Quotes About Empathy

I condemn racism on all levels, whether personal or systemic.

It's a totally different spiel when I talk at Morehouse. But when I'm talking at MIT? At the University of Cincinnati? I'm telling white people, in order to stop systemic racism, you must first befriend, become a colleague of, get to know intimately, put yourself culturally in the framework of someone who doesn't look like you.

Positioning ourselves, physically and psychologically, on the same plane with our subjects can help us avoid what Gardner refers to as "frigidity" in our writing, one of the "faults of soul" he warns against. Frigidity is coldhearted failure to respond on a deep, human level to the characters and events of our story. Sometimes,

Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it's a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.

there are pleasures to be had from books beyond being lightly entertained. There is the pleasure of being challenged; the pleasure of feeling one's range and capacities expanding; the pleasure of entering into an unfamiliar world, and being led into empathy with a consciousness very different from one's own; the pleasure of knowing what others have already thought it worth knowing, and entering a larger conversation. ( The New Yorker , 13 Aug 2014)

If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally," Eliot once wrote. "The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.

Nobody is so weird others can't identify with them.

She's a mystery, a cipher, something nearly extinct these days: a person not controlled by ambition or greed or a crass need for attention, but by a desire to experience life completely and to make life a little easier for the people around her

What a truly remarkable emotion love is," he whispered, his breath fogging the window. Only love, the very thing he'd once believed to be pure myth, could have made him feel the way he had today at the race. He'd been irritated by the way people laughed at her, angered by the condescending way everyone looked and sneered at her. The whispered insults he'd heard had infuriated him, and Wesley's slander had finally hurled him into a rage.

When he was gone, Dr. Larson picked up a scalpel. "Talk to your wolf," he instructed Chickadee. "Tell him you're here. Tell him the things you always tell him. Remind him of life.

Keep all your promises, don't take what doesn't belong to you, and always look after those less fortunate than yourself, and you'll do well in the world.

A real friend is someone who likes you for who you want to be and not for who they want you to be.

Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop being mean.

Who's the real you? The person who did something awful, or the one who's horrified by the awful thing you did? Is one part of you allowed to forgive the other?

Bridge knew why she was here. It's why we're all here, she thought. Call it Mr. Partridge with his black-and-white cookies. Call it Em standing on that stage with her knees shaking but her voice strong. Call it Jamie looking awkward in the doorway of her bedroom after she'd had the mummy nightmare. Call it love.

Isn't that the whole idea?' I asked. 'It's supposed to stop them from being criminals!' She shook her head. 'That's not what I mean. A lot of people make bad mistakes. But being in jail can make them feel like a mistake is all they are. Like they aren't even people anymore.

Em: I'm falling apart. That's what I'm trying to tell you Bridge: You're not falling apart. You're scared. Em: Isn't that the same thing? Bridge: No

Tab's mom said that when people reached out to hurt your feelings, it was because they secretly felt they deserved to be talked to that way. She said that they had 'long, hard roads ahead' and that you should just wish them well.

It was at that moment, standing next to her, that I figured out the truth. The truth was that Mom saw it too: the peeling paint, the cigarette butts on the stairs, everything. It soaked into me like water into sand, fast and heavy-making. But I still couldn't apologise for what I'd said. I wanted to, but I couldn't. I couldn't even smile at her.

You are allowed to make mistakes. And to be forgiven.

It's about the kind of love that doesn't ask you to be anyone but who you are.

When she finally got there, Mom hugged Belle and told her, "I owe you," like I was some repulsive burden instead of the person who had very helpfully unpacked three boxes of green bananas and scoured the refrigerated section for expired dairy items.

Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop being mean. It's like how turning on a light makes you realize how dark the room had gotten. And the way you usually act, the things you would have normally done, are like these ghosts that everyone can see but pretends not to.

Miriam says don't lie down inside a bad feeling if you can help it" - Bea