Quotes About Empathy

She waved me to a plaid couch in the middle of the living room floor. I eased down and looked around the sorry place. The odor of stale turnip greens was so thick, it seemed like it was seeping through the walls. Every piece of furniture looked like it belonged in the city dump, especially a chair with no legs facing the couch...If Betty Jean hadn't been so cheerful, I would have felt sorry for her.

There can be no situation in life in which the conversation of my dear sister will not administer some comfort to me.

So maybe my own life is not so drastic and dreadful...maybe I am just like all those other girls who have come before me with their oily T-zones and random terrible days and bittersweet triumphs, the world billowing out behind them.

I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.

Ten times a day something happens to me like this - some strengthening throb of amazement - some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.

Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

I looked her dead in the eyes. Her face changed. If I could have chosen for her to be crying than pull that face again, I would let her drown in her own tears.

Oh, man," said Jack. "Everyone was nice to us when we looked rich. Now it feels like the whole world's against us.

Charles is going to be fine," said Annie. "Yep," said Jack with a smile. "He never even knew that it was us who helped him." "That's the best way to help someone, I think," said Annie. "Why?" asked Jack. "Then you know you're not helping them just to get a lot of credit," said Annie. "You're helping because it's the right thing to do.

Some people underestimate how erotic it is to be understood.

Is he weeping?" said the one with the softest heart.

The lovers of the innocent must protect them above all from the knowledge of their own cruelty.

Do I grudge my lord the herb that will heal him, because another gathers it? No, let him be healed.

Alexander offered him (Aristotle)a hand to mount the gangplank, and tried the effect of a smile. When the man returned it, it could be seen that smiling was what he would do best; he would not often be caught with his head back laughing. But he did look like a man who would answer questions.

If you know about yourself, presumably you know about at least one other person.

We started off, he and I, and the girl between us. She shivered as the cold struck her; he pulled the sheepskins higher, and put his arm with a fold of his cloak about her shoulders. I felt a sudden rush of the past upon me; for a moment grief pierced me like a winter night; yet it came to me like an old grief, I had suffered it long since and now it was behind me.

I don't know what more there is to say, except this: that since one can't refuse to know oneself, and it must have happened eventually, I would rather it was through you than anyone else.

I know what you feel like anyone else. It's people that matter. If not, what are you worrying about. What's Madge got that you can't have for a bob against the railings? You care about someone and they let you down. Where's the difference?

With a poignancy he had never felt during the half-stupefying agony on the beach, he was beset by a terrible consciousness of the world's ever-renewed, ever-varied, never-dying pain: children and animals without hope in the present moment's eternity; the prisoners of cruel men, the cruel terribly imprisoned in themselves...

At the stair-foot Hephaistion was waiting. He happened to be there, as he happened to have a ball handy if Alexander wanted a game, or water if he was thirsty; not by calculation, but in a constant awareness by which no smallest trifle was missed. Now, when he came down the stairs with a shut mouth and blue lines under his eyes, Hephaistion received some mute signal he understood, and fell into step beside him.

waved a smiling good night to me. She looked a lonely figure standing there, under the high white pillars, and I find that I always think of her like that; lonely against the panoply of wealth, kind and totally unarmed against the world.

The world's full of people grieving for somebody they cared about. It's sheer sentimentality to worry about the ones we don't.

It is not what a poem says with its mouth, it's what a poem does with its eyes.

Extroverts need to know that sitting too close, standing too near, touching when touch is unwanted, or walking into a private room unannounced will drive introverts nuts and drain their energy.