Quotes About Empathy

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.

suppose that's the way we humans are, thinking too much and listening too little. Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own.

What if you were a teacher but had no voice to speak your knowledge? What if you had no language at all and yet there was something you needed to say? Wouldn't you dance it? Wouldn't you act it out? Wouldn't your every movement tell the story? In time you would be so eloquent that just to gaze upon you would reveal it all. And so it is with these silent green lives.

I suppose that's the way we humans are, thinking too much and listening too little. Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop.

You don't show your love and care by putting what you love behind a fence. You have to be involved.

Yes, I have learned the names of all the bushes, but I have yet to learn their songs.

As I listen to them, I hear another whisper from the swaying stand of cattails, from spruce boughs in the wind, a reminder that caring is not abstract. The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack.

Nor did I need anyone's pity, but I would accept it with grace, because I have been well trained. Rudeness was a sign of weakness. Grace stemmed from power, the powere to accept anything and move on.

Nobody likes me," he concluded at the tail end of a ten-minute pity fest. "Can't imagine why," Quinn murmured. I turned my snort of laughter into a fake cough, which was an embarrassingly feeble attempt at subterfuge when you consider the fact that I didn't have any lungs.

If women ran the world we wouldn't have wars, just intense negotiations every 28 days.

For the first time in my life, I realized that a man doesn't need to yell to be heard. A man doesn't have to throw a punch to make a point. And a man who is comfortable in his own skin doesn't need to constantly prove his worth to the world.

Does it matter whether you hate yourself? At least love your eyes that can see, your mind that can hear the music, the thunder of the wings.

I didn't want to cry in front of you." He wiped away the tears with the pad of his thumb. "I want you to cry only in front of me.

We'll make out for a while and you'll feel better.

Don't leave yet," he said, his voice hoarse. "Let me do something. Let me feed you. Hold you. Rub your shoulders. Change your oil. Anything, please.

At some point he realized that he knew how she felt—once you know how much you love someone, no one else would do.

Are you all right to drive without me talking you home?" He laughed a little. "You know what? I can't remember doing this before. Talking to a woman for over an hour on the phone." "You can't possibly expect me to believe that," she said. "I know you've had a million women!" "Not like you, Jilly. I was always looking for women who would take me to bed. It never occurred to me to look for a woman who would take me to heart.

As he looked down at her, his eyes were both warm and curious. "You don't look as tough as that." "I don't know how tough I am--look at me, sick as a pup. But I bet I can match you for stubborn." A sound came out of him. "Holy shit, Ian--was that a laugh?" "A cough," he lied. "You probably got me sick.

Thanks a lot. You could have cut the girl some slack. We haven't had anything pretty to look at around here since Bradley's old golder retriever died died last fall.

But, Marcie had reminded herself, I don't know the weight of anyone else's burdens—only my own. She didn't judge. She didn't feel smart or strong enough to judge.

People tend to treat a miscarriage like a heavy period but it's a death. You lost your baby. You have to take time to grieve.

What we wish other people would do has nothing to do with us. That's not moral fiber, that's being judgmental and unforgiving." "I've never been judgmental or unforgiving a day in my life," Maureen protested. "Know

She reached her fingertips up to the hair at his temples. "You're showing a little gray here. Not much, but a little. I suppose I did that to you." "Probably. But I'm very tough—I can take it." "Oh,

I'm a helpless, recovering introvert