Quotes About Empathy

Several performers have told me that they do the following brief lovingkindness meditation if they have stage fright: Standing in front of an audience, before they start acting, playing music, or reciting a poem, they send out wishes for the well-being of everyone in the room. 'When I do that,' one singer told me, 'I no longer have a sense of the audience as a group of hostile people out there waiting to judge me. I feel, okay, here we all are together.

We begin to cultivate real love for ourselves when we treat ourselves with compassion.

But if people are genuinely happy in their choice of action or lifestyle, we do not need to impose our standards. If they are not harming themselves, if they are not harming others, can we be generous enough to feel joy for them? That is the practice of mudita.

She said my problem was that I saw things in people that they didn't see in themselves.

We tend to reduce everyone else to the limits of our own mental universe and begin privileging our own ethics, morality, sense of duty and even our sense of utility. All religious conflicts arose from this propensity to judge others. If we indeed must judge at all, then it must be "according to his own ideal, and not by that of anyone else".

history is neither for excuses nor for revenge 1.

history is neither for excuses nor for revenge

I, for one, dearly hope that a British prime minister will find the heart, and the spirit, to get on his or her knees at Jallianwala Bagh in 2019 and beg forgiveness from Indians in the name of his or her people for the unforgivable massacre

He's been through hell and back, this dog, but he's not mean. Apollo doesn't have a mean bone in his body.

It's a shame you have to go down for someone else. You don't seem like such a bad kid.

He wanted to die, too, and I didn't even really know him. I don't think anybody did. How are you supposed to know someone who stares at his hands all day, and cracks his head open on a concrete wall?

I've never seen a more expressive woman. Or maybe I'm just reading her better because I'm so in tune with her. I can't say, and I can't spare the energy to figure it out now. Whatever it is about her, about us together, it makes me ache and sweat.

She doesn't have an answer and when I step closer, slowly bringing her body against me and enfolding her in my arms, she crumples onto me, giving me her weakness. I give her back my strength. I don't know exactly what demons haunt her, but I'm beginning to suspect they're darker than anyone's imagined. I'm in too deep now to get out.

Lying awake in the dark that night,unable to sleep, he thought he would have given anything to feel the heavy thud on the bed that used to announce the old dog's arrival. How extremely unloving and intolerant he had felt so often , waking in the middle of the night to the relentless shoving and pushing of his undesirable and selfish bedfellow.

a hospital for the broken, not a museum for the perfect.

Do not judge others, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn others, or it will all come back against you. Forgive others, and you will be forgiven." Luke 6:37

Many of the judgments we make of one another—judgments that cause great pain—are preventable, because they are based on misunderstanding

John Donne, the sixteenth-century poet, wrote these familiar but profound words: No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive. —C. S. LEWIS, MERE CHRISTIANITY

A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out" (Isaiah 42:3).

It's not any fun in the dark," he said, and she saw his eyes brimming with tears that glistened in the moonlight. She really felt sorry for him—even she. For what could be more pitiful than a voyeur in the dark?

What's the harm in letting him have his fling?" he remarked of one of the worst of these; "If he did not pitch into me, he would into some poor fellow he might hurt

He was always on hand for misfortune, among the first to arrive when tragedy struck, and for this reason was known as Light Hearse Harry.

look around the table: my ex-wife, my ex-girlfriend and me. We aren't a law firm— we're a support group. Somebody will probably name a 12-step program after us.