Quotes About Empathy

Nora wanted to live in a world where no cruelty existed, but the only worlds she had available to her were worlds with humans in them.

People place so much value on thought, but feeling is as essential. I want to read books that make me laugh and cry and fear and hope and punch the air in triumph. I want a book to hug me or grab me by the scruff of my neck. I don't even mind if it punches me in the gut. Because we are here to feel.

Never say 'pull yourself together' or 'cheer up' unless you're also going to provide detailed, foolproof instructions.

It is strange how close the past is, even when you imagine it to be so far away. Strange how it can just jump out of a sentence and hit you. Strange how every object or word can house a ghost.

It seems impossible to live without hurting people.' 'That's because it is.' 'So why live at all?' 'Well, in fairness, dying hurts people too.

She was a waterfall of apologies. She was drowning in herself.

The hardest question I have ever been asked is: 'How do I stay alive for other people if I have no one?' The answer is that you stay alive for other versions of you. For the people you will meet, yes, sure, but also the people you will be.

Even more staggeringly, depression is a disease so bad that people are killing themselves because of it in a way they do not kill themselves with any other illness. Yet people still don't really think depression really is that bad. If they did, they wouldn't say the things they say.

I drink some water and eat some cereal and then I take Abraham for a walk. He had spent the night eating the arm of the sofa but I don't want to judge him. He has enough issues already.

As civilisation advances, so does indifference.

Don't always try to be cool. The whole universe is cool. It's the warm bits that matter.

Accept feelings and accept that they are just that: feelings.

The weird thing about depression is that, even though you might have more suicidal thoughts, the fear of death remains the same. The only difference is that the pain of life has rapidly increased. So when you hear about someone killing themselves it's important to know that death wasn't any less scary for them. It wasn't a 'choice' in the moral sense. To be moralistic about it is to misunderstand.

That, I suppose, is a price we pay for love: the absorbing of another's pain as if our own.

I'm having a pretty shit time too, if we're doing the Misery Olympics.

I think that basically we are all helping people. All the time. Every time any of us speaks openly about mental health, we are helping normalize an illness that is still handled with protective goggles and safety gloves.

You understand quite completely that the main lesson of history is: humans don't learn from history. The twenty-first century could still turn out to be a bad cover version of the twentieth, but what could we do? People's minds across the world were filling with utopias that could never overlap. It was a recipe for disaster, but, alas, a familiar one. Empathy was waning, as it often had. Peace was made of porcelain, as it always was.

Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.

This was, I realized, a beautiful planet. Maybe it was the most beautiful of all. But beauty creates its own troubles. You look at a waterfall or an ocean or a sunset, and you find yourself wanting to share it with someone.

Forgiving other people is great practice for forgiving yourself when the time comes.

No drug in the universe will make you feel better, at the deepest level, than being kind to other people.

It' hard to explain depression to people who haven't suffered from it. It is like explaining life on Earth to an alien. The reference points just aren't there. You have to resort to metaphors.

Reading isn't important because it helps to get you a job. It's important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you're given. It is how humans merge.

I'm sorry,' I said. 'I'm sorry for everything. For the past and the future.' An apology, said while in dull pain, made me feel as close to human as it was possible to feel. I could almost have written a poem.