Quotes About Empathy

In the things we love lie clues to who we are. What we want for those we love.

This is what Kaikeyi failed to see: it's not enough to merely love someone. Even if we love them with our entire being, even if we're willing to commit the most heinous sin for their well-being. We must understand and respect the values that drive them. We must want what they want, not what we want for them.

To see a loved one in pain is more wrenching than to bear that pain yourself.

When your heart is crusted over with your own pain, it is easy to feel little for others.

If you want to stand up against wrongdoing, if you want to bring about change, do it in a way that doesn't bruise a man's pride. You'll have a better chance of success.

This incident taught me that the more love we distribute, the more it grows, coming back to us from unexpected sources. And its corollary: when we demand love, believing it to be our right, it shrivels, leaving only resentment behind.

She taught me to close myself off from the sorrow of others so that I might survive

O king of Ayodhya, you know I'm innocent, and yet, unfairly, you're asking me to step into the fire. You offer me a tempting prize indeed—to live in happiness with you and my children. But I must refuse. Because if I do what you demand, society will use my action forever after to judge other women. Even when they aren't guilty, the burden of proving their innocence will fall on them. And society will say

I heard the laments of the people of Hastinapur, their sorrow at losing us. But I no longer required their tears. It baffled me that as a younger women I'd thought that such a thing would make me happy.

I guess that's when people call their mothers - when their world is falling apart.

So this, too, was true of love: it could make us forget our own needs. It could make us strong even when the world was collapsing around us.

Daughter and mother, mother and daughter. Though we would like to think otherwise, how our lives echo each other's.

it's not enough to merely love someone. Even if we love them with our entire being, even if we're willing to commit the most heinous sin for their well-being. We must understand and respect the values that drive them. We must want what they want, not what we want for them.

Distance is a great promoter of harmony

I want to weep too, not for me but for us all--for rich or poor, educated or illiterate, here we are finally reduced to a sameness in this sisterhood of deprivation.

Perhaps that is the miracle of stories. They make us realize that we're not alone in our folly and our suffering.

Distance is a great promoter of harmony: a fact that women who find themselves in situations similar to mine should keep in mind.)

I knew now that love—no matter how deep—wasn't enough to transform another person: how they thought, what they believed. At best, we could only change ourselves.

That's how it is sometimes when we plunge into the depths of our lives. No one can accompany us, not even those who would give up their hearts for our happiness.

Most of all we learned to feel without words the sorrows of our sisters, and without words to console them. In this way our lives were not so different from those of the girls we had left behind in our home villages

Vaishnava jana to tene kahiyeje pi?a paraay? jaa?e re. Only those who feel the pain of others may be called truly good. Sarojini sees her listening and says, "A doctor is like that, no?

Weeping is not bad. It clears out the heart, making space in it for growth.

Not even Duryodhan had dared to look at me quite like this in his sabha, for he'd known I was a queen. Is this how men looked at ordinary women, then? Women they considered their inferiors? A new sympathy for my maids rose in my mind. When I became queen again, I thought, I would make sure common women were treated differently.

Animals were superior to most humans. Men would have turned away once you had nothing more to give them.