Quotes About Empathy

Love as much as you can from wherever you are.

there will be no peace in the world until there is peace in our hearts

Bienaventurados los que no hablan; porque ellos se entienden!

Thought I appear unaware of my surroundings, I hear her words. They're cruel and hurt me deeply...I know the state I'm in, but I also know that I didn't bring it on myself and I can't get out of it. (103)

Few authers feel sufficiently themselves to make others ''feel

Par exemple, tu vois, là, tu crois que tu es en train de me parler, mais peut-être pas. Peut-être que tu imagines que tu me parles, et moi en vrai je ne t'écoute pas. Alors qu'on pourrait se parler directement de soi à soi. Tu vois, il vaut mieux rencontrer l'altérité, quitte à être malheureux, que rester dans sa petite sûreté personnelle. L'essentiel c'est d'avoir des failles. Pas sa petite conscience tranquille. (p154)

Very few of us lack superficial faults and we must rely on each other's kindness to overlook them.

even if I could go back in time to her as me, the age I am now she would never come into my arms without believing that I wanted something.

His soul,' she would say, 'picked mine up and we flew.' And to those who gave her a disbelieving look, she would insist. 'Have you never touched someone and felt them? Felt what was inside of their body?' Only a few would know what she was talking about.

Why would you want to go look for that wicked girl?" she asked. "Because I never thanked her," Lillian said, but she was really hoping for forgiveness.

Good conversation is a courtesy, a kindness, a form of caritas that has as its deepest implicit intention binding one another together in understanding and love.

Curiosity. It was Oliver Sacks who first made me reflect on curiosity as a form of compassion. An ingenious and creative neurologist now well-known for his "clinical tales," he begins his work as diagnostician and healer with the implicit question 'What is it like to be you?

My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don't matter.

If you intend to create something that people will observe and listen to, you've got to listen to them first.

When you're taught to love everyone, to love your enemies, what value does that put on love?

People don't keep journals for themselves. They keep them for other people, like a secret they don't want to tell but they want everyone to know.

People don't necessarily confide in one another to get something off their chest. They want something: reassurance, which is a hard gift to give convincingly.

It's often just enough to be with someone. I don't need to touch them. Not even talk. A feeling passes between you both. You're not alone.

Dogs never bite me. Just humans.

Hobbs dominating the conversation with so long a catalogue of his woes that Jack fell behind to avoid having to listen.

Rejoice with those who rejoice. I have found that difficult too often. I was much better at weeping with those who weep.

There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding. ... If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace.

You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding.