I think my early challenges prepared me for what I do now. I can empathize because I have been there. I can relate because I know that pain.

Some empathy must be learned and then imagined, by perceiving the suffering of others and translating it into one's own experience of suffering and thereby suffering a little with then. Empathy can be a story you tell yourself about what it must be like to be that other person; but its lack can also arrive from narrative, about why the sufferer deserved it, or why that person or those people have nothing to do with you. Whole societies can be taught to deaden feeling, to dissociate from their marginal and minority members, just as people can and do erase the humanity of those close to them.
Empathy makes you imagine the sensation of the torture, of the hunger, of the loss. You make that person into yourself, you inscribe their suffering on your own body or heart or mind, and then you respond to their suffering as though it were your own. Identification, we say, to mean that I extend solidarity to you, and who and what you identify with builds your own identity. Physical pain defines the physical boundaries of the self but these identifications define a larger self, a map of affections and alliances, and the limits of this psychic self are nothing more or less than the limits of love. Which is to say love enlarges; it annexes affectionately; at its utmost it dissolves all boundaries.

You have to have empathy for folks and say, "I know you gave up all those things. I know what you went through frankly sucked. And the people who are coming along now that you're going to be leading are not going to put up with it, it's not going to work. So I need to have empathy and respect for what you went through, but I've got to tell you, if you want to be successful, you are not going to be successful with those tactics".

I have learned what suffering means. In a way that was impossible, I think I can understand something of the pain black people have come to endure. I know I contributed to that pain, and I can only ask your forgiveness.

Only at quite rare moments have I felt really glad to be alive. I could not but feel with a sympathy full of regret all the pain that I saw around me, not only that of men but that of the whole creation. From this community of suffering I have never tried to withdraw myself. It seemed to me a matter of course that we should all take our share of the burden of pain which lies upon the world.

From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.

When I was doing research on George Ashby, I felt some empathy. There’s something brave about leaving the world you know. If you can make that empathetic journey, you can show a more complicated picture.

Compassion is born from understanding suffering. We all should learn to embrace our own suffering, to listen to it deeply, and to have a deep look into its nature.

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

We all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can alow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with their own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.

It was a was a hard road to come back from, but it definitely taught me perseverance and grit, but also it taught me empathy, which I think I would not have learned otherwise.

It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach.

I've experienced a range of emotions and endured significant pain, but those experiences have helped shape me into the person I am today.

It is through weakness and vulnerability that most of us learn empathy and compassion and discover our soul.