Quotes About Empathy

No debes pensar que una chica sabe tan poco como imaginan sus padres. Una oye, una se da cuenta..., una tiene sus propios sentimientos e ideas.

Don't judge us too harshly—or not, at least, till you have taken the trouble to learn our point of view. You consider the individual—we think only of the family.

I believe it IS a vice, almost, to read such a book as the 'Letters,'" said Mrs. Touchett. "It's the woman's soul, absolutely torn up by the roots — her whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently didn't care; who couldn't have cared. I don't mean to read another line; it's too much like listening at a keyhole.

A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.

By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little.

It is the duty of those who claim to rule over others not to provoke them beyond the necessity of the case, nor to leave stings in their minds which must long rankle even when the appearance of tranquillity is restored.

More observe the characters of men than the order of things: to the one we are formed by Nature, and by that sympathy from which we are so strongly led to take a part in the passions and manners of our fellow-men; the other is, as it were, foreign and extrinsical.

The true lawgiver ought to have an heart full of sensibility. He ought to love and respect his kind, and to fear himself.

We are not made at once to pity the oppressor and the oppressed.

The reason that he knew so much about everything, I found, was that wherever he went he got right in with the people 

There did I finde mine onely faithfull frend In heauy plight and sad perplexitie; Whereof I sorie, yet my selfe did bend, Him to recomfort with my companie.

Je rêvais continuellement, durant mon adolescence au pensionnat, d'un adulte (mon prof de gym, l'un des peintres de l'école d'art où nous allions prendre des cours - qui s'occuperait de moi, devinerait mes pensées, anticiperait mes besoins (car je ne les aurais jamais exprimés et lui, s'il m'aimait, serait capable de lire en moi).

About mistakes it's funny. You've got to make your own; and not only that, if you try to keep people from making theirs, they get mad.

He sat looking down at his hands--his fine strong unscarred hands. Suddenly and unreasonably he thought of another pair of hands--his mother's--with the knuckles enlarged, the skin broken--expressive--her life written on them. Scars. She had them.

I would not leave a mother alone in her plight. They described how she had kept the news of my brother's death from our ailing father and on the evening that he was brought home, chapel bells rang out and kept ringing in honor of him, his valor, and my father kept asking if it was a bishop or something that was visiting the parish, not knowing that it was his own son.

He never studied, not a paper, not a textbook . . . the books he reads are the people that come to him

is the unseen guest at every table, the silent listener to every conversation"—her mother thereby inferring that she too would be the unseen guest and the silent listener to every conversation.

Silage making is more practical than saving hay. When you watch an animal die you think how sad it must be to see a human die. My best days I have seen out.

Quite unselfconsciously she ran her hands along her neck, all along the sides and then to the back to feel the stiffnesses, and though she had not asked me I felt without the words that she wished me to massage her and I did, searching out the knots and the crick, then along the nape, under her swallow, holding the bowl of her head in my hands, entreating her to let go, to let go of all her troubles

pouring her troubles out in order for her daughter to know the deep things, the wounds she had to bear:

who tolerates, which is intolerable; who is kind, which is cruel; who understands, which is beyond comprehension...

stepped into the witness box to be examined. The defense wanted jurors who empathized with Muybridge—a married man who had a runaway wife, on the one hand, and a man who confronted a sexual rival, on the other.

Remember that, lad, if you never remember anything else. We all touch each other's lives, for better or for worse. So say the things you have to say to people while you still have the chance.

All of our time, energy, and money go into keeping people away from us, into building up walls. What if we didn't do that? What if we became part of the world around us? What if we used all of that time, energy, and money for something else? For a greater good? We would no longer be people who were only worth a trash bag full of ransom money. We would be people who were worth something real.