Quotes About Empathy

Even sad stories are company. And perhaps that's why you might read such a chronicle, to look into a companionable darkness that isn't yours.

under the radiant towers, the floodlit ramparts, must have wondered at my impulse to touch her, which was like touching myself, the way your own hand feels when you hold it because you want to feel contained.

My pregnant wife came home with her previously long hair that I loved chopped off and replaced with a short, mommish haircut. She asked what I thought and could tell by my face. She had put a mom's need for convenience before being a wife. She wept.

To make matters worse, seemingly every book I read by Christians on sex and marriage sounded unfair. Nearly every one said the husband had to work very hard to understand his wife, to relate to her.

The sad truth is that we live in a world that encourages selfishness, independence, convenience, isolation, and using people rather than loving them.

Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom

Intimacy puts us in touch with fragility, he realized, and the acceptance of fragility opens us to intimacy.

Simply speaking, they showed him that he could be kind. In his years of spiritual searching he had perfected all kinds of esoteric talents. He could take his mind into spheres of nothingness, go for days and weeks without eating, and rend his flesh with the best of them, but he was still operating with barely disguised contempt, not benevolence, toward himself and his world. When the enlightened Buddha told his admirer that he was awake, it was this basic kindness he was pointing to.

The transitional object—the teddy bear, stuffed animal, blanket, or favorite toy—makes possible the movement from a purely subjective experience to one in which other people are experienced as truly "other." Neither "me" nor "not-me," the transitional object enjoys a special in-between status that the parents instinctively respect. It is the raft by which the infant crosses over to the understanding of the other.

The Buddha was interested in teaching us not only how to find our own freedom, but in how to stay in affectionate relationship to other people.

Usually people look at you when they're talking to you. I know that they're working out what I'm thinking, but I can't tell what they're thinking. It is like being in a room with a one-way mirror in a spy film.

I think she cared more for that bloody dog than for me, for us. And maybe that's not so stupid, looking back... maybe it is easier living on your own looking after some stupid mutt than sharing your life with other actual human beings.

You could ask for hugs if you were feeling sad or you'd hurt yourself, but when it happened spontaneously it made you feel warm inside.

companionship refused is worse than loneliness.

That was what it meant, didn't it. Being good. You didn't have to sink wells in Burkina Faso. You didn't have to give away your coffee table. You just had to see things from other people's point of view. Remember they were human.

It was true. There really was no limit to the ways in which you could say the wrong thing to your children. You offered an olive branch and it was the wrong olive branch at the wrong time.

She idly stroked his head in the way one might stroke a dog.

That was because when I was little I didn't understand about other people having minds.

He held up his right hand and spread his fingers out in a fan. I held up my left hand and spread my fingers out in a fan and we made our fingers and thumbs touch each other. We do this because sometimes father wants to give me a hug, but I do not like hugging people so we do this instead, and it means that he loves me.

Vergeben und vergessen. Langsam verstand sie, was das hieß. Man konnte nicht vergessen, bevor nicht jemand anderes einem vergab.

Ich weinte, weil ich keine Schuhe hatte, bis ich einen traf, der keine Füße hatte.

Never trust a man who doesn't like animals. That's my rule.

Los niños de mi colegio son estúpidos. Pero se supone que no he de llamarlos estúpidos, ni siquiera aunque sea eso lo que son. Se supone que he de decir que tienen dificultades de aprendizaje o que tienen necesidades especiales.

Everyone in their little worlds.