Quotes About Empathy

We forget what missiles our words are, how much damage we can cause with one thoughtless comment between the coffee and the toast.

My deepest gratitude goes to those we've quoted — men and women who labored long and hard to express in a few words a lifetime of experience; others who rarely wrote but paused in the middle of a busy life or a sleepless night with pen in hand, who wept and found a way to make of their suffering a gift, who laughed and found a way to make us laugh, too.

when someone says "please pray for me," they are not just saying "let's have lunch sometime." They are issuing an invitation into the depths of their lives and their humanity- and often with some urgency. And worry is not a substitute for prayer. Worry is a starting place, but not a staying place. Worry invites me into prayer. As a staying place, worry can be self-indulgent, paralyzing, draining, and controlling. When I take worry into prayer, it doesn't disappear, but it becomes smaller.

By the hungry, I will feed you. By the poor, I'll make you rich. By the broken, I will mend you. Tell me: which one is which?

As long as there are human beings, there will be the idea of brotherhood -- and an almost total inability to practice it.

Maturity begins when we're content to feel we're right about something, without feeling the necessity to prove someone else is wrong.

Never take the advice of someone who has not had your kind of trouble.

The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, "I was wrong.

It's surprising how many persons go through life without ever recognizing that their feelings toward other people are largely determined by their feelings toward themselves, and if you're not comfortable within yourself, you can't be comfortable with others.

The French may be straining the truth in their famous saying that "to understand all is to forgive all"," but it is certainly true that the more we know of any given person, the harder it becomes to hate him.

Nice things are done for our own sake, not for the sake of others. The pleasure must reside in the performance, not in the applause. Good deeds are, in a deeper psychological way, a favor to oneself. If this is not grasped, then our whole sense of personal relationships becomes warped.

The way in which we say something is often more important than what we say.

when the createdness of the other person is not viewed as necessary as our own—then there is no reason (beyond expediency) to treat the other as a person. All injustice and cruelty come, basically, from this distorted view of reality.

The truly terrible thing about the war spirit, about the fear and hate hysteria it generates, is that it forces us to think and talk and feel in terms of abstractions—those "communists" this time, those "fascists" last time. But those we are fighting and killing are people—men, women and children—not political, geographic or economic abstractions. They are, in the main, as decent and fearful and confused as we are. And they regard us as abstractions as much as we do them.

But what is significant is that if you don't want to like and accept somebody, one excuse is as good as another. The objective facts don't matter, and the reasons are never as 'reasonable' as we like to think they are.

A good talker is sensitive to expression, to tone and color and inflection in human speech. Because he himself is articulate, he can help others to articulate their half-formulated feelings. His mind fills in the gaps, and he becomes, in Socrates' words, a kind of midwife for ideas that are struggling to be born.

Nobody can misunderstand a child as much as his own parents.

And that is the beautiful thing about friendship: we can take liberties, we can show our frailer side, we can afford the vast luxury of giving way to our boredom when we are bored, our anger when we are angry, our peckishness when we feel downhearted.

I just don't believe that you have to come in and insult people when you want to change things.

Find fault when you must find fault in private, and if possible sometime after the offense, rather than at the time.

When you rise in the morning, form a resolution to make the day a happy one for a fellow creature.

I think you can lower your weapon now.

You, of all people, deserve a happy ending. Despite everything that happened to you, you aren't bitter. You aren't cold. You've just retreated a little and been shy, and that's okay. If I were a fairy godmother, I would give you your heart's desire in an istant. And I would wipe away your tears and tell you not to cry. -Rachel to Julia

Knowing is the key to caring, and with caring there is hope that people will be motivated to take positive actions. They might not care even if they know, but they can't care if they are unaware.