Quotes About Empathy

You can't make someone feel good about themselves until you feel good about yourself.

it is only when you have mastered the art of loving yourself that you can truly love others. it's only when you have opened your own heart that you can touch the hearts of others. when you feel centered and alive, you are in much better position to be a better person.

Life hands us lessons, and my lesson was to face this awful situation and grow from it, Blossom. I thought love had been taken away from me, but it hadn't been. I was still the same person who had loved Mr. Feingold and my old aunts and my cousins and my friends. I still ahd love inside of me, and I still had it to give.

Weep! Weep!" calls a toad from the water's edge. And I do. If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.

There are some aches witch hazel can't assuage. For those, we need each other.

Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion---until we teach them not to.

It is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.

For what good is knowing, unless it is coupled with caring? Science can give us knowing, but caring comes from someplace else.

When we tell them that the tree is not a who but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation...If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice.

To be heard, you must speak the language of the one you want to listen.

use your gifts and dreams for good

Women have a natural bond with water, because we are both life bearers

The question of goldenrod and aster was of course just emblematic of what I really wanted to know. It was an architecture of relationships, of connections that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together. And I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.

There are some aches witch hazel can't assuage; for those, we need each other. My mother and Hazel Barnett, unlikely sisters, I suppose, learned well from the plants they both loved - they made a balm for loneliness together, a strengthening tea for the pain of longing.

We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species.

We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. But imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us.

toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion—until we teach them not to.

Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion -- until we teach them not to. We quickly retrain them and make them forget. When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation.

when three hundred voices all joined together, all those voices, in measured cadence, from the gray-haired school nurse's to the kindergarteners', made me feel part of something. It was as if for a moment our minds were one.

made me feel part of something. It was as if for a moment our minds were one.

how their friendship was medicine for each other.

Across the market stalls and blankets, warmth and compassion were changing hands.

It would be so satisfying to provide for the well-being of others— like being a mother again, like being needed.

We tend to respond to nature as a part of ourselves, not a stranger or alien available for exploitation.