Quotes About Empathy

Those who wake at this hour feel a lonely separation from everyone but night birds and ghost crabs, never imagining the legion of kindred souls scattered in the darkness, who stare at ceilings and pace floors and look out windows and covet and worry and mourn.

Our high school suffered a huge loss of life. But as awful as the tsunami was, good things actually came of it. We learned that out there on the ocean, there's no such thing as popular kids and unpopular kids. We were all equal and all valuable.

And I know that when you get hurt, your first instinct is to run. But I also realized something else. No one has ever followed you when you did run. But I'm going to follow, and I'm going to keep following until you realize that you can trust me. I'm not going to let you run away from something that could be so great. That is so great. Marty, I love you. - Nate

But she'd seen beyond his indifferent mask. She'd realized he was hiding his pain - she understood, because she hid her own. Not behind sullen ennui but by trying to stay quiet, unnoticed. Invisible.

You are only able to love in the first place if you love yourself, if you believe in yourself, if you know yourself. Only then can you approach the other.… Love can only come if you are clear about who you are.

Hatred is not a crime.

to get in on both sides, and there's space for a

One learns from girlhood to fear the competitive energy, the ambient fury and resentment that can be aimed at powerful females. And yet at the same time, women often want or need power. The goal, then, is to take power in a way that navigates that rage or resentment; it is a little like trying to feed a dragon without getting burned.

As time goes on, I find myself caring less about fitting in, and more about nurturing those relationships that fit who I truly am.

The writer's special talent is to empathize with people and imagine their lives. We know them as we write them.

I am reminded of the importance of small kindnesses.

Some part of me instinctively reached out, and in an odd way understood this pain, never imagining that I would someday look in the mirror and see their sadness and insanity in my own eyes.

I avoided situations that might otherwise trip or jangle my hypersensitive wiring, and I learned to pretend I was paying attention or following a logical point when my mind qas off chasing rabbits in a thousand directions.

It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. "If

Patient reluctant to be with people when depressed because she feels her depression is such an intolerable burden on others";

There is no easy way to tell other people that you have manic-depressive illness; if there is, I haven't found it.

It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. "If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters Ã¢â'¬Â¦ I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.

Others would say to me, It is only temporary, it will pass, you will get over it, but of course they had no idea how I felt, although they were certain that they did. Over and over and over I would say to myself, If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?

It is not an illness that lends itself to easy empathy. Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rather than as being willful, angry, irrational, or simply tiresome.

It was one of those still, clear moments when you realize that you haven't understood anything at all, that you have had no real comprehension of the other person's world.

Now and again she would break in with "Yes, yes, that's very interesting," "Of course you can," or "Had you thought of …?" Never, but never, was there an "I don't think that's very practical" or "Why don't you just wait and see how it goes?

He was low-key, I was intense; things that cut me to the quick he was able to sail by with scarcely a notice; he was slow to anger, I quick; the world registered gently upon him, sometimes not at all, whereas I was fast to feel both pleasure and pain.

But, as I well knew, an understanding at an abstract level does not necessarily translate into an understanding at a day-to-day level. I have become fundamentally and deeply skeptical that anyone who does not have this illness can truly understand it.

Two other patients were waiting for their doctors, which only added to my sense of indignity and embarrassment at finding myself with the roles reversed--character building, no doubt, but I was beginning to tire or all the opportunities to build character at the expense of peace, predictability, and a normal life.