Quotes About Empathy

Addressing our own suffering while learning not to inflict it on others is part of the work we're all here to do.

There is always someone whose suffering is greater than yours. The reproaches are often framed as though there is an economy of suffering, and of compassion, and you should measure yourself, price yourself, with the same sense of scarcity and finite resources that govern monetary economies, but there is no measure of either.

One day in Auschwitz, the writer Primo Levi recited a canto of Dante's Inferno to a companion, and the poem about hell reached out from six hundred years before to roll back Levi's despair and his dehumanization. It was the canto about Ulysses, and though it ends tragically, it contains the lines You were not made to live like animals But to pursue virtue and know the world which he recited and translated to the man walking with him.

In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones.

Had I visited at an earlier hour she would have found fault with something I'd done when I was with her. And had I not given her a copy, another failure could be charted. There was no winning, just some decisions about how to lose and how not to play.

Mutual aid [called this in Kropotkin's 1902 Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution ] means that every participant is both giver and recipient in acts of care that bind them together, as distinct from the one-way street of charity.

Much of this is done through speech, through telling of one's plight, through being heard, through hearing compassion and understanding in the response of the people you tend to, whom you befriend. Not only women do this, but perhaps women do this more routinely. It's how I cope, or how my community helps me cope, now that I have one.

Not to know yourself is dangerous, to that self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and from their own emotion, and their internal landscape fills with partitions, caves, minefields, blank spots, pit traps, and more, a landscape turned against itself, a landscape that does not know itself, a landscape through which they may not travel.

There are lovely and wonderful men out there, and one of the things that's encouraging in this round of the war against women is how many men I've seen who get it, who think it's their issue too, who stand up for us and with us in everyday life, online and in the marches from New Delhi to San Francisco this winter.

We'd never set eyes on each other before. But that's the work that books do, reaching out further than their writers.

To tell a story and have it and the teller recognized and respected is still one of the best methods we have of overcoming trauma.

We are all the heroes of our own stories, and one of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another's story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather than be told by them.

addressing our own suffering while learning not to inflict it on others is part of the work we're all here to do.

As Sidda joined Vivi in staring out into the darkness of the fields, where hundreds of sunflowers grew, she thought: I will never fully know my mother, any more than I will ever know my father or Connor, or myself. I have been missing the point. The point is not knowing another person, or learning to love another person. The point is simply this: how tender can we bear to be? What good manners can we show as we welcome ourselves and others into our hearts?

you do not have too many boogeymen for me. You have just the right number.

She breathed in the vast world of suffering and pure, dark love, and as she did, a well of compassion began to flow in her.

sadness usually does, as soon as I sat down and began to listen. The small press had a correspondingly

The point is not knowing another person, or learning to love another person. The point is simply this: how tender can we bear to be? What good manners can we show as we welcome ourselves and others in our hearts?

I couldn't wait until my own stroke was strong enough for me to follow in her wake.

and I will always have to be careful with each other. She

Sidda and I will always have to be careful with each other.

That it is kindness that makes you rich.

I had just asked the kids what would have made them feel more loved. But

I was near, even though she couldn't see me. But then I'm always expecting too much from the girl, wanting her to know things she can't