Quotes About Empathy

I took one look at his composed face and know he doesn't understand, because if he did understand, he would be weeping, too, for this boy who loved a world that never loved him.

Mirar, escuchar: ponerse en modo esponja. Nunca deja de maravillarme el privilegio de que personas me cuenten sus historias, sus vidas; nunca deja de sorprenderme la cantidad de cosas que tantas personas pueden contarte si te ven dispuesto a escucharlas.

Mi papá dice que no, que una cosa es matarla para comerla y otra matarla por odio, que eso no debemos. Así que la gallinita de la verga le sigue dando huevos al vecino.

beneath the surface, Emily was trying to understand if writers were responsible for the feelings they prompted in others: if hurling a word had the same effect as throwing a stone. Was imagination—like a loaded gun—the one pulling the trigger?

Absolutely lonely people have few personal interactions of any kind.

Anger elicits anger, fear elicits fear, no matter how well meaning we may be.

The way that other people judge me is none of my business.

There's more God in one hurt child than in all the religions humans ever created.

Disgust relies on moral obtuseness. It is possible to view another human being as a slimy slug or a piece of revolting trash only if one has never made a serious good-faith attempt to see the world through that person's eyes or to experience that person's feelings. Disgust imputes to the other a subhuman nature. How, by contrast, do we ever become able to see one another as human? Only through the exercise of imagination.

You should care about things in a way that makes it a possibility that tragedy will happen to you.

We might say that there can be pity in its full-fledged form only where there is also mercy for self: for the self engulfed by a sense of its own utter blackness can never win through to a sufficient recognition of the sorrows of the other as other.

Mamma said that when you don't love someone one bit, you have to try to see them like Jesus would. It's a hard thing to do. Even Mamma has to squint sometimes.

War happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say and it seems to me I have been saying it forever. Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

On the night of New Year's Day, I thought of a wonderful New Year's resolution for the men who run the world: get to know the people who only live in it.

I am frightened and doubtful, and everyone who touches me must suffer.

Someday our children, whom we love, may blame us for dishonoring America because we did not care enough about children 10,000 miles away [written, 1967].

I did not want to be a tree, a flower or a wave. In a dancer's body, we as audience must see ourselves, not the imitated behavior of everyday actions, not the phenomenon of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of a miracle.

I did not want to be a tree, a flower or a wave. In a dancer's body, we as audience must see ourselves, not the imitated behavior of everyday actions, not the phenomenon of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of the miracle that is a human being.

Misery is a communicable disease.

Before you hate something you should try to understand it.

People leaders discover that leading is impossible when they forget that they're people first.

To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control."

You can't really change the heart without telling a story.

EPICURUS WROTE, "Empty is that philosopher's argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no use in a medical art that does not cast out the sicknesses of bodies, so too there is no use in philosophy, unless it casts out the suffering of the soul.