Quotes About Empathy

Antoinette, tu vas sûrement trouver que la vie est injuste, comme tu as déjà pu t'en rendre compte. Les gens vont t'accuser, ils l'ont d'ailleurs déjà fait. Mais écoute-moi bien. J'ai lu les rapports de police. J'ai vu ton dossier médical. Je sais exactement ce que tu as subi, et je t'assure que rien de tout cela n'est de ta faute. Tu n'as pas à avoir honte.

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.

Lonely, ain't it? Yes, but my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely.

On the outside it doesn't look like very much happened. A burned girl was in my class for a while. Once I brought her some homework. In class she said my name. Then she was gone. That's pretty much all that happened.

Interactive management requires open, honest, and tension-free relationships with others. You do this by negotiating relationships and sharing, so that everybody wins.

Humans and animals inhabit the planet together and we have to find a way to take the cruelty out of it.

Anything that takes your heart, Darling,' the woman smiled, patting Odette on the shoulder as if she was a child.

To win power, we need self-discipline not self-indulgence; listening to what people are truly saying, not hearing only the parts we want to hear.

Sadly, we do a much better job of making people feel guilty than we do of delivering them from the guilt we create. We need to confess this and change our ways.

I have three things I'd like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don't give a shit. What's worse is that you're more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.

Jesus never says to the poor: 'come find the church', but he says to those of us in the church: 'go into the world and find the poor, hungry, homeless, imprisoned.

Eva, I recognize your confusion. It is not always easy to understand another's spirit, especially if you do not know where to look" -Rovender

A heart of compassion is just as hard to hold within you as one of indifference" -the Truth Bird

Even the most wicked have a family that loves them.

Our wives are like mirrors, reflecting back to us what kinds of husbands we are.

True biblical love is compassionately and righteously pursuing the well-being of another.

One guy, seeing that I was hungry, insisted on buying me a huge lunch and when I thanked him for his kindness, he simply said, 'Pass it on.' I liked this selfless concept - repay me by rewarding someone else entirely with a generous dollop of goodwill.

History was not simply a catalogue of the dead and buried and benighted, but rather a vast new world to be pioneered; ...if you approached the past generously, so to speak—its people as humans, not facts, as modern in their time as we were in ours, who thought and felt as we do, the dead would live again, our equals, not our old-fashioned, hopelessly unenlightened, and backward inferiors. Humanity, to be fully known, had to be seen as changeless as well as ever changing.

In the meantime, she is the one today among us most able to bear the idea of her own beauty, and when we see it, what we do is natural: we take our burned hands out of our pockets, and clap.

In a world where, as one poet says, "people speak to each other mostly for profit," it is exhilarating to listen to a voice that is practicing disclosure without seeking advantage. That is intimate.

You speak differently to your four-year-old daughter than you do to the bank manager.

What humanizes the speaker's rage, what keeps the poem a poem, is the grief which colors it—we understand that the speaker's immoderation and anger come from deep personal injury. We recognize that the rage comes out of an experience of empathy, and that forcefield between love and denunciation moves us as much as Lear's rage on the mountainside. It amounts to the difference between poetic terrorism and poetic tragedy.

The way I see it," King said, "your great-grandfather fought and died because he believed my great-grandfather should stay a slave. I'm supposed to feel all warm inside about that?

Give others the benefit of the doubt and remember that people are doing the best they can with the resources that they have.