Quotes About Empathy

I carefully crawled on to the side of his chest, careful not to knock out his tubes, and fell asleep. I could hear the sounds of his body working. The creaky floor sounds from his tummy. The swish of his blood. The pounding of his heart. It sounded like I was swimming and listening to the sounds of water beneath the surface of my father. This was my dad.

Get off your high horse and get yourself grounded! Know what it is like to have your world turned upside down! Your becoming a good therapist is not about putting yourself apart from the people you work with; it is about coming to know intimately their pain, their humiliation, and their ability to rise above it.

Violence and racism are bad. Whenever they occur they are to be condemned (and) we should not turn a blind eye to them.

It was only when I realized how actors have the power to move people that I decided to pursue acting as a career.

Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don't listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won't tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff.

Everyone dies, and yet it's unendurable. There is so much love inside of us. How do we become worthy of it? And, then, where does it go? A worldwide crescendo of grief, sustained day after day, and only one tiny note of it is mine.

What I'm starting to understand, finally, is that the point isn't to help the people who know how best to ask for help. It's to be helpful.

What it is like to be any parent. The way you ache when they ache, the way you experience their stomachaches or heartaches or fear in your very self. It's as if, having once been placentally connected to your beating heart, having once inhabited your actual body, your children continue to live there with you. For better and worse, you are never alone again. Parental love defies your apartness from another person.

If you compared your troubles, or challenges, with those of others, you would surely find that there are those whose troubles make yours look like minor inconveniences.

There is no wrong way to perform an act of kindness.

I decided that not talking is like a litmus test for a real friend. You can just sit there and be. Not always be filling up the air with words

Grace talking to Billy.] "It's like people who want to feel only happy but not sad," she said. "It never works. You either feel things or you don't. You don't get to pick and choose. At least, I don't think so.

We should all be much more careful with each other`s hearts.

We're all just doing our best.' I left out the second part. 'Even if it doesn't look so good from the outside.

If I was to kill everybody who didn't love me and never would, wouldn't be nobody left on the planet?

I think you're the first person I've ever known . . . I might not say it right. We'll see . . . who really sees me. And I mean the whole thing of me, not just the part that fits with how they want to see me. And it seems weird to me, because the first person I met who really sees me for all of who I am . . . you know . . . can't see.

I guess if you're really a friend, you overlook certain things. Its easy to be friends with someone who only says things you want to hear. I guess if you're really a friend, you have to cut a friend some slack.

So if you run around putting a pillow under people to cushion their fall . . . well, I'm just not sure it's quite the favor we think it is.

Since we all know for a fact that we're all going to die, why don't we all treat each other like we could lose each other at any minute?

All I know is that you can't force yourself to feel something you don't.

If it takes you apart, that's not love. Love puts you back together.

I'm not saying I know it all. In one way, we've all just got the time since we got up this morning. But I've seen a lot of people walk a lot of roads. Some not so happy. And it makes them what they are. So if you run around putting a pillow under people to cushion their fall . . . well, I'm just not sure it's quite the favor we think it is.

When somebody holds a view that seems to make no sense, know that it makes sense to them, but for reasons you don't know anything about yet. And I guess in a lot of cases,

you can't change anybody's mind. The sooner I learned that, the happier my life would be, and now I felt like a happy life was a goal again for the first time in a long time.