Quotes About Empathy

What is making contact? It is hard to define, but people do know when they have or have not made contact… Sometimes it seems that humans have lost the art. The range of possibilities for contact open to human beings is extremely large, ranging from conversations that can last hours to something as brief as a pull on a pigtail. However, just a small attempt to make contact with the other person on a regular basis can put a distant relationship back on track.

It is simplistic to advocate that if you stop worrying about your children, they'll automatically have no problems. To be alive is to have problems. But it is certain that, if children don't have their parents' concern about them added to their ordinary difficulties, they will do better. Worrying about a child does not solve the lack of differentiation of self that leads to it.

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

understanding is not the point. Feeling is the point. Understanding and experiencing are not interchangeable. Any theologian understands martyrdom, but only the martyr experiences the fire.

Never neglect the charms of narrative for the human heart.

It is not hard to be popular with any group, whether composed of the most conventional Canadians or of Central European freaks, if one is prepared to talk to people about themselves.

I think a great many marriages would be saved if people would behave toward one another with the same courtesy that they would extend to someone whom they really didn't know as well as a marriage necessarily implies. … It's not very easy to do, but it is surely easier to do than to haggle and nag and fight and bitch and yelp at one another as you hear a lot of married people doing … They seem to feel that the familiarity of affection permits anything, including insult.

they were frightened by the concept of a brain tumor; the idea that anybody could have one; even they. The

Her conception of the role of the medical examiner was to speak for the dead to help the living.

I could hear something so I realized, of course, what he was trying to tell me was first of all, don't be judgmental of anybody else, just listen and pay attention and look for the beauty. And then when you find the beauty, study that and don't bother with the rest of it.53

Why must people be hateful toward anyone who is different? Because we live in a fallen world, my girl. I'm afraid people will continue to find reasons to hate until the day Jesus returns.

We must offer him Christian compassion and understanding. But we must also give him truth. Compassion doesn't mean lying to someone to save their feelings.

Oh, why does compassion weaken us?' It doesn't, really ... Somewhere where it all balances out - don't the philosophers have a name for it, the perfect place, the place where the answers live? - if we could go there, you could see it doesn't. It only looks, a little bit, like it does, from here, like an ant at the foot of an oak tree. He doesn't have a clue that it's a tree; it's the beginning of the wall round the world, to him.

It was too important a matter, this talking to people, and listening to them, to do it lightly or often.

Sungold blew impatiently and began to dig a hole with one foot. She booted his elbow with her toe and he stopped, but after a moment he lowered his head and blew again, harder, and she could feel him shifting his weight, considering if she might let him dig just a small hole.

Little John, watching her standing next to her brother, half-glowering in the old Cecil manner and half-comforted by Robin's words, saw for a moment what it had been like for her as Will's litter sister. Some of what she was good at, and some of what she was bad at, as his pupil, came clear to him in that moment; and something else came clear to him too, but he set it aside so quickly that he allowed himself not to recognize it for what it was.

Stop it. This is me, remember? We've been thrown up by the same puppies.

Although when there were too many people around- which there certainly were today- it was hard even to remember to say thank you: all those people were like drowning.

But he hated to see his people people unhappy--because he was a good king, not because he was a nervous one--

You did not disturb me, said the pegasus. I disturbed myself, that I might speak to you.

Dogs are very comforting when your world has exploded.

I'm your friend, Sunshine," he said. "Everything else is just static on the line.

Little John: I would come too. He might want knocking in a stream to cool his anger. Much: I will come too, to fish him out again, and to reassure him that not all of us have this queer craving for hurling folks in water.

she'd found she couldn't bring herself to kill any of her bees, which was the system all the northern demesnes used, and so had to get them through the winter somehow. She'd been cold that winter herself, after wrapping up her most exposed hives in all the blankets she had.