Quotes About Empathy

Here, I pause to offer a prayer for my gentle reader: May you never, ever, have to get a divorce in New York.

My truth is not a condemnation of yours.

No outbreak of jealousy or malice has ever been welcomed in God's eyes." Beatrix continued, "nor shall such an outbreak ever be welcomed in the eyes of your family. If you have sentiments within you that are unpleasant or uncharitable, let them fall stillborn to the ground.

I've realized that one of the most unkind things I can do to somebody is to put them on a pedestal because very soon, inevitably, they're going to do something that's going to knock them off it, and then I'm going to have a lot of trouble with that because I really needed you to be something else. And that's inhumane." –Elizabeth Gilbert

to be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow- this is human offering that can be border on miraculous

Never take anything for granted & treat others the way you want to be treated

We all of us need to be toppled off the throne of self, my dear, he said. Perched up there the tears of others are never upon our own cheek.

Most of us tend to belittle all suffering except our own, said Mary. I think it's fear. We don't want to come too near in case we're sucked in and have to share it.

this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.

It got worse still as time went on because people did not sympathize with you any more. They couldn't do enough for you at first, and that helped, and then they got bored with your troubles. But your troubles went on just the same and you had to bear them alone.

Those who have deeply suffered in some particular way are welded together in an understanding incomprehensible to those who have not so suffered.

To see your mother as a baby, that is what it's like, and therefore heartbreaking and wretched, and therefore also cleansing in some crooked way, the self wiped clean of static, pared down to its essentials, the human core that bore you, which was borne.

Love the sojourner for you were once sojourners in the land of Egypt.

Because I happen to think that being sensitive is the most valuable form of intelligence there is.

When you're of a different race people distrust you because they are afraid. If you don't give them reason to dislike you, it becomes their problem, not yours.

If I've never stepped outside the role that's been assigned to me since birth, I've never tested myself. I've been too afraid of others' opinions, I think. I've been a coward. If that woman needs me, why not help her - for her... and for me?

Still, it was a sad state of the world that people judged others not by the best that they could be but by the worst thought in their own hearts.

But…" Both men looked over inquiringly when Maximus spoke. "But I never asked you to help me with Noakes." Makepeace nodded, his expression grave. "You didn't have to." "You never had to," St. John concurred.

He doesn't like making others uncomfortable." -Helen to Sophia about Alistair

Why? she asked urgently. Why me? Because, he murmured, you draw me. Because you are kind but not soft. Because you cradle a desperate secret to your bosom, like a viper in your arms, and don't let go of it even as it gnaws on your very flesh. I want to pry that viper from your arms. To take that pain within myself and make it mine.

It was the sad state of the world that people judged others not by the best that they could be but by the worst thought in their own hearts

When at last they rose by some unspoken male accord, she noticed with a pang that Indio came only to Caliban's waist. The man towered over the boy, so much taller and broader that his gentleness was all the more moving as a result. They walked to the pond's bank and Indio launched his boat. Caliban restrained Daffodil from jumping in after. This man was not at all like Kitty's husband. Not at

There's something about her," Caire said in a low voice. "She cares for everyone about her, yet neglects herself. I want to be the one who cares for her.

It was a strange thing, this feeling of empathy. He'd never experienced it before. He realized that what hurt this woman hurt him as well, that what made her bleed caused a hemorrhage of pain within his soul.