Quotes about Empathy

He crouched down, and carefully put his finger through the thorns into the round door of the nest. It's almost as if you were feeling inside the live body of the bird, he said... After that, Miriam came to see it everyday. It seemed so close to her. Again, going down the hedge side with the girl, he noticed the celandines, scalloped slashes of gold, on the side of the ditch. I like them, he said, when their petals go flat back with the sunshine. They seem to be pressing themselves at the sun.

She never suffered alone any more: the children suffered with her.

Do you think one can only care once?' she asked. 'Or never. Most women never care, never begin to. They don't know what it means. Nor men either. But when I see a woman as cares, my heart stands still for her.

She's had no love. No! - Well, you must make up to her.

I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right.

So he smiled to himself, for a dangerous phenomenon in the world is a man of narrow belief, who denies the right of his neighbour to be alone.

Why talk about what we want? That is childish. Absurd. Of course, you are interested in what you want. You are eternally interested in it. But no one else is. The rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want.

A good deed, said the prophet Mohammed, is one that brings a smile of joy to the face of another. Why will doing a good deed every day produce such astounding efforts on the doer? Because trying to please others will cause us to stop thinking of ourselves: the very thing that produces worry and fear and melancholia.

Arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way.

If you argue and rankle and contradict, you may achieve a victory sometimes; but it will be an empty victory because you will never get your opponent's good will.

The chronic kicker, even the most violent critic, will frequently soften and be subdued in the presence of a patient, sympathetic listener— a listener who will be silent while the irate fault-finder dilates like a king cobra and spews the poison out of his system.

The world is full of people who are grabbing and self-seeking. So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage.