Quotes About Empathy

Beatles. "All you need is love, love. Love is all you need.

In the military, JAG lawyers switch sides. One day a prosecutor, the next day a defense lawyer. Maybe they should make civilian prosecutors do the same thing. Many are plagued with a disease I call emotional scurvy. Instead of lacking vitamin C, they've been shortchanged of empathy.

We try to live and let live, but underneath it, we're left with a smug sense of superiority about ourselves and vague disgust for others who don't measure up.

Getting Steve to open up was a lot like opening a jar of martini olives. It helps if you bang on his lid a few times.

12. When a man and woman are in total sync—thinking each other's thoughts, making each other laugh, bringing each other joy—they've hit the sweet spot, and just being together is better than . . . almost as good as sex.

undeserved guilt is just another form of indulgent self-pity.

You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.

Damn, a mirror can be a lethal weapon, and self-knowledge a poisoned pill. I had been a self-centered and egotistical jock with all the trappings of stunted male adolescence. Back then, I had yet to develop the empathy for others that marks the passage into manhood.

I try to go through life doing the least damage possible. Having fun without hurting anyone, maybe doing a little good along the way, but without taking myself too seriously.

I don't want to be superior to anyone for being afraid. We already have a culture built on that.

In my mind android is a metaphor for people who are physiologically human but behaving in a nonhuman way.

That was the nature of presents. You kept them in the giver's stead. They were a small part of that person to keep.

You can judge a man's true character by the way he treats his fellow animals.

I still believe that love is all you need. I don't know a better message than that.

You can judge a man's true character by the way he treats his fellow animals.

I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird.

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.

Maybe it's wrong-footed trying to fit people into the world, rather than trying to make the world a better place for people. [as quoted in "Brain Gain" by Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 4/27/09 issue]

When I think of how Jesus loved people, the word "cherish" comes to mind. When we cherish someone, we combine looking and compassion—we notice and care for that person. We don't shut him or her out.

If it's true that you have to love yourself before you can love someone else, then I suppose a certain self-regard must've kept me above water during my decade of drowning alone. But I think that in my case it was the other way—that I learned to love myself because someone else finally loved me. Seeing myself whole in another man's eyes, deeper than any mirror, and neither of us looking away because there's so much lost time to make up for.

That is one of the shocking things about a hospital: its leveling of you to your body's weakest link. The Ph.D. in Comp Lit, the years in Paris, the wall of books—you do not wear these badges on your johnny gown. No wonder I was forever giving our resumes to doctors and nurses, as if to beg them to see us for real, see what happy lives we had left at the border, which waited still like a dog on the front stoop.

We are creatures of the cruelties we witness.

Self pity becomes your oxygen. But you learned to breathe it without a gasp. So, nobody even notices you're hurting.

Go without hate, but not without rage. Heal the world.