Quotes About Empathy

I want you all to think not only of yourselves and your families but everybody else who is alive. We are all equal, and all of us need helping and there is nobody to help mankind except mankind.

There is no room for pride in any man. There is no room for unkindness. There is not room for wit at the expense of others. All men are born the same, and equal. As you saw today, so come Captains and the Kings and the Tinkers and the Tailors. Let the memory direct your dealings with men and women.

I went to bed, full, happy, and caring nothing for all the hurt of all the Englished Welshmen that ever festered upon a proud land.

You can get used to horror, he thought. When it has lost immediacy and is no longer pungent and has become a steady diet. When it has degraded to a chain of mind-numbing events. ("Lover When You're Near Me")

It was not my pain but Ann's. She was crying, frightened. Because I was hurt. She was afraid for me. I felt her anguish. She was suffering terribly. I tried to will away the shadows but I couldn't. Tried in vain to speak her name. Don't cry, I thought. I'll be all right. Don't be afraid. I love you, Ann. Where are you?

Send her loving thoughts," he told me. "That's all?" "That's quite a lot, Chris," he said. "Thoughts are very real.

I read because one life isn't enough, and in the pages of a book I can be anybody

I read because one life isn't enough, and in the page of a book I can be anybody.

Gladys took a supper tray upstairs to Mother, who said she could not face anybody anymore that night or maybe ever. Lucille was a worse case. She stalked through all the rooms staring up at the ceilings like she was planning to take her cue from Captain Campbell and hang herself from a light fixture.

There are four good things worth practicing. Being kind toward everything alive. Staying level and steady. Feeling happy for any creature anywhere that is happy. And remembering that any suffering is also yours.

CONTROL KILLS CONNECTION HEALS

She takes his shaking hand in the dark. It feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground. There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.

It seemed to me that half of life's problems would be solved if one of us had a vagina.

The Greeks had a word, xenia—guest friendship—a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be God.

every boy carries a variation on hanging himself in the backyard branches in the rain. At least the one I saw did. I love nobody. I feel I am on the verge of loving everybody. Then I step outside my room. And he is waiting there.

It came from Buddhism, the Four Immeasurables. "There are four good things worth practicing. Being kind toward everything alive. Staying level and steady. Feeling happy for any creature anywhere that is happy. And remembering that any suffering is also yours.

He tries to read a novel, something about privileged people having trouble getting along with each other in exotic locations. He throws it against the wall. Something has broken in him. His appetite for human self-regard is dead.

I never knew how strong a drug other people are.

What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer...

Thank you, she says, following the ancient formula. For all these gifts that you have given. And still not knowing how to stop, she adds, We're sorry. We didn't know how hard it is for you to grow back.

Who does the tree-hugger really hug, when he hugs a tree?

The proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of "us"—those who are holding rights at the time.

Olivia leans in. Are you okay? His reply sticks in his wide, coprophagic grin.

What we want, finally, from friends, is that they have no more clue than we do.