Quotes About Empathy

Overlook and forgive the weaknesses of the generous people because if they fall down, God will help them.

Mutilate not even a rabid dog.

The best deed of a great man is to forgive and forget.

Not every man with a heart is understanding, nor every man with an ear a listener, and nor every man with eyes able to see.

always looking off to the side. But that's good too. It's good, to be seen past, as if you're not the only one, as if everything isn't happening just to you. Because you're not. And it isn't.

A great many men don't understand a woman full of joy, even more don't understand paintings full of joy by a woman.

Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We've got to come up with a better answer.

With a bit of help and a bit of luck, we get to be more than the one thing or the nothing that history'd have us be. We're only here by the grace and the work of others. I am anyway. Here's to those others who helped, that's my prayer when I go to my bed, and may I be such an other to a good many myself.

Stop thieving my tragedy

Sometimes, he says, we don't know why people do what they do. But we can only do our best, the best we can do, in response, and try to be as good-humoured as possible while we do it.

The third person is another pair of eyes. The third person is a presentiment of God. ...... a way to tell the story. It's a box for the endless music that's there between people, waiting to be played.

It isn't a good enough answer, that one group of people can be in charge of the destinies of another group of people and choose whether to exclude them or include them. Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We've got to come up with a better answer.

Friends are always pretty, even when they're not.

But love was terribly important. She didn't mean romantic love. Generalized sort of love.

Mark, shaken, realizes he has just made the terrible mistake of not just seeming to be but actually being sincere.

Hope is exactly that, that's all it is, a matter of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we're here for a mere blink of the eyes, that's all.

He had seemed a man with whom the right kind of dialogue would be possible.

It's good, to be seen past, as if you're not the only one, as if everything isn't happening just to you. Because you're not. And it isn't.

One day instead the old woman said kind words to her and gave her an awning on a stick to keep rain off (there has been much rain in purgatorium)

It was kindly meant. But kindly meant was complicated. There were lines you had to draw. There were correct responses. On the one hand there was laugh and say something funny back, on the other there was how dare you talk to me like that. It depended.

it's like the people in the play are living in the same world but separately from each other, like their worlds have somehow become disjointed or broken off each other's worlds. But if they could just step out of themselves, or just hear and see what's happening right next to their ears and eyes, they'd see it's the same play they're all in, the same world, that they're all part of the same story.

The act of saying I forgive you, it's like saying you are less than me and I have the moral or superior upper hand.

Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?

People like feeling. They like to be asked to feel. Feeling is a very powerful thing.