Quotes About Empathy

A yawn is a silent scream.

Once I got over the belief that I didn't have a right to explore my life when there were many other people in the world experiencing greater suffering than I could imagine, I stepped onto the path that would truly allow me to change.

There is nothing worse than falling prey To someone else's confusion.

Gwen, a woman with BPD, talks about her inability to decipher the world around her. "On the day I was born, all the newborn babies got on a line to meet God and to get their How to Act in All Situations Throughout Life book. When it was my turn, God had run out of the book. Ever since that day, I have been looking over other people's shoulders so that I could read their book and know how to act.

This painful mental illness is not fair, but saying it is not fair does not change anything. Thinking that you should not have to work so hard to get through everyday life with someone with BPD does not change the fact that this is what you need to do.

People with BPD judge themselves harshly all the time and find judgments lurking around the corner of every raised eyebrow, sneeze, yawn, or shoulder shrug. You must be acutely aware of how your responses can be misconstrued as judgments.

There's no reason why a society consisting of rational beings capable of empathizing with each other, complete and having no natural reason to compete, should have a government, laws, or leaders.

It is a grave mistake to think that the Inquisition or the Southern lynchings or the Rwandan genocide were committed by people who were fundamentally different from us. Soul-scarred Vietnam veterans have tried repeatedly to tell us: You don't know what you're capable of until you are there. Only when all of us recognize our own potential for evil, do we have some power to guard against it.

Spirituality centered in love is hard work, but it is solid granite. Because love doesn't insist on who is right, it isn't at risk when we are shown wrong. It simply is a commitment to a foundational set of values – and a values commitment is something that no one else can take away.

It's important to help both friends and strangers when times are hard.

I do not expect from someone what they will not or cannot give me.

I feel that there's nothing more genuinely artistic than to love people.

No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.

Magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And, what is more, they find it everywhere.

Find the Grace in the things you can't change, and help somebody if you can.

It is not the magnitude of the gift that matters but the magnitude of the heart that offers it.

If they had a social gospel in the days of the prodigal son, somebody would have given him a bed and a sandwich and he never would have gone home.

The Saturday Review is not a church paper. It's a secular paper. But, the other day, it said, "The desensitization of 20th century man is more than a danger to the general safety. There are some things we have no business ever getting used to.

I feel like I gather up other people's energy. Not on purpose but my eyes are open to everything. We are all part of the same phantom fabric anyway.

It was definitely a part of our life. I mean, my mom had both her brothers and her fiancee in Vietnam at the same time, so it wasn't just my dad's story, it was my mom's story too. And we definitely grew up listening to the stories.

Poems help to keep human beings actually responding as human beings to the sufferings of others.

When I talk to people about what makes us human, some people say it's our tears. Because we are the only ones who weep, only we can feel true sorrow. When I hear this, I remember Isiro's face, her anguished eyes as she cried for Mikeno, how she screamed at the keepers with her teeth bared and pushed at the poles. How she dashed back to his body and dug her fingers into his chest as if the strength of her grip could bring him back. There is sorrow without tears. Of course there is.

There is something in the eyes of a bonobo that you don't see in those of a tiger or a shark. They are human eyes, but not the cautious glimpse of a stranger you pass on a city street, or the pretended interest of a shrink you're paying $300 an hour. Or someone you think you recognize but don't. The eyes of a bonobo are the eyes of your best friend or a lover or a priest. They see into you. They see nothing else. They invite confession.

Any leader who doesn't support the heart of evolving humanity is not a leader worthy of being followed.