#empathy

If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit down and rejoice with you, because you’d think I should like to share those good things; but I should like better to share in your trouble and your labour. ↗

— George Eliot

#empathy #friendship #grief #friendship

Do you know what it is?' [Toby] said thoughtfully. 'It's that they haven't had anything really awful happen to them. No wonder they seem so superficial and unfeeling.' It was certainly an interesting theory, ... [but] surely one didn't need to have suffered in order to possess empathy for those who had? All it required was a bit of imagination and a well-stocked library. ↗

— Michelle Cooper

#empathy #reading #suffering #imagination

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

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

— Jodi Picoult

#empathy #pity #sisters

We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer. ↗

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#empathy #kindness #suffering #understanding-others #suffering

How can the intensity of this shame be understood by those who have never experienced it? How can they understand the strength of the motivations produced by the desire to escape from it? ↗

— Didier Eribon

#heterosexuality #homosexuality #shame #motivational

He's really sort of the devil. He's completely emotionally detached. He has no empathy. You find that in psychopaths. It's about power with Voldemort. It's an aphrodisiac for him. Power makes him feel alive. ↗

— Ralph Fiennes

#alive #aphrodisiac #completely #detached #devil

All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart. ↗

— Tahereh Mafi

#empathy #loneliness #love #love