.

I hope that schools have changed since I was a little girl. My memory of the teaching of the public schools is that it showed the brutal incomprehension of children.

All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.

You don't need to put someone under for a blood transfusion! [pauses, realizes] It's more than that, isn't it?

My teeth became sour as I listened to his story. It was then that I understood why he was quiet all the time.

Your destiny is my destiny. Your happiness is my happiness.

To tell the truth, this was one of the few cases in which she had not told him just what she was thinking. Usually, she let him know whatever thoughts happened to come to her, and indeed he never took it amiss if she let slip a word that might pain him, because when all was said and done that was the price one paid for sincerity.

The deepest wounds aren't the ones we get from other people hurting us. They are the wounds we give ourselves when we hurt other people.

Strength without compassion is soulless and cruel. Weakness, too, has its place, for it brings understanding.

I shivered at the notion of a Misfit with empathy or coercion, driven by defective will. Thank Lud, Ariel had never realised his abiities or used them consciously. How much more harm might he have done? Chapter 9, page 97