Quotes About Empathy

Tonglen (sending-and-taking) practice also helps cultivate fearlessness. When you do this practice for some time, you begin to realize that fear has to do with wanting to protect your heart: you feel that something is going to harm your heart, and therefore you protect it.

This is our link with all those who have ever loved. This genuine heart of sadness can teach us great compassion.

Hatred never ceases by hatred But by love alone is healed. This is an ancient and eternal law.

This book stresses repeatedly that it is unconditional compassion for ourselves that leads naturally to unconditional compassion for others.

This can be the value of our personal suffering. We can understand firsthand that we are all in the same boat and that the only thing that makes any sense is to care for one another.

What we hate in ourselves, we'll hate in others. To the degree that we have compassion for ourselves, we will also have compassion for others.

Unwise selfish people think only of themselves, and the result is confusion and pain. Wise selfish people know that the best thing they can do for themselves is to be there for others. As a result, they experience joy.

But fortunately for us, the soft spot—our innate ability to love and to care about things—is like a crack in these walls we erect. It's a natural opening in the barriers we create when we're afraid.

This genuine heart of sadness can teach us great compassion. It can humble us when we're arrogant and soften us when we are unkind.

A fundamentalist mind is a mind that has become rigid. First the heart closes, then the mind becomes hardened into a view, then you can justify your hatred of another human being because of what they represent and what they say and do.

Bodhichitta exists on two levels. First there is unconditional bodhichitta, an immediate experience that is refreshingly free of concept, opinion, and our usual all-caught-upness.

we might realize that we are on the verge of something. We might realize that this is a very vulnerable and tender place, and that tenderness can go either way.

As Trungpa Rinpoche put it, "Everybody loves something, even if it's only tortillas." Bodhichitta

Second there is relative bodhichitta, our ability to keep our hearts and minds open to suffering without shutting down.

You begin to have the clarity to see injustice happening, but you can also see that injustice, by its very definition, is harming everybody involved. It's harming the people who are being oppressed or abused, and it's harming those who are oppressing and abusing.

The Four Limitless Ones Chant May all sentient beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness. May they be free from suffering and the root of suffering. May they not be separated from the great happiness devoid of suffering. May they dwell in the great equanimity free from passion, aggression, and prejudice.

We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves.

este dogma por el que sientes que el mundo se va a hundir si no actúa como tú quieres es una manera de agresión, aunque la creencia se considere digna o humanitaria

We're all in this together, all so interconnected that we can't awaken without one another. We

When you come from the view that you're fundamentally good rather than fundamentally flawed, as you see yourself speak or act out, as you see yourself repress, you will have a growing understanding that you're not a bad person who needs to shape up but a good person with temporary, malleable habits that are causing you a lot of suffering. And then, in that spirit, you can become very familiar with these temporary but strongly embedded habits.

Cultivating absolute bodhichitta means having a relationship with the world that is nonconceptual, that is unprejudiced, having a direct, unedited relationship with reality.

In cultivating loving-kindness, we learn first to be honest, loving, and compassionate toward ourselves.

When you come to have this kind of honesty, gentleness, and good-heartedness, combined with clarity about yourself, there's no obstacle to feeling loving-kindness for others as well.

THE only reason that we don't open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don't feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else's eyes.