Quotes About Empathy

I wanted to work alone (painting the fence). I wanted to seem outmatched and undermanned by the insanity of the job before me, so that when the Mexicans returned they'd feel sorry for me.

Theo could think of nothing but April and of her miserable home life, her warring parents, her scarred brother and sister

She nodded again, and took a deep breath. A small tear managed to find its way through the swelling and dropped onto her left cheek. He

By five-thirty, eleven people had been excused, and sixteen others had been sent back to their seats after failing to sound sufficiently pitiful

After a tragedy, those with even the slightest connections to it often exaggerate their involvement and importance.

A dog has no use for fancy cars, big homes, or designer clothes. A water log stick will do just fine. A dog doesn't care if your rich or poor, clever or dull, smart or dumb. Give him your heart and he'll give you his. How many people can you say that about? How many people can make you feel rare and pure and special? How many people can make you feel extraordinary?

A dog judges others not by their color or creed or class but by who they are inside. A dog doesn't care if you are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his.

Gli amanti degli animali sono una speciale razza umana, generosa di spirito, piena di empatia, forse un po' incline al sentimentalismo, e con cuori immensi come un cielo senza nuvole.

Elizabeth was still acutely sympathetic to Mary;

Does anyone really know their friends? Close friends even? Can you really say, hand on heart, that you know what your pal's thinking, even if you've known them intimately all their life?

Yours is a loving spirit; it should not die with you

So when I tell you what I think, I am not transferring thoughts to you. I do not lose them when I tell them. I express what I think, and for you to understand, you need not think what I think, or have the same thought as I. You may need to know what I think and to say it, but not to have the thought or think it.

It is very difficult to get up resentment towards persons whom one has never seen.

Everyone is doing what they have to do, and everyone is doing the best they can. And soon you will be going home.

I wish she were alive, but I am grateful for her death. If she were alive, I would likely still be working at the literary agency. For how much longer in my life would I have believed there was time for everything? And by the time I faced my own mortality at the Bookmill in western Massachusetts, how much less would I have done? Her leaving taught me about the worst sadness, one we all must face eventually. I feel lucky I am better equipped to help others who are going through it now.

I love my father. It's not his fault that he made up a fear and, in order to make it feel more real to him, gave it to me. I was obviously built to receive it.

You are sleeping and farting and snorting and flaking and puking in close proximity, and there is no way to hide all of these sounds and smells from your beloved. You see your partner unhinge their jaw to say the worst things, or shed their disgusting skin to become something new, and you have to accept and forgive these things. A marriage, like a python, is expensive.

cat's feelings, and neither do you. It is not your pet anymore. It is an asshole who lives with you.

I love my father. It's not his fault that he made up a fear and, in order to make it feel more real to him, gave it to me. I was obviously built to receive it. As a father now myself, it's sobering to think about how the smallest comments will ripple through your children's lives, with some leaving permanent warps.

The delusion lies in the fact that no matter how well we think we know the Other, we still judge from within the imprisoning framework of our own limited cultural criteria, we still speak within the cliché of the stereotype." That

Eventually, some black thinkers believe, this separation may be the shortest route to an authentic communication at some future date when blacks and whites can enter into encounters in which they truly speak as equals and in which the white man will no longer load every phrase with unconscious suggestions that he has something to concede to black men or that he wants to help black men overcome their blackness.

I learned a strange thing... that in a jumble of unintelligible talk, the word nigger leaps out with electric clarity. You always hear it and it always stings. And always it casts the person using it into a category of brute ignorance. I thought with some amusement that if these two women only knew what they were revealing about themselves to every Negro on that bus, they would have been outraged.

I believe that before we can truly dialogue with one another we must first perceive intellectually, and then at the profoundest emotiomal level, that there is no Other - that the Other is simply Oneself in all the significant essentials. This alone is the key that can unlock the prison of culture. It will neutralize the poisons of the stereotype that allow men to go on benevolently justifying their abuses against humanity.

Some whites, who had never really understood, were offended by this sudden death of their role as the "good white leading the poor black out of the jungle." Many of these were among the saddest people of our time, good-hearted whites who had dedicated themselves to helping black people become imitation whites, to "bringing them up to our level," without ever realizing what a deep insult this attitude can be.