#empathy

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it. ↗

— Harper Lee

#life

To perceive is to suffer. ↗

— Aristotle

#life #suffer #understanding #life

...It also taught me that while cruelty can be fun for a few moments, compassion has a much longer shelf life. ↗

— Doreen Orion

#cruelty #empathy #teasing #life

Children who find a single important life in the ordinary, unimportant, and unheroic are less likely to succumb to the human fallacy of us versus them. ↗

— Betty Levin Betty Levin ("Polar Bears and Lemmings

#life

When my sister was released from the mental hospital, she came to live with me in the tilting and crumbling one-bedroom house I'd bought with the small amount of money I inherited when our parents died. She arrived one afternoon unannounced in a taxi. She must have known instinctively that I'd take her in. I don't know how or why they released her. Probably due to overcrowding, and they had her scratch her name on a form then pushed her out the door. Or maybe she just slipped away when no one was looking (who'd notice in a place like that?)--she never did tell me and I didn't ask her. I was so happy to have her with me again that the last thing I wanted to do was break the spell by letting reality intrude. Ever since they'd dragged her away weeping with laughter and reaching out for me with our parents' blood still coating her hands with shiny red gloves, I'd felt amputated, like they'd pulled her kicking and screaming and insane out of my guts. ↗

— Michael Gira

#money

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive. ↗

— James Baldwin

#empathy #pain #reading #people

I learn from my own daughter that you don’t have to be awake to cry. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#empathy #pity #sisters

I did not know how to reach him, how to catch up with him... The land of tears is so mysterious. ↗

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

#empathy #sadness #sympathy #comfort

Close both eyes see with the other one. Then we are no longer saddled by the burden of our persistent judgments our ceaseless withholding our constant exclusion. Our sphere has widened and we find ourselves quite unexpectedly in a new expansive location in a place of endless acceptance and infinite love. ↗

— Gregory Boyle

#compassion #empathy #unconditional-love #love

It’s like when you’re excited about a girl and you see a couple holding hands, and you feel so happy for them. And other times you see the same couple, and they make you so mad. And all you want is to feel happy for them because you know that if you do, then it means you’re happy, too. ↗

— Stephen Chbosky

#yearning #madness