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"You can't love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can't be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that's not what I mean). Show me the tyrants who have been great lovers."
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Exlpore more Empathy quotes
"Appreciate youthfulness and empathize with elderly people."
"You didn't get past something like that, you go through it -- and for that reason alone, I understood more about her than she ever would have guessed."
"If you see a person who is suffering from misery and sadness, wash it away with your compassion and kindness."
"Don't just listen to people crying, hear the reasons why they cry."
"If Erik existed and lived life in despair,We wish him to know we are here and we care."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes
"Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't."
"What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies."
"If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details."
"He didn't really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself."
"The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it's giving way to something else."
"(on grief) And you do come out of it, that's true. After a year, after five. But you don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life."
"Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical."
"Remember the botched brothel-visit in L'Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory."
"Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return."
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