Quotes About Empathy

Those who have suffered understand suffering and thereby extend their hand.

What do we do with those that can be accessed and dismissed by a channel changer, that we love no less than a nineteenth-century poet or an admired stranger or a character from the pen of Emily Brontë? What do we do when one of them commingles with our own sense of self, only to be transferred into a finite space within an on-demand portal?

But all the heart break of her heroins had not prepared her for her own.

William Burroughs was simultaneously old and young. Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer. He had a medicine chest he kept locked, but if you were in pain he would open it. He did not like to see his loved ones suffer. If you were infirm he would feed you. He'd appear at your door with a fish wrapped in newsprint and fry it up. He was inaccessible to a girl but I loved him anyway.

Nothing was spoken, it was just mutually understood.

And when we went home he was unnaturally quiet and looked at me as if he wanted to convey all he was feeling without words.

The thing is, it's not uncool to worry about people who seem like they're going on the wrong path. There's nothing cool about being self-destructive.

Mommy, I said aloud, and I thought of her suddenly stopping what she was doing, often in the center of the kitchen, and invoking her own mother whom she lost when she was eleven years old. How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they're gone?

We didn't have to talk then, and that is real friendship. Never uncomfortable with silence, which, in its welcome form, is yet an extension of conversation.

Mein Hemd war etwas zerknittert, aber warum sollte es ihm besser gehen als mir.

The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can't give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work.

Robert trusted in the law of empathy, by which he could, by his will, transfer himself into an object or a work of art, and thus influence the outer world. He did not feel redeemed by the work he did. He did not seek redemption. He sought to see what others did not, the projection of his imagination.

In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer. Robert trusted in the law of empathy, by which he could, by his will, transfer himself into an object or a work of art, and thus influence the outer world.

If I've learned one thing in life, it's not to be so judgmental of other people.

If you're giving love and not receiving it, you're not in the right relationship. If you're receiving it and not giving it than you are taking advantage of the other person.

Good and true friends ask what wrong and how your doing.

Today we see studies on mentally retarded children as monstrous.

Never use hope to hurt someone.

Because a person wants to know that there's a person in the world who would do something if they could." She takes a ragged breath. "Even if they can't.

And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.

If you look into someone's face long enough, eventually you're going to feel that you're looking at yourself.

Real love...is when you get as much pleasure from giving pleasure as you do from receiving it.

but the truly frightening thing was to learn that his mother was no stronger than he was, that the blows of the world hurt her just as much as they hurt him and that except for the fact that she was older, there was no difference between them.

you can't punish someone for a lack of affection, can you? You can't force a child to love you just because he's your child.