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Empathy Quotes


"Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again."


"We can't help everyone, but everyone can help someone."


"She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression."


"Any man filled with empathy is capable of gaining valuable insights on the human condition through the suffering of others. You do not need to suffer to know suffering, but you need empathy first to identify and feel the suffering of others around you."



"When we stake a claim to the needs and wants of our life, we may easily fail to live up to the standards of others. Empathy and connectedness, however, might bridge the gap, by stirring our consciousness of the sensitive queries and by assessing the intricate framework of our surroundings with their countless, prickly nitty-gritties. ['Absence of Desire']"


"But it's hard to explain, Mitch. Now that I'm suffering, I feel closer to people who suffer than I ever did before. The other night, on TV, I saw people in Bosnia running across the street, getting fired upon, killed, innocent victims... and I just started to cry. I feel their anguish as if it were my own. I don't know any of these people. But--how can I put this?--I'm almost... drawn to them."


"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."


"There's nothing wrong or evil about having a bad day. There's everything wrong with making others have to have it... with you."


"It's not mind-reading,' she said. 'Not even an empathy link. Just - a temporary wave of exhaustion. Primal emotions. Your pain washes over me. I take on some of your burden.'Nico's expression became guarded. He twisted the silver skull ring on his finger, the same way Reyna did with her silver ring when she was thinking. Sharing a habit with the son of Hades made her uneasy."


"But she remembered having told Archer once that you could not measure love on a scale of degrees, and now she understood that it was the same with pain. Pain might escalate upward and, just when you thought you'd reached your limit, begin to spread sideways, and spill out, and touch other people, and mix with their pain. And grow larger, but somehow less oppressive. She had thought herself trapped in a place outside the ordinary feeling lives of people; she had not noticed how many people were trapped in that place with her."


"A woman who can't forgive should never have more than a nodding acquaintance with a man."


"You only know how you feel, and you can only guess how others feel."


"I have a few friends who are confined to wheelchairs for access and mobility. I don't want to always be looking down at them while they are looking up at me. To enjoy a meaningful conversation, I'm quick to kneel beside them or pull up a chair to talk at the same height. Begin to recognize the orientation of other people and align yourself with their body position and physical needs so that you may connect on a more balanced and effective level."


"Indeed, when I came to Italy, I expected to encounter a certain amount of resentment, but have received instead empathy from most Italians. In any reference to George Bush, people only nod to Berlusconi, saying","We understand how it is - we have one, too."


"Don't judge someone's choices without first knowing their reason."


"Feel pity for the person who judged you rudely. For they are selfish in their judgment, trying to make their life feel just a little bit better. It was never about you it was all about them."


"Embrace love and compassion with all your spirit. Understand that they never hurt or offend, they just heal and empower."



"When someone is crying, of course, the noble thing to do is to comfort them. But if someone is trying to hide their tears, it may also be noble to pretend you do not notice them."


"Please," he says. "I'm begging you to stop."I still. "I can't stomach your pain," he says. "I can feel it so strongly and it's making me crazy- please," he says to me. "Don't be sad. Or hurt. Or guilty. You've done nothing wrong." "I'm sorry-""Don't be sorry, either," he says. "God, the only reason I'm not going to kill Kent for this is because I know it would only upset you more."


"Mirroring provides social cues through body language and behavior which enable us to develop more empathy and understanding for others."



"Do not judge. You don't know what storm i've asked her to walk through."


"You never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them."


"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."


"Feel pity for those with insecurities that rest heavy on their shoulders. They'll take every opportunity to negativity judge others. They speak with a sadness in their voice searching for something, anything to make their life feel just a little bit better."


"How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that is moves me to action?"


"When someone is suffering, there is a deep, visceral reaction in the core of our being, a flood of empathy and a frightfully desperate compulsion to give aid."


"Everyone is doing the best they can with what they know, and we are all here to learn and grow."


"I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person."


"It's just that you're about to do something out of the ordinary. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. But don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality."


"If writing novels - and reading them - have any redeeming social value, it's probably that they force you to imagine what it's like to be somebody else. Which increasingly is something we all need to know."


"Still, this was on the order of a minor miracle, running across someone to whom you can express your feeling so clearly, so completely. Most people go their entire lives without meeting a person like that. It would have been mistake to label this "love". It was more like total empathy."


"If you see a person who is suffering from misery and sadness, wash it away with your compassion and kindness."


"I had a dream about you last night. You set a timer on in the bathroom to prove how long it takes me to get ready. So I shaved your legs, made up your face and gave you lashes. An hour later you thanked God for not making you a woman."
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