Quotes About Empathy

They could not make a deep and powerful connection to the larger world until they were able to connect to themselves. And, in an example of the kind of feedback loops that characterize all living systems, they were not able to connect to themselves until they were in authentic relationship with others.

An astute observer might suggest that my emphasis on connection probably comes from experience of its opposite. And that's true. I know what it's like to feel disconnected, on the outside, estranged, not only from other people, but also from myself. I spent many years trying to reassemble the fragments of my divided self and reconnect them.

When we work through our own grief, we can cut to the heart of the common universal experience, which opens us to feel for others.

Our relationships are the crucible of our greatest growth.

If we don't tell our stories to each other, we lose the opportunity to find what binds us together, as human beings and spiritual beings.

We need not the king's horses and men but do need each other to put ourselves back together again.

When you are broken, you run. But you don't always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards.

It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try.

Watching, not doing. Seeking safety in not being seen. It's a habit you can fall into, willing yourself into invisibility. And it doesn't serve you well in life. Believe me it doesn't. Not with people and loves and hearts and homes and work. But for the first few days with a new hawk, making yourself disappear is the greatest skill in the world.

I've learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not.

Most of all I hope my work is about a thing that seems to me of the deepest possible importance in our present-day historical moment: finding ways to recognise and love difference. The attempt to see through eyes that are not your own. To understand that your way of looking at the world is not the only one. To think what it might mean to love those that are not like you. To rejoice in the complexity of things.

I learned that to harden your heart was not the same as not caring.

When you are broken, you run. But you don't always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards. My reasons weren't White's, but I was running just the same.

So the thing is, you all share the same kind of pain, exactly the same, but you're too busy experiencing total agony to feel anything other than completely alone. That's what it's like!' I

It wasn't just that I saw in his book, reflected backwards and dimly, my own retreat into wildness. It was this: of all the books I read as a child, his was the only one I remembered where the animal didn't die.

Being sworn at by woodland creatures is disquieting, but comforting too...these alarm calls remind me that we have consequential presence, that the animals we like to watch are creatures with their own needs, desires, emotions, lives.

You are exercising what the poet Keats called your chameleon quality, the ability to 'tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment'. Such a feat of imaginative recreation has always come easily to me. Too easily. It's part of being a watcher, forgetting who you are and putting yourself in the thing you are watching.

They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world. In my time with Mabel I've learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not.

Most of all I hope my work is about a thing that seems to me of the deepest possible importance in our present-day historical moment: finding ways to recognise and love difference. The

I couldn't let that suffering happen. Hunting makes you animal, but the death of an animal makes you human.

And now, holding the card in my hands and feeling its edges, all the grief had turned into something different. It was simply love.

I'd turned myself into a hawk – taken all the traits of goshawks in the books and made them my own.

It's part of being a watcher, forgetting who you are and putting yourself in the thing you are watching. That

You cannot know what it is like to be a bat by screwing your eyes tight, imagining membranous wings, finding your way through darkness by talking to it in tones that reply to you with the shape of the world.