Quotes About Empathy

Ah, what happiness it is to be with people who are all happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes.

I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship, was that one had to explain nothing

You have never been curious about me; you never wanted to explore my soul.

I am treating you as my friend, asking you to share my present minuses in the hope that I can ask you to share my future plusses.

Would you not like to try all sorts of lives - one is so very small - but that is the satisfaction of writing - one can impersonate so many people.

The reason that taking care of others doesn't work is that no one knows what another person needs to feel nourished (unless they can tell us clearly and directly, and in dysfunctional families, they usually don't). We end up guessing: "Oh, I think this would help." "It seems to me that he needs that." But we can't guess what would truly nourish another person. He or she may not even know themselves.

But remember that this is a dysfunctional pattern, born of misunderstanding and misinterpretation. We can't know what others truly need, but with a little investigation, we can find out what nourishes us, and place our focus there. Then we become a role model for others – when we see someone nourishing themselves, we tend to allow more space in our lives to do that for ourselves.

When a child carries unspoken rules into adulthood, he or she may try to determine what others are thinking based on their behavior rather than their words, and because behavior can be based on a variety of motivations, this can cause blocks in communication.

Ce devrait être toujours comme ça quand on aime. Sans condition. Sans juger. Sans établir des critères, des préférences.

Just 'cause she's farting through silk doesn't mean she can shit on people who don't have any money.

Tu vois, je crois que... Cette lutte de tous les jours, elle repose sur l'amour. Pas sur l'ambition, le besoin d'avoir, de posséder, mais sur l'amour... Pas l'amour de sois non plus. Ça c'est le malheur, c'est ce qui nous fait tourner en rond. Non ! Sur l'amour des autres, l'amour de la vie. Quand tu aimes, tu es sauvée.

It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.

It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch their imaginations- something that will help them make sense of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward people whose lives are quite different from their own.

Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don't have to be ashamed.

When my husband died, people kept telling me not to cry. People kept trying to help me to forget. But I didn't want to forget... So I realize, that if it's hard for me, how much harder it must be for you.

The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else's life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn't been able to see before.

You gotta know someone cares about you, or you just give up.

A person carrying a grudge who can't forgive is only hurting themself.

Dad told me, 'Mommy doesn't need antidepressants, you see. She needs flowers and sometimes she needs antiques.

To give up having to be right, having to prove someone else wrong, having to have the last word, having to be understood - that is the mark of a person who is capable and truly ready to create a loving relationship that will last and flourish over time.

We must remember that loneliness is not the real enemy - alienation from ourselves is. We are never lonely because we have lost contact with others. We are lonely because we have lost contact with ourselves.

Listening is love in action.

Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth "You owe me." Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.

I open myself fully to give and receive love.