"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."
— Henri J.M. Nouwen (The Road to Daybreak: A Spiritual Journey)

"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

"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 (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"None of us can choose where we shall love..."
— Susan Kay (Phantom)

"Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?"
— Henry David Thoreau

"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 (Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized)

"Look. See. Think. Understand. Feel. REACT!"
— ArtReaction.org

"It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

"It's the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else's pain."
— Pat Barker

"A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination."
— Percy Bysshe Shelley

"The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction)

"I think I'm an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist. "
— Susan Sarandon

"Humans have long since possessed the tools for crafting a better world. Where love, compassion, altruism and justice have failed, genetic manipulation will not succeed."
— Gina Maranto (QUEST FOR PERFECTION: The Drive to Breed Better Human Beings)

"All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?"
— Milan Kundera (The Art of the Novel)

""As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitutde, but compassion holding its breath."

h/t to wordsmith.org"
— Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)

"I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways...It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decint human being."
— John Connolly (The Book of Lost Things)

"As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves."
— Martha C. Nussbaum

"As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.
h/t wordsmith.org"
— Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)

"
"Humani nihil a se alineum putat."
(He deems nothing human alien to him.)"
— Terrence , De Quincey

"I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy...that makes you unkind."
— Sue Miller (While I Was Gone)

"My knowledge of myself is direct, synthetic, from within outwards; my knowledge of other persons is indirect, analytical, from outside inwards. My knowledge of myself starts at the core; that of others at the crust."
— Salvador de Madariaga (Essays with a Purpose)

"It is not learning we need at all. Individuals need learning but the culture needs something else, the pulse of light on the sea, the warm urge of huddling together to keep out the cold. We need empathy, we need the eyes that still can weep."
— Lydia Millet (Oh Pure and Radiant Heart)

"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," Origins of Story, eds. Barbara Harrison & Grego

"Whenever I see an old lady slip and fall on a wet sidewalk, my first instinct is to laugh. But then I think: what if I was an ant and she fell on me? Then it wouldn't seem quite so funny. "
— Jack Handey