Quotes About Empathy

You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.

How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others... But even more important is the love that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness.

The overall purpose of human communication is - or should be - reconciliation. It should ultimately serve to lower or remove the walls of misunderstanding which unduly separate us human beings, one from another.

It is rare in life to be graced with a true best friend. Someone who is willing to do anything for you. Good or bad times. Drop his or her life to be there, without any personal expectations. Nothing can replace the warm touch, kind embrace, or simple gestures best friends lavish on each other.

Katie was displaying signs of antisocial personality disorder and extreme narcissism. Those who display a pattern of disregard for right and wrong, persistent lying, arrogance, impulsiveness, lack of empathy and remorse, along with other symptoms, fall within the antisocial/sociopath spectrum.

Behold, in example I grieve my heart out for that so sweet young girl; I give my blood for her.... I give my time, my skill, my sleep; I let my other sufferers want that so she may have all." —Bram Stoker, Dracula

By the same token, if conscience and empathy were impediments to the advancement of self-interest, then we would have evolved to be amoral sociopaths.

That woman has halitosis of the soul.

We remember the best fiction as though experienced, and we finish the greatest works with access to the inner-lives of the mind in a way life refuses us.

Too many people try to assuage pain that can never be eradicated. All you can do is salute the grief, acknowledge that you carry it, too, and that even though we all travel that path alone, we are not alone in traveling it.

To be a decent writer you must have both empathy and imagination. While these attributes aid your art, they can plague your soul. You don't simply suffer your own sadness, experience your own longing and worry about your own wife and children, you are burdened with experiencing the emotional states of multitudes of others you don't know.

In your way that I have come to know and appreciate, you did not say anything. You didn't push me to say more. You waited. Your patience is a gift. You trusted our silence.

reached the edge of the pond. I didn't know how deep the water was, but that didn't matter. If a child was in danger, if there was a life to save, I had to attempt it.

I could see my face, crying, in her blank eye.

We believe that the body hath its rights — to move in a reasonable ambit — to raise, to lower its limbs — but across the face of this earth, there are every day those who suffer unforgivable torments, strapped or chained, confined in boxes or in the holds of ships. May the Lord remind me of this always as I walk free upon paths, and may I thus always give thanks unto Him for the strange, small gifts of gesture, of simple tasks done with requisite care and sphere of action.

I was thinking of how sometimes, trying to say the right thing to people, it's like some kind of brain surgery, and you have to tweak exactly the right part of the lobe. except with talking, it's more like brain surgery with old, rusted skewers and things, and maybe like those things you use to eat lobster, but brown. And you have to get exactly the right place, and you're touching around in the brain, But the patient, she keeps jumping and saying ow.

and we smoke their sorrow contentedly; and we eat their sorrow; and we wear their sorrow; and wonder how it came so cheap. It

We were as strangers, in the moment-as intimate as strangers-for strangers know more of us, and can judge of us more without reproach than ever those we love.

I am not sure what it is that finally allows people to just turn to each other and touch. There is some hidden trigger. There is a secret language people learn, so they can signal to stop talking and just move. I don't know it.

Y lo peor es que hiciste que se disculpara. [...] La hiciste pedir perdón por su enfermedad. Por su valor. Hiciste que le diera vergüenza morirse.

It's times like this that I'm real glad I have friends. They say friends are worth your weight in gold.

I won't remember you standing there bored by my bedside as I slur words, standing there waiting to feel like you've stayed long enough so that you're a good person and you're allowed to leave.

He was not very fond of music. Not because it didn't move him — but because it did. "It makes me want to say kind things, stupid things, and pat the heads of people," he admitted. "But now you have to beat them on the head, beat them without mercy.

You made her apologize for sickness. For her courage. You made her feel sorry for dying.