Quotes About Empathy

Seeing when you justify yourself and when you blame others is not a reason to criticize yourself, but actually an opportunity to recognize what all people do and how it imprisons us in a very limited perspective of this world.

Natural warmth is our shared capacity to love, to have empathy, to have a sense of humor. It is also our capacity to feel gratitude and appreciation and tenderness. It's the whole gamut of what often are called the heart qualities, qualities that are a natural part of being human. Natural warmth has the power to heal all relationships—the relationship with ourselves as well as with people, animals, and all that we encounter every day of our lives.

Taking the . . . vow to help others implies that instead of holding our own individual territory and defending it tooth and nail, we become open to the world that we are living in. It means we are willing to take on greater responsibility, immense responsibility. In fact, it means taking a big chance. —CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE

When we hear about compassion, it naturally brings up working with others, caring for others. The reason we're often not there for others - whether for our child or our mother or someone who is insulting us or someone who frightens us - is that we're not there for ourselves. There are whole parts of ourselves that are so unwanted that whenever they begin to come up we run away.

The more you're willing to open your heart, the more challenges come along that make you want to shut it.

Blaming is a way to protect our hearts, to try to protect what is soft and open and tender in ourselves.

Status quo is not very helpful for spiritual growth, for using this short interval between birth and death. On the other hand, expanding our ability to feel comfortable in our own skin and in the world, so that we can be there as much as possible for other people, is a very worthy way to spend a human life.

It's about being able to stay present with ourselves. It becomes increasingly clear that we won't be free of self-destructive patterns unless we develop a compassionate understanding of what they are.

In a nutshell, when life is pleasant, think of others. When life is a burden, think of others. If this is the only training we ever remember to do, it will benefit us tremendously and everyone else as well.

This pattern is what we observe in many difficult situations. For instance, if someone is very ill, everyone pulls together to help, but if the illness goes on for a year or two, people start pulling away because they're not up for that much.

IN ORDER to feel compassion for other people, we have to feel compassion for ourselves. In particular, to care about people who are fearful, angry, jealous, overpowered by addictions of all kinds, arrogant, proud, miserly, selfish, mean, you name it—to have compassion and to care for these people means not to run from the pain of finding these things in ourselves.

If we were to make a list of people we don't like—people we find obnoxious, threatening, or worthy of contempt—we would discover much about those aspects of ourselves that we can't face. If we were to come up with one word about each of the troublemakers in our lives, we would find ourselves with a list of descriptions of our own rejected qualities.

I realized that it is these two things that staying with regrets offers: It can become the seed of compassion and empathy so that you can stand in the shoes of other people because you'er feeling exactly what they feel. And it spurs you on to help people in the future rather than hurt them.

Selfless help, helping others without an agenda, is the result of having helped ourselves. We

Our story lines are different, but when it comes to pain and pleasure and our reaction to them, people everywhere are the same.

There comes a time when we are able to be pierced to the heart by our own suffering and the suffering of others, and by our own regrets, without it dragging us down. We can hold the sadness of life in our hearts while never forgetting the beauty of the world, and the goodness of being alive.

Often we think of the people we don't like as our enemies, but in fact, they're all-important to us. They're our greatest teachers: special messengers who show up just when we need them, to point out our fixed identity.

learned that a person can only take so much. He found that taking on suffering had to be balanced with love and kindness, with the completeness of life.

Before we can heal others with our speech, we need to get a handle on our own mind and its propensities.

This is where, through my mindfulness and my tonglen and everything that I do, my whole life is a process of learning how to make friends with myself.

soften, to connect with your heart and engender a basic attitude of generosity and compassion toward yourself, the archetypal coward.

What makes maitri such a different approach is that we are not trying to solve a problem. We are not striving to make pain go away or to become a better person. In fact, we are giving up control altogether and letting concepts and ideals fall apart.

The main question is, are we living in a way that adds further aggression and self-centeredness to the mix, or are we adding some much-needed sanity?

No matter how committed we are to unkindness, selfishness, or greed, the genuine heart of bodhicitta cannot be lost. It is here in all that lives, never marred and completely whole.