Quotes About Empathy

Love, in the universal sense, is unconditional acceptance. In the individual sense, the one-on-one sense, try this: we can say we love each other if my life is better because you're in it and your life is better because I'm in it. The intensity of the love is weighted by how much better.

we can say we love each other if my life is better because you're in it and your life is better because I'm in it.

You put yourself out there in the truest way you can and hope others do the same. You'll connect or you won't, but you did what you could.

I walk outside and scream at the top of my lungs, and it maybe travels two blocks. A whale unleashes his cry, and it travels hundreds or even thousands of miles. Every whale in the ocean will at one time or another run into that song. And I figure whales probably don't edit. If they think it, they say it...Whale talk is the truth, and in a very short period of time, if you're a whale, you know exactly what it is to be you.

If someone's different from you and it scares you or makes you mad, that's God telling you to take a closer look. If you're scared or mad, that's about you, not about the person who scares you or angers you.

As a child abuse and neglect therapist I do battle daily with Christians enamored of the Old Testament phrase "Spare the rod and spoil the child." No matter how far I stretch my imagination, it does not stretch far enough to include the image of a cool dude like Jesus taking a rod to a kid.

You have to see everyone in relationship to you. Just because you understand the shit in someone else's life doesn't mean you don't stand up for your own

Like I said before, Rudy says, it's all about differences. Something about humans really doesn't like them, when they are the very thing we should embrace. If someone's different from you and it scares you or makes you mad, that's God telling you to take a closer look. If you're scared or mad, that's about you, not about the person who scares or angers you.

when Sierra Russell was into a book, she was totally into it. She practically crawled between the covers to live with the characters.

In truth, Riley's crew didn't make trouble. They were fixers. The school's go-to team of Robin Hoods. They only tried to right wrongs, protect innocent kids from bullies, look out for abused animals, and, basically, use their talents to do all the good they could.

All the statistics in the world can't measure the warmth of a smile.

If any of this breaks your heart, it was probably already a little broken to begin with.

The second you make it all about you, is the second you've already lost. It's about people - it always has been and it always will be.

I remember listening to the radio as a kid and finding that the songs always made me feel more peaceful. Funny, but the more hurtin' the music was, the better it made me feel. I think of that now when I write my songs. I may not be feelin' the blues myself, but I'm writing them for other people who have a hard life.

If you can love cats, you can love human beings, because you have to be able to love them without getting them at all.

It's better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill -- getting larger cause you're entering another person's language, cadence, heart and mind.

Anyone who feels to much or radiates extremity gets very lonely.

No one...can live in this heightened state of reflective receptivity forever. Because this empathy's involuntary, there's terror here. Loss of control, a seepage. Becoming someone else or worse: becoming nothing but the vibratory field between two people.

The panic of altruism: sadness rests inside the body, always, nascent like the inflammation of a chronic disease. Therefore, empathy is not a reaching outward. It is a loop. Because there isn't any separation any more between what you are and what you see.

Because identifying so completely with someone else can only happen by abandoning yourself, ... panics and retreats abruptly from these connections. Connect and cut.

leaves the body, transcends himself, herself, outside any system of belief. Freedom equals panic because without belief there is no language when you've lost yourself to empathy, a total shut down is the only way back in.

Being rejected] hurt, 'cause what turned me on in sex was believing that they knew me, that I'd found somebody to understand.

We've met a few times and I've felt a lot of sympathy towards you and a desire to be closer... I had a feeling that somehow I knew you and we could just be what we are together.

I like to dip into other people's books, to catch the rhythm of their thinking, as I try to write my own. (...) It's better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill—getting larger 'cause you're entering another person's language, cadence, heart and mind.