Quotes About Empathy

If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders.

If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly.

Accordingly, the test of "loving your neighbor" is showing compassion for someone you might naturally be inclined to hate or fear or despise—not someone who is your natural ally or blood kin or fellow citizen.

I am ashamed to admit that I believed black people smelled bad and had low moral standards and that good Christian white people only associated with a few "good" colored people—despite the fact that I knew no Negroes firsthand. Isn't that remarkable? Where in the world did I get those strange ideas?

I couldn't not write. Sometimes I ask myself, How do people get through life without writing? I write to calm anxiety, to process pain. Writing to me is reflection.

I have been a full-time fag for the past five years, I realized the other day. Everyone I know is gay, everything I do is gay, all my fantasies are gay, I am what Gus called those people we used to see in discos, bars, baths, all the time—remember? Those people we used to see EVERYWHERE, every time we went out, so that you wanted to call the police and have them arrested?

Because that's what kindness is. It's not doing something for someone else because they can't, but because you can.

It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.

My feelings are spent, my moral rationalizations are empty, and I can't say it's not my problem when I'm pulling and lifting and throwing bodies of people who once only wanted to go about the business of their lives.

My dad was a physician. As a kid, I remember driving around with him on weekends so he could do his rounds at the hospital and talk to patients. We'd spend time in the car talking about what was going on with them, their stories.

My mum, who comes from Goa, wanted us to develop our minds when we were kids, so she used to turn the electricity off at weekends so we couldn't sit watching the telly.

Being the only non-Black was a unique experience. After a few weeks, you're not aware of skin color differences. You see the color; you're not blind, but it doesn't matter. You see the human being first.

Oscar Hammerstein was a surrogate father during all those many days, and weeks and months when I didn't see my own father.

I had called her up a couple of weeks before then, because I had heard this vicious rumour that she did not like the movie. It was very upsetting for me. I am very sensitive to that, because I am portraying her life and did not want her to be unhappy.

We experienced a miscarriage at 13 weeks and then a few years later we lost our son Willem at 30 weeks. I held him in my arms and had to organise his funeral.

Michael and I talk at least every two weeks. He understands why I've done the things I have.

Jackie Kennedy was magnificent in the days and weeks immediately following her husband's assassination. She was especially wonderful to me.

Once I started on 'Frances' I discovered it was literally a bottomless well. It devastated me to maintain that for eighteen weeks, to be immersed in this state of rage for twelve to eighteen hours a day. It spilled all over, into other areas of my life.

Don't start writing your novel until you know your characters very, very well. What they'd do if they saw somebody shoplifting. What they were like at school. What shoes they wear. Spend days - weeks, months - being them until they thicken up and start to breathe.

I met Drew Barrymore, and she was so cool. She told me, 'I know I just had my baby three weeks ago, and that's why I'm emotional, but I cried when you performed.' And then she pulled out a tissue and said, 'Look, I was sobbing.'

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

Any beast can cry over the misfortunes of its own child. It takes a mensch to weep for others' children.

We should weep for men at their birth, not at their death.

The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.