Quotes About Empathy

To listen well is as powerful a means of communication and influence as to talk well.

The distant soul can shake the distant friend's soul and make the longing felt, over untold miles.

The way to restore the Wasteland is to embrace it with compassion, to become identified with it in exactly the same way that the lover identifies with the beloved: for what wounds the beloved wounds the lover.

You have to live with the people to know their needs, and you have to live with God to know how to solve them.

I look away at car crashes, and I know people who look away at car crashes, because it makes us uncomfortable to watch other people in pain.

All of life is relationship. We relate to people, things, and ideas, and our actions reflect the tone and substance of each relationship. How we relate to money, to the ideal of love, to nature, to our concept of death, and to our spouse reveals, in the moment, the truth of ourselves.

have treated you. The ultimate victim of torture is the torturer, the one who inflicts pain and suffering at the cost of their humanity.

The ultimate victim of torture is the torturer, the one who inflicts pain and suffering at the cost of their humanity.

It is said that man doesn't live by bread alone. Sometimes this is unfortunate, because people who cannot live by bread alone too often kill other people in consequence of the fights they get into.

I naïvely believed that this person actually thought along the same lines as I did—and maybe she did, for a while. In her own way, Tatum tried hard, too, but ultimately she just didn't have the wherewithal to bring it off. She was so young! We were so young. As angry as I get, I do feel for her—when I can get through the anger.

I always had to fight to find my best self, to be aware of other people's feelings—and the devil's bargain of it is, the players who are more aware of others struggle more. Boris Becker was like that, too. We would have brilliant moments on the court, and total meltdowns. There was just too much going on inside.

Being an effective person-centred counsellor is not so much a matter of possessing skills and knowledge, but of having a particular set of deeply-held values and beliefs and then being able to express these qualities in interactions with other people.

When will we learn that it's not about being color-blind? It's about respect and humanity, pure and simple.' The Good Detective

People view their own behaviors as originating from amendable, situational constraints,but they view other people's behavior as originating from inherent, immutable personality traits.

and I could hear from his voice that he was smiling. He was happy that I hurt like that. And I knew I had felt the same happiness, anytime he mentioned feeling hurt by me. Why was it fun for us to make each other suffer? Did that mean it wasn't love? Surely that wasn't what love was?

I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo's tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they're you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn't know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.

It can be really exasperating to look back at your past. What's the matter with you? I want to ask her, my younger self, shaking her shoulder. If I did that, she would probably cry. Maybe I would cry, too.

real intimacy is a place where there are no mistakes, at least not in the sense you feel. You don't just blow everything with one wrong move. A friendship is a space where you're supposted and free to make mistakes.

Was that what was so painful: that nobody had ever come so close to me- nobody had ever seen me, and come right up to me, and kept going, and looked into my eyes so seriously, with so little fear?

What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place.

It's so rare in the world to meet somebody you connect to. Most people are so awful. In the big picture, bad breath just seems relatively manageable.

Don't condemn if you see a person has a dirty glass of water, [.....] just show them the clean glass of water that you have. When they inspect it, you won't have to say that yours is better.

He'd learned that when you love someone purely enough, all you wanted was for that person to be happy. (p. 419)

no one can judge a relationship except for the two people in it.