Quotes About Empathy

I think believing in something is what matters most. Believe in nature or believe in love or believe that by doing the right thing you can make some difference to another human being or an entire generation.

Your words are so powerful that they can break hearts or fill them with joy. Your words have the ability to comfort a wounded soul or shatter someone's confidence. Your words can act as your messengers of hope or a salve for a broken human being.

Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is -- whether its victim is human or animal -- we cannot expect things to be much better in this world. We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature. By every act that glorifies or even tolerates such moronic delight in killing, we set back the progress of humanity.

And likewise I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people's lives a commentary on my own.

It was perfectly possible to become the prisoner of an artist's vision, I said. Like love, I said, being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again.

It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream of sometimes.

I had found out more, I said, by listening than I had ever thought possible.

I'm not the kind of woman who intuitively understands or sympathises with other women, probably because I don't understand or sympathise all that much with myself.

It is hard to listen while you were talking.

This feeling, that she was the invisible witness to another person's solitude - a kind of ghost - nearly drove her mad for awhile.

Tony has taught me that my habit of wanting to please people by saying that things are better than they are just creates disappointment, mine more than anyone else's. It's a form of control, as so much of generosity is.

He has not asked them one question about themselves: she and Claudia do not exist for him, they are just lines of perspective, ways for him to measure his location in space.

sea lo que sea lo que queramos pensar de nosotros mismos, no somos sino el resultado del trato que hemos recibido por parte de los demás.

We live with an almost superstitious belief in our own differences, she said, and Luis has shown that those differences are not the result of some divine mystery but are merely the consequence of our lack of empathy, which if we had it would enable us to see that in fact we are all the same.

I was working, somehow, to free her from myself, when it appeared that what she needed was to take some of me along with her!

I saw him wandering forlornly in the garden and I went out to find him, since I felt sorry for him by this point and wondered whether I should have done more to look after him. How guilty a man like that can make you feel, Jeffers!

What is the point of self pity if there is was nobody to pity you for it?

what is the point of self pity if there was nobody to pity you for it?

Es dificilísimo que hasta los más bondadosos, los que más te quieren, se tomen tus intereses verdaderamente en serio, porque suelen aconsejarte desde una vida más segura y más aislada que la tuya, en la que escapar no es una realidad, sino algo con lo que de vez en cuando sueñan.

My husband Tony sometimes says to me that I underestimate my own power, and I wonder whether that makes living more hazardous for me than for other people, the way it's dangerous for those who lack the ability to feel pain.

More than anything,' he said, 'people dislike being made to feel stupid, and if you arouse those feelings, you do so at your own cost.

was a funny idea, writing in a language not your own. It almost makes you feel guilty, she said, the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them.

Ele não olhou para mim nem sequer uma vez, pois os momentos em que as pessoas estão demonstrando o próprio poder sobre as outras são aqueles em que têm menos consciência delas.

maybe it's just you become disinhibited. He'd felt this last night, socializing with people in their twenties. He'd forgotten how phsysically shy they were.