1,354 Quotes About Empathy

It reminded Sade of some of the aristocrats, who had treated imprisonment as a bad joke, a mild annoyance that would be made right before any real damage was done. They had kept their dignity right up to the moment when the drum roll stopped and the blade fell. Then, too late, they screamed like children. As I would have done. The thought popped unwelcome into his head.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis; something deeper is wreaking havoc across the land, a mercenary and utilitarian attitude that demonstrates little empathy for people's actual well-being, that dismisses imagination and thought, branding passion for knowledge as irrelevant.

Love seeketh not Itself to pleaseNor for itself hath any care,But for another gives its easeAnd builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.'So sung a little Clod of ClayTrodden with the cattle's feet,But a Pebble of the brookWarbled out these metres meet:'Love seeketh only Self to please,To bind another to Its delight,Joys in another's loss of ease,And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite.

Life is paradoxical, but it is enough for me. Ridiculous conflicts and inconsistencies admittedly congeal into what I term the self. Personal growth commences by honing in on the troubling personal issues. I am my only enemy. A radiant soul strives for self-enrichment by passionately pursuing the serious tasks and delights of living including expressing empathy for other people. I will explore the world and attempt to eliminate the perversions of my own egocentric being.

One thing about the om meditation is certain: It is a universal sound that is representative of the unity that’s needed to empathize with those around us.

In my judgment, the woman is the equal of the man. She has all the rights I have and one more, and that is the right to be protected. That is my doctrine. You are married; try and make the woman you love happy. Whoever marries simply for himself will make a mistake; but whoever loves a woman so well that he says 'I will make her happy,' makes no mistake. And so with the woman who says, 'I will make him happy.' There is only one way to be happy, and that is to make somebody else so.

How could I castrate my mind--neuter it!--and build up a resistance to know what was mine from what was everyone else's, and finally be in the world in my own way? That endless capacity for empathy--which you have to really kill in order to act freely, to know your own desires!

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