Quotes about Empathy

God does not create other people so we could turn our backs on them.

A man who has suffered more than others, and differently, should live apart. Alone. Outside of any organized existence. He poisons the air. He makes it unfit for breathing. He takes away from joy its spontaneity and its justification. He kills hope and the will to live. He is the incarnation of time that negates present and future, only recognizing the harsh law of memory. He suffers and his contagious suffering calls forth echoes around him.

And what do you take care of? What people throw away, what history rejects, what memory denies. The smile of a starving child, the years of its dying mother, the silent prayers of the condemned man and the cries of his friend: I gather them up and preserve them. In this city, i am memory.

He spoke only of what he had seen. But people not only refused to believe his tales, they refused to listen. Some even insinuated that he only wanted their pity, that he was imagining things. Others flatly said that he had gone mad.

Suffering is given to the living, not to the dead," he said looking right through me. "It is man's duty to make it cease, not to increase it. One hour of suffering less is already a victory over fate.

Could men and women who consider it normal to assist the weak, to heal the sick, to protect small children, and to respect the wisdom of their elders understand what happened there? Would they be able to comprehend how, within that cursed universe, the masters tortured the weak and massacred the children, the sick, and the old?

The lack of hate between executioner and victim, perhaps this is God.

I cannot cure everybody. I cannot help everybody. But to tell the lonely person that I am not far or different from that lonely person, that I am with him or her, that's all I think we can do and we should do.

Every tragedy is unique, just as every human is unique. When a person loses someone dear to her, who am I to say that my tragedy was greater? I have no right. For that person, her tragedy is the greatest in the world—and she is right in thinking so.

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always takes sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

Suffering confers no privileges; it is what one does with suffering that matters.

Let not him who accepts light in an instant despise him who gropes months in shadows.