Quotes About Empathy

Perils of solitude #1: People talk to you. I'd rather listen.

Never try directly to diminish or minimize something which is important to another person. By making a direct challenge to a crucial criterion you are more likely to strengthen it than to diminish it. Your best strategy is to begin by accepting

Never try directly to diminish or minimize something which is important to another person. By making a direct challenge to a crucial criterion you are more likely to strengthen it than to diminish it. Your best strategy is to begin by accepting that the criterion is legitimately important.

Would we ever learn to get along with each other?

That you love her as you love yourself. You recognize that she has good and bad points, just like each of us does. And that your love for her has to be equal to your love for yourself. You don't owe it to her to turn your whole life upside down to take care of her—just to make sure that she's safe, and well-cared for, that she has a roof over her head, food in her belly, and that she knows you love her.

Vann had a practiced eye for loneliness. He walked over to her and said that she was pretty and complimented her on her clothes.

Take care of him. And make him feel important. And if you can do that, you'll have a happy and wonderful marriage. Like two out of every ten couples.

One of benefit of fiction: it puts your mind off your reality when your reality is off-putting.

Intimacy is sharing your reality with someone else and knowing you're safe, and them being able to share their reality with you and also be safe.

Don't let it bring you down. It's only castles burning, find someone who's turning, and you will come around.

Though we rush ahead to save our time, we are only what we feel

We Americans pride ourselves on our freedom to speak, to say what we believe. But of what use is it to speak if only those who already agree with us listen? A first step toward the abolition of war is learning to listen with respect and sympathy.

But Amina couldn't stand to look. It wasn't that George was old but that he felt sorry for himself that drove her crazy. If her father was Thunder, then George was Smoke—and how could you argue with someone who began to disappear as soon as you opened your mouth?

it was something harder to describe than that. We were on each other's side in a way that felt permanent, and so it hurt more than it might have otherwise, when she decided to shut me out.

What we should see is that there is none among us with nothing to give, and that giving is our purpose.

I now know that my pain is not more sacred, my suffering is not more noble, and the injustice I endure is not more ill-deserved than someone else's.

Sympathy toward me would demand self examination and the questioning of their values, with the discomfort that brings. Their hearts were not large enough to withstand that kind of scrutiny.

What are friends for, if not to help bear our sins?

It is only after one is in trouble that one realizes how little sympathy and kindness there are in the world.

He had met him before, that certain down-at-heel vet growing stooped from carrying a thirty-five-pound monkey on his back.

Never sleep with someone whose troubles are worse than your own.

If Jesus Christ treated me like you do, I'd drive in the nails myself.

If everyone howled at every injustice, every act of barbarism, every act of unkindness, then we would be taking the first step towards a real humanity.

We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.