Daphne du Maurier Quotes

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

I don't want someone else to go through and live through the life that I have had to live through in terms of the challenges that I face.

Well, I was a big fan of the book and therein a huge fan of the girl Precious. And so I felt like I knew this girl. I felt like I'd grown up alongside her. I felt like she was in my family. She was my friend and she was like people I didn't want to be friends with.

The adage is true: Walk a mile in my shoes - or drive a mile in my car. There is nothing quite like sitting in the seat yourself.

I can relate when people are going through a tough time.

The delicate and infirm go for sympathy, not to the well and buoyant, but to those who have suffered like themselves.

but you could also look at it the other way. Like you’re saying no matter how bad things are for you, I can still relate.

The neighborhoods I grew up in were poor and full of drug users. I don't think you have to look that hard to find those kinds of lives. But I also don't think you have to have experienced it really close to be able to empathize.

It's very hard to feel the difficulties that the military goes through. It's very hard to feel the difficulties of military families, unless you're in that environment. And sometimes you have to force yourself to try and put yourself in other people's sort of shoes and environment to get the sense of that.

It's hard to get people to empathize with the poor. You can get some people to sympathize with the poor, but to empathize is actually very hard, because most people are not poor. I realized that scarcity gives you a thread.

The character is close to me, except that I haven't lived through those situations, so it's not completely me.

It is an easy thing for one whose foot is on the outside of calamity to give advice and to rebuke the sufferer.

I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.

I can't write about your pain; I only know my own.

I traffic in empathy. I try to be vulnerable with people so they can be vulnerable back. I've always been searching for empathy in other people. It's when I feel most not alone.

I learned compassion from being discriminated against. Everything bad that's ever happened to me has taught me compassion.

I can tell you and promise you that I've had struggles in my life. And I would love to have people understand that Mitt and I have compassion for people that are struggling.

Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend.

Let no one underestimate the need of pity. We live in a stony universe whose hard, brilliant forces rage fiercely.

It is easier to speak to those who have had similar experiences than to those who are as yet ignorant.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested. Even the real monsters have to have a spark of something you can relate to.

None knows the weight of another's burden.