Quotes About Empathy

I always pull from something I know really well. Because I would never want to write about something that I hadn't experienced or that I hadn't witnessed happen to somebody else because it wouldn't be genuine.

Even the most self-confident people, at one point of their lives, felt like outsiders or felt like they weren't being heard or seen or witnessed in some way.

It is very east to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

My husband and I witnessed firsthand how love truly heals.

I'll never forget during the 'Descendants' parade at Disneyland when I waved at a girl with bright blue hair and witnessed her dream being realized and the involuntary tears that followed.

Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been repeatedly flabbergasted by the insouciance, and sometimes relish, with which our ancestors carried out and witnessed unspeakable cruelties.

The stories my pupils told me were astonishing. One told how he had witnessed his cousin being shot in the back five times; another how his parents had died of AIDS. Another said that he'd probably been to more funerals than parties in his young life. For me - someone who had had an idyllic, happy childhood - this was staggering.

My dad lost his hearing in the last 18 months of his life, and as a result, I witnessed first-hand the effect that this can have on a family.

It's kind of a mystery to me, as far as my own life experiences and what I've witnessed - why some people can just move on through traumatic experiences, in childhood particularly, and why other people are just paralyzed by it. I just don't know how and why that is.

The Iraq I returned from was, in my mind, a fairly simple place. By which I mean it had little relationship to reality. It's only with time and the help of smart, empathetic friends willing to pull through many serious conversations that I've been able to learn more about what I witnessed.

Sometimes, as an actor - and I've witnessed this with other actors that I've worked with - you don't realize that it's not all about the actor.

From the most remote of villages to the largest metropolitan cities, we, as a species, have the same internal need to be seen, heard, and validated. It is the most human of traits that I have witnessed and experienced the world over.

I think as men begin to see things that address them, they will feel that they can relate. They can't relate to 'Basketball Wives,' 'Housewives of Atlanta.' I am not judging or criticizing those shows at all; what I am saying is the perspective is not necessarily the male perspective. 'Iyanla: Fix My Life' is inclusive of everyone.

If men have easy access to divorce, many will choose it thoughtlessly. They may not gain true happiness with their new trophy wives, but they certainly will not slide into the material indigence and emotional misery that awaits most divorced women.

To you wives who are constantly complaining and see only the dark side of life, and feel that you are unloved and unwanted, look into your own hearts and minds. If there is something wrong, turn about. Put a smile on your faces. Make yourselves more attractive. Brighten your outlook.

To play a cop's wife - there's so much in that world, the wives or partners of anyone who is a first responder - it's not an easy job. It's not an easy way to live, to say goodbye to someone in the morning and not know what's going to happen throughout the day.

All my ex-girlfriends or wives are all kind of great friends and I've never understood somebody who can live with somebody for five or six years and then not like them.

With soldiers, their wives are so fundamental in their relationships, and yet there's this kind of other war happening back in the States, where wives of soldiers don't quite understand what their husbands have been through, because their husbands won't really talk about it, and that's really the hidden war.

It's always interesting to talk to people's moms or sisters or wives. It gives you a different perspective of somebody that everybody already thinks they knew.

It must be a nightmare for football managers' wives, putting up with us.

Some pastors are so hard-nosed about submission and insensitive to their wives' needs that they don't recognize the frustration even hatred within their own households.

This little hobbit saves the world. The wizard kills the dragon and saves the town. So many people connect to that character; it doesn't matter if it's an elf or a hobbit or a dwarf. It doesn't matter. They're human in their heart and soul.

Teach me to feel another's woe, to hide the fault I see, that mercy I to others show, that mercy show to me.

My mother smokes me out. We'll get these long periods of me thinking I'm too busy to call her up or e-mail her, and she'll send me something. My mom's a real whiner. I love her to death, but she always sends me these 'woe is me' things. I think she might be Jewish. I'm not sure. She's Baptist-Jewish, which is a double whammy.