Quotes About Empathy

Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact.

When we are in love, our love is too vast to be wholly contained within ourselves; it radiates outwards, reaches the resistant surface of the loved one, which reflects it back to its starting-point; and this return of our own tenderness is what we see as the other's feelings, working their new, enhanced charm on us, because we do not recognize them as having originated in ourselves.

It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering.

it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were readers of themselves, my book being a sort of magnifying glass … by which I could give them the means to read within themselves.

Ogni lettore, quando legge, legge sé stesso. L'opera dello scrittore è soltanto una specie di strumento ottico che è offerto al lettore per permettergli di discernere quello che, senza libro, non avrebbe forse visto in sé stesso.

In the human race, the frequency of the virtues that are identical in us all is not more wonderful than the multiplicity of the defects that are peculiar to each one of us. Undoubtedly, it is not common sense that is "the commonest thing in the world"; it is human kindness.

The whole art of living is to use the people who make us suffer simply as steps enabling us to obtain access to their divine form and thus joyfully to people our lives with divinities.

Whenever she saw in others an advantage, however trivial, which she herself lacked, she would persuade herself that it was no advantage at all, but a drawback, and would pity so as not to have to envy them. "I

A real person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either.

In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another.

I never much like thus being told without possibility of reply what I am to think about people whom I know.

So difficult is it for us to know, with the dead as with the living, whether a thing would cause them joy or sorrow!

I do my intellectual work within myself, and once with other people, it's more or less irrelevant to me that they're intelligent, as long as they are kind, sincere etc."

It is in sickness that we are compelled to recognise that we do not live alone but are chained to a being from a different realm, from whom we are worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

To have a kind heart is everything

what brings men together is not a community of views but a consanguinity of minds.

There are few who are worthy to understand what I feel... I seek out those who are of this chosen few, and I avoid the rest.

when she called to mind all this utter and crushing misery that had come upon my aunts' old music-master, she was moved to very real grief, and shuddered to think of that other grief, so different in its bitterness, which Mlle. Vinteuil must now be feeling, tinged with remorse at having virtually killed her father.

I came to recognise that, apart from her [Françoise's] own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself.

Os que vêm a conhecer algum detalhe exato da vida alheia tiram logo consequências que não o são, e veem no fato recém-descoberto a explicação de coisas que precisamente não têm nenhuma relação com ele.

We ought never to lose our tempers with people who, when we find them at fault, begin to snigger. They do so not because they are laughing at us, but because they are afraid of our displeasure.

We do not tremble except for ourselves, or for those whom we love.

For one cannot have a perfect knowledge, one cannot effect the complete absorption of a person who disdains one, so long as one has not overcome her disdain.