Quotes About Empathy

We wanted - no, we needed - to tell our stories, and more importantly, we needed our stories to be heard.

Darling boysy...me loves you, oh so very tenderly...you must always tell me everything, you can fully trust me, look upon me as a bit of yourself...How I love you, darling treasure, my very own one. —Alix, to Nicholas II

Incredible shame is associated with mental illness. People will confide the most intimate details of their love life before they'll mention a relative who had a serious mental breakdown. But the brain is just another organ. It's just a machine, and a machine can go wrong.

Jan Smuts, the brilliant young Transvaal state attorney, wrote of Botha that he had a natural sympathy that made it possible for him to "get extremely close to others and to read their minds and divine their characters with marvellous accuracy. It gave him an intuitive power of understanding and appreciating men which was very rare." Botha

It is one of the precious mysteries of sorrow that it finds solace in unselfish thought. - James A. Garfield

We cannot hold a torch to light another's path without brightening our own. Ben Sweetland

Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God's kindness: kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile. Mother Teresa

Wendy warmed my heart, earned my trust, touched my soul, and then touched me in a lot of other places. And right after we'd slept together for the very first time she looked up at me with her chocolate-brown, trustworthy doe eyes and said, "I've got herpes. I thought you should know.

I learned to accept my family for who they were and understand that, though they might be limited in certain areas, they all had good qualities that I could appreciate.

Picture the person who intimidates you most. Now picture them crouched like a dog, pooping on the sidewalk, looking up at you, all vulnerable. We all poop. Maybe not on the sidewalk, but nobody is better than you and don't let them think they are for a minute.

And it's not that Pearl Jam was any more amazing than anyone else. I think we just liked who we were when they were who they were.

sometimes you just want the comfort of knowing that somebody really does care about you (even if they show it in peculiar ways).

Animals have done us no harm and they have no power of resistance. There is something so very dreadful in tormenting those who have never harmed us, who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power.

When I am reading a poem, I rarely feel alone in the room. The poet and I are together. It's as if the poet wrote a secret diary years ago.

There was no difference between my characters and the life my readers were going to have to face.

If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.

An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion

What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved -- what then?

If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us. --"The Content of the Psychoses

Si empatizamos con los misterios de la persona enferma, la locura también revela su sistema, y reconocemos en la enfermedad mental simplemente una reacción excepcional a problemas emocionales que no nos son ajenos.