Quotes about Empathy
the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.
— Charles Dickens
They never show mercy because mercy was never shown to them
— Charles Dickens
The supposed Evremonde descends, and the seamstress is lifted out next after him. He has not relinquished her patient hand in getting out, but still holds it as he promised. He gently places her with her back to the crashing engine that constantly whirrs up and falls, and she looks into his face and thanks him.
— Charles Dickens
Come out into the world about you, be it either wide or limited. Sympathize, not in thought only, but in action, with all about you. Make yourself known and felt for something that would be loved and missed, in twenty thousand little ways, if you were to die; then your life will be a happy one, believe me.
— Charles Dickens
I wish some well-fed philosopher, whose meat and drink turn to gall within him; whose blood is ice, whose heart is iron; could have seen Oliver Twist clutching at the dainty viands that the dog had neglected. I wish he could have witnessed the horrible avidity with which Oliver tore the bits asunder with all the ferocity of famine. There is only one thing I should like better; and that would be to see the Philosopher making the same sort of meal himself, with the same relish.
— Charles Dickens
Whatsume'er the failings on his part, Remember reader he were that good in his hart.
— Charles Dickens
Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred Bard who had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, Teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man's neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled!
— Charles Dickens
Her father, cheering her, showed a compassionate superiority to this woman's weakness, which was wonderful to see.
— Charles Dickens
Who am I, for God's sake, that I should be kind!
— Charles Dickens
Carton left him there; but lingered after a little distance, and turned back to the gate again when it was shut, and touched it. He had heard of her going to the prison every day. 'She came out here,' he said, looking about him, 'turned this way, must have trod on these stones often. Let me follow in her footsteps.
— Charles Dickens
I verily believe that her not remembering and not minding in the least, made me cry again, inwardly - and that is the sharpest crying of all
— Charles Dickens
In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. He may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stance as many hands high according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.
— Charles Dickens