Quotes About Empathy

Links zu sein, sagt Gilles Deleuze in seinem Abécédaire, das heiße, 'eine Horizontwahrnehmung' zu haben (die Welt als ganze zu sehen, die Probleme der Dritten Welt wichtiger zu finden als die des eigenen Viertels). Nicht links zu sein hingegen bedeute, die Wahrnehmung auf das eigene Land, auf die eigene Straße zu verengen.

J'imagine que l'une des raisons pour lesquelles les gens s'accrochent de manière si tenace à leurs haines, c'est qu'ils sentent bien que, une fois la haine disparue, ils se retrouveront confrontés à la douleur1. »

An artist is above all a human being, profoundly human to the core. If the artist can't feel everything that humanity feels, if the artist isn't capable of loving until he forgets himself and sacrifices himself if necessary, if he won't put down his magic brush and head the fight against the oppressor, then he isn't a great artist.

This is how Hillary conducts government policy. She is ruthless, she is grasping, she appears to have little empathy or concern for people. She is old, and mean, and even her laugh is a witch's cackle. There is almost nothing appealing about her. How, then, could she be the first choice of progressive Democrats and the apparent frontrunner for winning the presidency in November 2016?

In India, I learned a proverb that may seem somewhat heartless: "The tears of strangers are only water." It means we are obligated to help only our own; if others have a problem, we wish them well, but it's their problem.

Exercise the muscles that compassionately open the heart. In your writing and your life.

My job is not to just set down events that happened to me. My job is to create an experience for a reader." —Mary Karr

If I see someone I see the ghost of them, the air around them, and where they've been. If I see a city I see it's living ghostliness—the stray looks, the dying hands. I see it's needs and its discomforts locked in apartments.

I wanted so terribly to be good to him.

Cruel blows of fate call for extreme kindness in the family circle.

surely I could give him--a sort of contentment... That isn't enough to give. Not for the giver.

I was so happy that I wanted to be kind to everyone in the world.

When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing a book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it.

At least we're companions in misfortune

The thought came to me that perhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return - that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness.

As she only cries about once a year I really ought to have gone over and comforted her, but I wanted to set it all down here. I begin to see that writers are liable to become callous.

And I suspect that, to the eyes of love, love shows. I knew about you as well as about myself, almost from the beginning.

It can't be immoral to love anyone -- as long as one doesn't hurt anyone by it.

I felt as I did once when Rose had very bad toothache - that it was callous of me to be so separate from the pain, that just being sorry for suffering people isn't enough.

When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it — or rather, it is like living it.

It's hopeless to make friends with people who never talk about themselves.

Doing things for others gives you a lovely glow. So does port, I said cynically.

A thousand pounds for clothes — when one thinks how long poor people could live on it! When one thinks how long we could live on it, for that matter! Oddly, I have never thought of us as poor people — I mean, I have never been terribly sorry for us, as for the unemployed or beggars; though really we have been rather worse off, being unemployable and with no one to beg from.

That evening of the row was our lowest depths; miserable people cannot afford to dislike each other. Cruel blows of fate call for extreme kindness in the family circle.