Quotes About Empathy

It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.

I have always liked the phrase 'nursing a grudge' because many people are tender of their resentments as of the thing nearest their hearts.

That is to say, I pray for you. And there's an intimacy in it. That's the truth.

It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men.

A letter makes ordinary things seem important.

You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding.

So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.

To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error.

That's one good thing about the way life is, that no one can know you if you don't let them.

I have spent years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of . . . people who do not exist.

Harm to you is not harm to me in the strict sense, and that is a great part of the problem. He could knock me down the stairs and I would have worked out the theology for forgiving him before I reached the bottom. But if he harmed you in the slightest way, I'm afraid theology would fail me.

Thinking about hell doesn't help me live the way I should. I believe this is true for most people. And thinking that other people might go to hell just feels evil to me, like a very grave sin. So I don't want to encourage anyone else to think that way either.

You must forgive in order to understand.

That reservoir of goodness beyond and of another kind that we are able to do for each other in the ordinary cause of things.

History could make a stone weep.

when I see a man or woman alone, he or she looks mysterious to me, which is only to say that for a moment I see another human being clearly.

But when folks are down to the one thing that keeps them alive, that one thing can be meanness. It makes you feel like you're there, you're doing something.

Kindly intentioned, but not considerate.

Doll may have been the loneliest woman in the world, and she was the loneliest child, and there they were, the two of them together, keeping each other warm in the rain.

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 a posture of grace.

In the old days I could walk down every single street, past every house, in about an hour. I'd try to remember the people who lived in each one, and whatever I knew about them, which was often quite a lot, since many of the ones who weren't mine were Boughton's. And I'd pray for them. And I'd imagine peace they didn't expect and couldn't account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams.

Our humanity consists in the fact that we do more than survive, that a great part of what we do confers no survival benefit in terms presumably salient from the Pleistocene point of view.

The minute that you start thinking about someone in the whole circumstance of his life to the extent that you can, he becomes mysterious, immediately.

So many of earth's grievances could be soothed by a little consideration.