Quotes About Empathy

To be gentle is to encourage ourselves.

Happiness is not necessarily how many things we have—happiness is the ability to share what we have with others.

is the ability to share what we have with others.

How we move forward cannot depend on one spiritual tradition, economy, or political system, but rather should depend on who we feel we are, both personally and socially. What is the nature of humans and our society?

However, especially in an age of coarsening values, it is hard to feel our natural kindness because it is often blocked by reactionary emotions. This occurs when we divide the world into us versus them. Then the more we forget our kindness, the more unkindness there is, and the more we forget.

One of my favorite sayings is "If you want to be miserable, think of yourself. If you want to be happy, think of others.

when you give love... it grows and grows.

when you give.. it grows and grows.

It is hard to care for the earth if one has never cared for a piece of it.

Larry Hjort, an AIDS activist, gave counsel to people who were overwhelmed with the needs of their dying friends. "Everyone is perfectly adequate," he said. "There are just some impossible situations.

To like and dislike the same things, that is indeed true friendship.

if you find something or somebody a bore, the fault lies in you.

After American titan and presidential father Joseph P. Kennedy suffered a stroke that impacted one side of his body, guests pretended not to notice the impact. Jackie Kennedy, however, held the impacted hand and kissed the affected side of his face, facing his disability and giving him the courage to do so.

Her uncanny empathy grew out of her tenuous sense of herself. She could shed her own troubles, compensating for her own emptiness, by losing herself in others' traumas—in effect, she could "be" another person, if only momentarily—even as she delivered the sort of compassion she desperately wanted for herself.

Sometimes," says a fellow depressive, "I wish I was in a full body cast, with every bone in my body broken. That's how I feel anyway. Then, maybe, people would stop minimising my illness because they can actually see what's wrong with me. They seem to need physical evidence.

A friend called the other day. 'How are you?' she said. The sun was shining, the sky a merciless blue. It was only eleven in the morning but I had been awake since three twenty. I was in bed because, as usual, I could think of nowhere else to go. I said that I was feeling low. Low is the depressive's euphemism for despair. She said: 'How can you be depressed on a day like this?' I wanted to say: 'If I had flu, would you ask me how I could be sick on a day like this?

I find it easy to spot a depressive. The illness is scrawled across them like graffiti.

Everyone else has a work party,'Kate said. 'So why shouldn't we? We're working hard at not being mad.

I know how it feels to be told that it's all in your mind. It drives you mad.

This is not really me. I am not like this. I am like you. I am not a patient from a mental hospital. I am just an ordinary woman whose mind has gone temporarily wrong.

I believe, completely, that life is about connection; that nothing else truly matters.

Look for other women with whom you can connect as well. So many women are isolated—with no friends as neighbors, no family close by, no kindred spirits.

It took me a long time not to judge myself through someone else's eyes.

He coughs. Not a good sound. Too deep, too full of coffins. Why is mankind so fucking cruel? Why?