Quotes About Empathy

Now, you also want to ask yourself how they stand, what they carry in their pockets or purses, what happens in their faces and to their posture when they are thinking, or bored, or afraid. Whom would they have voted for last time? Why should we care about them anyway? What would be the first thing they stopped doing if they found out they had six months to live? Would they start smoking again? Would they keep flossing? You

My good ideas for other people so often seem to annoy them.

you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

The good news is that if you don't seal up your heart with caulking compound, and instead stay permeable, people stay alive inside you, and maybe outside you, too, forever. This

Kindness toward others and radical kindness to ourselves buy us a shot at a warm and generous heart, which is the greatest prize of all.

Mercy means compassion, empathy, a heart for someone's troubles. It's not something you do – it is something in you, accessed, revealed, or cultivated through use, like a muscle. We find it in the most unlikely places, never where we first look.

Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein.

A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn't protect itself and it doesn't hide.

Remember that you own what happened to you.

Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on. Now, if you ask me, what's going on is that we're all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another.

My true religion is kindness. That is a great moral position - practicing kindness, keeping one's heart open in the presence of suffering.

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care.

As well as we know our grown children and relatives, we don't know how much energy they have to put into simply keeping their lives together at all.

Some of my wise, more evolved friends say that loathing certain people, henceforth referred to as Them, is not worth the effort, that they are too thin as human forms to actually hate. I say, 'Not for me, baby.

I would give her the same advice God always gives me if I think to ask: Go do some anonymous things for lonely people, give a few bucks to every poor person you see, return phone calls. Get out of yourself and become a person for others, while simultaneously practicing radical self-care: maybe have a bite to eat, check in with the sky twice, buy some cute socks, take a nap.

Make me a channel of Thy peace, that where there is hatred, let me sow love, or at least not fertilize the hate with my dainty bullshit.

what good people can do in the face of great sorrow. We help some time pass for those suffering. We sit with them in their hopeless pain and feel terrible with them, without trying to fix them with platitudes; doing this with them is just about the most gracious gift we have to offer. We give up what we think we should be doing, or think we need to get done, to keep them company. We help them to bear being in time and space during unbearable times and spaces.

Write about your childhoods, I tell them for the umpteenth time. Write about that time in your life when you were so intensely interested in the world, when your powers of observation were at their most acute, when you felt things so deeply. Exploring and understanding your childhood will give you the ability to empathize, and that understanding and empathy will teach you to write with intelligence and insight and compassion.

what good people can do in the face of great sorrow. We help some time pass for those suffering. We sit with them in their hopeless pain and feel terrible with them, without trying to fix them with platitudes; doing this with them is just about the most gracious gift we have to offer. We give up what we think we should be doing, or think we need to get done, to keep them company.

The facts of this world will never satisfy the human heart, but what we give each other can, when it holds love.

As far as I can recall, none of the adults in my life ever once remembered to say, "Some people have a thick skin and you don't. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world. The cost is high, but the blessing of being compassionate is beyond your wildest dreams. However, you're not going to feel that a lot in seventh grade. Just hang on." I

Goodness and courage are how the divine presents itself so often—whether in drag, as close friends, or as EMTs.

One of the immutable laws of being human is that the people who show up are the right people.

Forgiveness and mercy mean that, bit by bit, you begin to outshine the resentment.