#empathy

If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins. ↗

— Yann Martel

#empathy #imagination

I'm too intense. I feel too much. And when I experience certain sensations, I act. Even if the situation is one I should probably walk away from. But you know what?" She was feeling a little better. "I'm never going to walk away, not from any of it. I can't. I am what I am. I'm intense, just as my fiance said. I feel everything around me, and I'm glad about that. I can't imagine life without the depth, without the magic that accompanies the pain. ↗

— Tara Taylor Quinn

#feelings #experience

...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

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

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

Suffering should not define you as a woman! And just because you’re a man it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t affect you! HELP HER to remove the taboos and the loneliness surrounding this disease; be understanding, show empathy, and don’t accuse her of being sensitive, delicate, or overly dramatic – this is a big opportunity for you guys to show that you care and to be a real man! [Susan Sarandon on endometriosis awareness] ↗

— Susan Sarandon

#endometriosis #feminism #feminist #healthcare #illness

Now do you understand why I'm interested in you? You're a locked door, sweetheart. You give no one a key and you never answer the door when anyone knocks...Ah, but sometimes, sometimes I get a peek through the keyhole and what I find there...It's like glimpsing you as you're stripping. Underneath all of that darkness is something hungry, something desperate, something, oh, so deliciously vulnerable. ↗

— Tricia Owens

#empathy #gay #lust #mm #empathy

Ecstasy is a complex emotion containing elements of joy, fear, terror, triumph, surrender, and empathy. What has replaced our prehistoric understanding of this complex of ecstasy now is the word comfort, a tremendously bloodless notion. Drugs are not comfortable, and anyone who thinks they are comfortable or even escapist should not toy with drugs unless they’re willing to get their noses rubbed in their own stuff. ↗

— Terence McKenna

#drugs #ecstasy #empathy