Quotes About Empathy

In this sense, she offers what we wish every mother would: enough compassion to make us feel safe within our broken need, and enough wisdom to hold on to hope.

I've long believed literature's greatest superpower is how it makes us feel less alone. Across generations, cultures, classes, races, genders, and every other divide, stories and sentences can make us think, Oh yes, me too. That is precisely how it feels to love and lose and triumph and try again.

She was a real human being laying herself bare, fearlessly, that we might come to understand the nature of our own predicaments.

think the answer to most problems is more often than not outside of the right/wrong binary that we tend to cling to when we're angry or scared or in pain.

The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over anything. Or at least not anything that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering.

But I encourage you to swallow your pride and hear your friends out, to look at the image of yourself they're reflecting back to you. It might be useful. It might piss you off.

But I encourage you to swallow your pride and hear your friends our, to look at the image of yourself they're reflecting back to you It might be useful. It might piss you off. It might help you get over the tender feelings you have about what happened at the cabin. The complicated thing about friends is that sometimes they are totally wrong about us and sometimes they are totally right and it's almost always only in retrospect that we know which is which.

The only thing I ever hope to do as a writer is to make people feel less alone, to make them feel more human, to make them feel what I have felt so many times as a reader: stories have the power to save us by illuminating the most profoundly beautiful and terrible things about our existence.

Anything else? To be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of being. Your life will be a hundred times better for it. This is good advice for anyone at any age, but particularly for those in their twenties.

Why? Because in your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.

Forgiveness means you've found a way forward that acknowledges harm done and hurt caused without letting either your anger or your pain rule your life or define your relationship with the one who did you wrong.

Also, because it's harder to be magnanimous when you're in your twenties, I think, and so that's why I'd like to remind you of it.

He said, "Don't get me wrong. I want to hear everything about your life. But I want you to know that you don't need to tell me this to get me to love you. You don't have to be broken for me.

Practice saying the word "love" to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

To be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of being. Your life will be a hundred times better for it. This is good advice for anyone at any age, but particularly for those in their twenties.

you is acceptance. And the thing after that, forgiveness.

Though we live in a time and place and culture that tries to tell us otherwise, suffering is what happens when truly horrible things happen to us.

We act as if we don't know that awful things happen to all sorts of people every second of every day and the only thing that's changed about the world or the existence or nonexistence of God or the color of the sky is that the awful thing is happening to us.

I suggest you forget about forgiveness for now and strive for acceptance instead.

Your behavior and words will deeply impact your child's life—both how he or she feels about his or her father and also how he or she feels about him or herself.

I learned then what I have learned in many other ways over the course of my life: that when we're in the presence of someone else's pain, the burden of not-doing is so much greater than the burden of doing. Doing lifts the burden. Even if it's a small thing. Like writing a letter.

The mission of literature is to tell us who we are."—Cheryl Strayed @CherylStrayed

I got you," my friend the writer and teacher Jen Pastiloff says so often she has it tattooed on her arm. That's what this vespers thing felt like to me, Spent. Like someone had me. Like for the tiniest glimmer of a moment I was held by a force more powerful than the force I could muster on my own.

our minds are small, but our hearts are big. Just about every one of us has fucked up at some point or another