Quotes About Empathy

Learn to be - gentle with them. Learn that... that gentleness isn't... weakness.

We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

It is very unfair to judge of anybody's conduct, without an intimate knowledge of their situation. Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be'" (E 1:18).

I knew Lynn was a "professional." Like all of the therapists I had seen before her, she was talking to me because she was getting paid to do so. But she was better at pretending that she cared. Her body language and sympathetic "umm' suggested that she really listened. (12)

I'm going through hell," I cried, "and Steve wants me to be thankful he baked a pie." (272)

I was just thinking that I started off OK," Jo said. "There wasn't anything different or wrong with me when I was born. I wasn't inherently bad or freakish." That's right, Jo," Lynn said. "Other people—my mother and father—did things to me that made me feel all wrong about myself," Jo said, another warm wave of new, sure knowledge washing over her.

I had never before considered that people near me might have problems that were not caused by me. I had been created to please people. If the people around me weren't happy, I must be doing something wrong. Lynn helped me see that I lacked the power to make other people feel anything.

She wanted to know about them, not to know them.

If compassion is so good for us, why don't we train our health care providers in compassion so that they can do what they're supposed to do, which is to transform suffering?

Conceptual knowledge is so valued in our world. Yet in many cultures wisdom is equated not with knowledge but with an open heart. And

A world without empathy is a world that is dead to others—and if we are dead to others, we are dead to ourselves. The sharing of another's pain can take us past the narrow canyon of selfish disregard, and even cruelty, and into the larger, more expansive landscape of wisdom and compassion.

In the end, I learned that the practice of Not-Knowing is the very ground of altruism, because it opens us up to a much wider horizon than our preconceptions could ever afford us and can let in connection and tenderness.

the way out of the storm and mud of suffering, the way back to freedom on the high edge of strength and courage, is through the power of compassion.

Listening to the testimony of a dying person or a grieving family member can serve the one speaking; it all depends on how we listen. Maybe we can reflect back the words and feelings in such a way that the speaker can at last really hear what he's said.

if we manipulate others into not sharing so we don't have to hear, so we don't have to listen, or if we react with horror or abandon the scene, we stifle our empathy and rob ourselves of this fundamental virtue of humanity.

The second tenet, bearing witness, calls us to be present with the suffering and joy in the world, as it is, without judgment or any attachment to outcome.

Most of us are shrinking in the face of psycho-social and physical poisons, of the toxins of our world. But compassion actually mobilizes our immunity.

Birdfoot's Grampa The old man must have stopped our car two dozen times to climb out and gather into his hands the small toads blinded by our lights and leaping, live drops of rain. ******** The rain was falling a mist about his white hair and I kept saying you can't save them all accept it, get back in we've got places to go. But the leathery hands full of wet brown life knee deep in the summer roadside grass he just smiled and said they have places to go too.

them," Snow admitted.

How do you prove to a woman that you loved her, when she was certain you didn't?

Poverty doesn't make anyone an inferior being.

The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old.

Being empathic by reaffirming the patients' subjective experiences alone does not distinguish between true empathic resonance and collusion.