Quotes About Empathy

THEY DO NOT WANT to hear what their children suffer. They've made the telling of the suffering itself taboo.

because part of shaping ourselves is done by others; and a lot of our shaping comes from that one close friend who is something like us. It

If every man in this courtroom had had his penis removed, what then? Would they understand better that that condition is similar to that of all the women in this room? That, even as we sit here, the women are suffering from the unnatural constrictions of flesh their bodies have been whittled and refashioned into?

How wearying to think nobody in this courtroom has ever listened to them. I see each one of them as the little child my father was always so concerned about, screaming her terror eternally into her own ear.

We were the kind of friends, instead, who understood that we were forever on the same side: the side of the poor, the economically, spiritually and politically oppressed, "the wretched of the earth.

When his uncle and his guests finished laughing, they'd seemed lighter, clearer; even their activities appeared to be done more gracefully. It was as if the laughing emptied them, and sharing it placed whatever was laughable and unbearable in its proper perspective.

There is a way that the men speak to women that reminds me too much of Pa. They listen just long enough to issue instructions. They don't even look at women when women are speaking.

What I love best bout her is what she been through, I say. When you look in her eyes you know she been where she been, seen what she seen, did what she did. And now she know.

Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing.

No one is exempt from the possibility of a conscious connection to All That Is. Not the poor. Not the suffering. Not the writer sitting in the open field. This

My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people … it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed … you can't miss it.

I wish I could be traveling with her, but thank God she able to do it. Sometimes I feel mad at her. Feel like I could scratch her hair right off her head. But then I think, Shug got a right to live too. She got a right to look over the world in whatever company she choose. Just cause I love her don't take away none of her rights.

Access is something that we all have capacity, in some way or another, to give one another. So whether it's...hey, you know, if I say, Oh, hey, Rochelle, can we talk later tonight instead of tomorrow morning? I had a bad day, or I'm just tired, you could say, Hey, yeah. No problem. That's a form of access, right?

There is so much that able-bodied people could learn from the wisdom that often comes with disability. But space needs to be made. Hands need to be reached out. People need to be lifted up.

Parents and children help each other to grow. In raising their children, parents are also raising themselves. Child rearing gives parents the chance to redo their own childhood and to improve on it.

It is neither possible nor desirable to be always attuned and responsive to the moods and wishes of children.

The child may feel strongly about his or her goals, but it is the parent who is raising the child and not vice versa. While retaining their empathy, adults need to achieve the self-confidence to have the last word when they are not being cruel or unreasonably arbitrary.

Four years after my father's death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation i would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me.

There was a certain thing I did not get from my mother. There is a lack, a gap, a void. How's that? But in it's place, she has given me something else. Something, I would argue, that is far more valuable. I think I can get up now. She has given me the way out.

Maybe the mother manages to be a mirror only part of the time. In such 'tantalizing' cases, some babies learn to withdraw their own needs when the mother's are evident.

I'm sure these things are true. But the way she says them feels like an implied criticism. As if she's comparing her own selflessness to my self-absorption. But of course that's just evidence of my self-absorption. My mother is probably not thinking anything like this. In fact, my desire to think that she's thinking of me at all is a bit pathetic.

No solo éramos invertidos, éramos inversiones el uno del otro

What makes us love a child isn't something about the child—it's something about us. We don't care for children because we love them; we love them because we care for them.

we did not vilify all white men when mcveigh bombed oklahoma. america did not give out his family's addresses or where he went to church. or blame the bible or pat robertson.