Quotes About Empathy

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.

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.

much. 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.

You know that grief cannot be avoided. And that when it finds a person, they might look the same but they're changed: their missing person has altered the atmosphere in the house, the classroom, the playground; on birthdays and holidays; amongst friends and with the parent who survives.

The essence of warriorship, or the essence of human bravery, is refusing to give up on anyone or anything.

Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world. You are willing to share your heart with others.

When we find ourselves in a situation in which our buttons are being pushed, we can choose to repress or act out, or we can choose to practice. If we can start to do the exchange, breathing in with the intention of keeping our hearts open to the embarrassment or fear or anger that we feel, then to our surprise we find that we are also open to what the other person is feeling. Open heart is open heart.

People who are hungry don't have the heart to think about others. Sometimes they can't even care for their own family. Hunger quashes man's will to help his fellow man. I've seen fathers steal food from their own children's lunchboxes. As they scarf down the corn they have only one overpowering desire: to placate, if even for just one moment, that feeling of insufferable need.

But many have to look on in silence at what distresses them.

For sorrow to which one gives voice is worth nothing if it does not touch the heart.

I think that most writers who are trying to write important and difficult books are in many ways putting their own humanity into question. Sometimes the journey is finding out where you stand in relationship to your own humanity and to the humanity of others.

What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion.

But the thing is that, in the end, we each must decide how comfortable we are with how much we hurt other people.

I shall not weep for any of them, nor regret their fate, nor shake one feather in sympathy.

Maybe, she thought, the reign of malicious sarcasm was over and she could be a good person again.

At some point you do not need to talk to have a conversation. The conversation exists whether you have it or not. It continues silently in a parallel dimension of the marriage. They both pause to let it run its course toward another stalemate.

nondefensive communication is one of the hardest skills to master. But it's also one of the most important.

when the subject matter is potentially a hot button, it never hurts to be prepared, anticipating the kinds of thoughts and feelings that your partner might experience.

The only way to BE happy is to GIVE happy.

Some women are drawn to a damaged man...Tthink they'll be able to put him back together in a way they prefer.

The reason why I love people, and writing about them, is because they don't always respond with hate and anger. If they did I wouldn't have a story to tell. Who wants to know about someone who was brutalised and became brutal? I'm interested in the exceptions.

Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.

I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.

This was how a kind heart broke, after all: inward, making no shrapnel. Dear