5 Kurt Vonnegut Quotes on Empathy

Kurt Vonnegut quotes on empathy

41. You go up to a man, and you say, 'How are things going, Joe?' and he says, 'Oh fine, fine - couldn't be better.' And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn't be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody's having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much.

75. Wars would be a lot better, I think, if guys would say to themselves sometimes 'Jesus - I'm not going to do that to the enemy. That's too much.'

122. You can't help it but you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed - so you were a good man just the same.

161. Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone.'

180. Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.