Empathy Failure Quotes

It is very easy for whites to miss problems that aren’t our own; that’s a function not of being white but of being human.

What do you know of my heart? What do you know of anything but your own suffering?

I think one of the biggest political failures, and the biggest social failures, over the past few years has been the failure of empathy; not being able to look at the other person down the street.

i couldn't speak the language of his feelings

One victim lives in tragedy, another victim stops to stare, and still another walks on by pretending not to see

even those who call themselves 'intimate' know very little about each other - hardly ever know just how a sorrow is felt, and hurt each other by their very attempts at sympathy or consolation. We can bear no hand on our bruises.

So many people witness atrocities and can't take their eyes away from them, but that doesn't mean they're good.

They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.

Fishes do not roar; they cannot express any sound of suffering; and therefore the angler chooses to think they do not suffer, more than it is convenient for him to fancy. Now it is a poor sport that depends for its existence on the want of a voice in the sufferer, and of imagination in the sportsman.

A casual attitude toward human hurt and pain is the surest sign of educational failure.

And we went our separate ways without having understood each other. As in this world nobody understands the other easily.

What if the one I choose to discount is one who has been truly hurt?

Watching the news, there seems to be an empathy failure and miscommunication.

People love that monkey torture.

I guess I feel so tortured most of the time, when I see someone else feeling tortured, I get a little perverse glee out of it.

Every time we tell anybody to cheer up, things might be worse, we run away for fear we might be asked to specify how.

I find it kind of disturbing when people cheer when someone just gets stabbed brutally.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People imagine they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.

It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.

I have been guilty of watching Westerns without acknowledging that Native Americans have gone through the same madness as African Americans. Isn't it extraordinary that sometimes the most offended have not seen others being offended?

Bind up their wounds - but look the other way.

I got an email from my ex, telling me that she has AIDS. I didn't know how to comfort her, so I just wrote back I know.

There's nothing that makes me laugh more than being in the situation where you're not supposed to laugh. Funerals. People crying. Breaking down. Telling you their life. I'm the worst. I'm the worst at that.