Quotes About Empathy

We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said...Understanding does not occur when we try to intercept what someone wants to say to us by claiming we already know it.

Allow me someday to touch you.The way that you've all touched me.

We get mad at someone for cutting us off in traffic or for taking too long to order at Starbucks or for not responding exactly as we see fit, and we have no idea that behind their facade, they may be dealing with some industrial-strength shit. Their lives may be in pieces. They may be in the midst of incalculable tragedy and turmoil, and they may be hanging on to their sanity by a thread. But we don't care. We don't see. We just keep pushing.

For a short time, I hated them. But when you think about it, what good does that do?It takes so much to hold on to hate—you lose your grip on what's important, you know?

Often the difference between a successful marriage and a mediocre one consists of leaving about three or four things a day unsaid.

There is a bond of fellowship in sorrow that knows no conventionality.

There is a bond of fellowship in sorrow that knows no conventionalities.

I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.

In our opposed forms of loneliness and self-recognition and recognition of the other, we touched each other often as we spoke; and on shore in explorations of the past, we strolled with our arms linked...

Reading is an intimate act, perhaps more intimate than any other human act. I say that because of the prolonged (or intense) exposure of one mind to another.

And what is love? My measure of it is that I should have died to spare her. Her measure is for us to be together longer. I

Approach each session as an occasion to practice being with another without expectation.

In the American Civil War it was a matter of principle that a good officer rode his horse as little as possible. There were sound reasons for this. If you are riding and your soldiers are marching, how can you judge how tired they are, how thirsty, how heavy their packs weigh on their shoulders?

The less harshly we judge ourselves, the more accepting we become of others. People want to be around you if you feel enthusiastic about yourself and others. Just as dissatisfaction with yourself is contagious, so is enthusiasm.

To make peace with yourself, you may have to give up a lot. You may have to give up feeling sorry for yourself, straining to be someone you are not, hiding the parts of yourself you fear are unacceptable, and worrying about what others think.

As the endlessly patient husband explained of his volatile wife's outbursts some years later: "If you knew how little harm it does me, and how much good it does her, you wouldn't wonder that I am meek.

Children need love, especially when they do not deserve it.

Ignoring emotional feelings never contributes to the stability of a marriage or any other relationship.

life is trying to teach us one thing: to see the Eck, the Holy Spirit, in the eyes of all we meet

We are the messiah for somebody if not for everybody.

To be fully and authentically human, we have to be prepared to take off the armor we usually go around wearing to keep the world from hurting us. We have to be prepared to accept pain, or else we will never dare to hope or to love

It's very difficult to feel contempt for others when you see yourself in the mirror.

As you know, Francis, I hate like the dickens to have to send any boy to the reformatory. I refuse to believe that any child is intentionally bad. The entire theory behind my work is to prove to certain people that incorrigible children are only incorrigible because we make them that way—that their failure is not theirs alone, but ours as well." She smiled at me. "Do you understand what I'm saying?