Quotes About Empathy

It is not reason that gives us our moral orientation, it is sensitivity.

Nothing moves an older man more than a confession of inexperience from a younger, particularly if the latter be his social superior.

Les hommes de nature infidèle, si infatués qu'ils paraissent, sont souvent assez modestes en amour, parce qu'ils imaginent les autres d'après eux-mêmes. (Le roi de fer, partie 3, ch. 7, p. 328)

Es error común de los humanos creer que el prójimo concede a su persona tanta importancia como cada uno se da a sí mismo; los demás, a no ser que tengan interés particular en el recuerdo, olvidan rápidamente lo que nos ha ocurrido, y si no lo han olvidado, su recuerdo no tiene la firmeza que imaginamos.

We are all apt to fall into the error of assuming that other people think we are as important as we do ourselves; but unless there is some particular reason for their remembering it, others forget what has happened to us very quickly; and, even if they have not forgotten, their memories attach much less weight to it than we are inclined to believe.

We all of us need assistance. Those who sustain others themselves want to be sustained.

I have never for one instant seen clearly within myself. How then would you have me judge the deeds of others?

We are never the same with others as when we are alone. We are different, even when we are in the dark with them.

It is always a mistake not to close one's eyes, whether to forgive or to look better into oneself.

To learn to love, one must first learn to see.

Be good at the depth of you, and you will discover that those who surround you will be good even to the same depths. Nothing responds more infallibly to the secret cry of goodness than the secret cry of goodness that is near. While you are actively good in the invisible, all those who approach you will unconsciously do things that they could not do by the side of any other man.

Before we can bring happiness to others, we first must be happy ourselves; nor will happiness abide within us unless we confer it on others. If there be a smile upon our lips, those around us will soon smile too; and our happiness will become the truer and deeper as we see that these others are happy. "It is not seemly that I, who, willingly, have brought sorrow to none, should permit myself to be sad," said Marcus Aurelius, in one of his noblest passages.

Niemand is waarlijk mijn vriend, voordat we geleerd hebben in elkanders tegenwoordigheid te zwijgen.

Truly they who know still know nothing if the strength of love be not theirs; for the true sage is not he who sees, but he who, seeing the furthest, has the deepest love for mankind. He who sees without loving is only straining his eyes in the darkness.

We subdue that in others which we have learned to subdue in ourselves. Around the upright man there is drawn a wide circle of peace, within which the arrows of evil soon cease to fall; nor have his fellows the power to inflict moral suffering upon him.

And indeed, if we had only the courage to listen to the simplest, the nearest, most pressing voice of our conscience, and be deaf to all else, it were doubtless our solitary duty to relieve the suffering about us to the greatest extent in our power.

Why not admit that it is not our paramount duty to weep with all those who are weeping, to suffer with all who are sad, to expose our heart to the passer-by for him to caress or stab? Tears and suffering and wounds are helpful to us only when they do not discourage our life.

I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.

We will arrive at the universal not by abandoning our particularity but by turning it into a way of reaching others, by virtue of that mysterious affinity which makes situations mutually understandable.

There is already a kind of presence of the other in me.

Consider an angry or a threatening gesture...I do not perceive the anger or the threat as a psychological fact hidden behind the gesture, I read the anger in the gesture. The gesture does not make me think of anger, it is anger itself...Everything happens as if the other person's intention inhabited my body, or as if my intention inhabited his body...I understand the other person through my body, just as I perceive 'things' through my body.

If we want to both inhabit our body and know it, we must be simultaneously ourselves and another.

The flesh...The wrapping of a body - object around itself...my body standing in front of the upright things, in a circuit with the world, an empathy with the world, with the things, with the animals, with other bodies...The flesh is the originary presentation of the unpresentable as such, the visibility of the invisible...In this arrangement of flesh, then, there appears or emerges a vision...by the arrangement of a hollow, by the irruption of a new field that comes from the interworld.

The body as the power of empathy is already desire, libido, projection - introjection, identification. The esthesiological structure of the human body is thus a libidinal structure, the perception of a mode of desire, a relation of being and not of knowledge...What is the I of desire? It is obviously the body,