#empathy

for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#empathy #imagination

If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in. ↗

— Frederick Buechner

#imagination #love #understanding #imagination

seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another. ↗

— Alfred Adler

#empathy #inspirational #passionate #inspirational

Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors. ↗

— Andrew Boyd

#destiny #empathy #pain #universe #love

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

But when he’s cut, I bleed. ↗

— Lois McMaster Bujold

#love #pain #love

• People deserve a break. The stressed and unorganized person who doesn’t have the same priorities as you may be dealing with an autistic child, abusive spouse, fading parents, or cancer. Don’t judge people until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. Give them a break instead. ↗

— Guy Kawasaki

#art

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