Quotes About Empathy

To gaze into another person's face is to do two things: to recognize their humanity, and to assert your own.

I looked up from the street and again at the wretched captives. I vowed not to let the noises of the city drown out their voices or rob me of my past. It was less painful to forget, but I would look and I would remember.

To gaze into another person's face is to do two things: to recognize their humanity, and to assert your own.

Never have I met a person doing terrible things who would meet my own eyes peacefully. To gaze into another person's face is to do two things: to recognize their humanity, and to assert your own.

Feelings aren't supposed to be rational. If we stop judging fears as invalid, we can find a deeper empathy.

The most common response by parents to children's isolation is aggravation or worry. We may focus on the annoying behavior, not seeing the pain underneath, or we see the pain all too clearly and feel helpless to fix it. These are difficult moments for any parent. What we need are keys to unlock the door to that fortress of isolation and help the child out again into the fields of play. Playful Parenting provides those keys.

Getting on the floor also means joining in with play that we would rather ignore or eliminate.

Maybe we swore we would never be harsh with our children the way others were harsh with us. Then, just when they need us most - when they act up and misbehave and call us names and son on - we get angry and punish them, or feel hurt and block them out. We momentarily forget how fragile our little ones are, just as they forget about cooperation or sharing or calming down and following the rules.

In the words of John Updike, who often writes about the alienation of husbands and fathers, "If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money." Obviously Updike was making an understatement; fathering takes more than just being on speaking terms with our children.

Video screens can offer many useful things: entertainment, information, even distraction from stress. But they can't make goofy faces, give hugs, or provide a deep sense of safety and security.

You must protect people who have no social clout because the health of a congregation is measured by its ability to tolerate dweebs.

If the human species is differentiated from the beasts by the marvel of consciousness, then we enact our humanity and the very authenticity of our being by straining to "know" through awareness the "unthinkable" experience of others.

Say what you want, but gay guys who've been where you are—there're a loyal breed of animal.

Love is always right.

I dare reveal my private woe, The secret blots of my imperfect heart, Nor strive to shrink or swell mine own desert, Nor beautify nor hide. For this I know, That even as I am, thou also art.

To possess another language is to possess another soul.

Each of us has only a quantum of compassion ... if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.

It is hard, I found, to be called traitor. Strange how hard it is, for it's an easy name to call another man.

To hear, one must be silent.

All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.

While we read a novel, we are insane--bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched.

Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.

If one morning in the Spring, a stranger came and said to me, your mother,father, brother, sister, uncle, lover, friend is dead from a b-52, napalm bombing, search and destroy misson, air attack, Tet offensive, My Lai massacre, failed escape, I would not scream but make of my body a net, a tarp, stretched taut across the sky, the sea, over every village and hamlet, prepared to catch everything from the sky, shade everything on the ground, rain water and receive yyou, war, with arms outstretched