Quotes about Empathy

One learns people through the heart, not through the eyes or the intellect.

I said it was a brutal thing. No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not deserved it.

Among the prisoners were a number of priests, and Joan took these under her protection and saved their lives. It was urged that they were most probably combatants in disguise, but she said: 'As to that, how can any tell? They wear the livery of God, and if even one of these wears it rightfully, surely it were better that all the guilty should escape than that we have upon our hands the blood of that innocent man. I will lodge them where I lodge, and feed them, and sent them away in safety.

Poor little creatures! she said. What can a person's heart be made of that can pity a Christian's child and yet can't pity a devil's child, that a thousand times more needs it!

They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.

he's my own dead sister's boy, poor thing, and I ain't got the heart to lash him, somehow. Every time I let him off, my conscience does hurt me so, and every time I hit him my old heart most breaks.

When I talk to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and other patient support groups, I take questions at the end. At one talk I was asked, "What's the difference between yourself and someone without mental illness?" At another talk I was asked, "How do you make the voices be not so mean?" I wish I knew.

Don't hate, it's too big a burden to bear.

People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they have not communicated with each other.

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy to a friend.

The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But...the good Samaritan reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.