Quotes About Empathy

They held each other and kissed and pushed each others' darkness into the corner, believing in each others' light, each others' dream.

When you write about the people you hate the most, do it with love.

It is very easy to misunderstand a strange people, and very hard to understand them thoroughly.

I think what motivates people is not great hate, but great love for other people.

Nothing, except what flows from the heart, can render even external manners truly pleasing.

All people want is someone to listen.

Listen. Do not have an opinion while you listen because frankly, your opinion doesn't hold much water outside of Your Universe. Just listen. Listen until their brain has been twisted like a dripping towel and what they have to say is all over the floor.

Share your M&Ms. There are bags and bags of them all over the place. If you give them one of yours, even one of the green ones, you will not be lacking. Honust Injun. Now apply this to Time, Concern, Touch, Interest and Being Vulnerable.

As you get older you have more respect and empathy for your parents. Now I have a great relationship with both of them.

Later, a very fat woman came in with a trolley and put a plate of something brown and foul-smelling on a table beside me. I couldn't imagine what I'd ever done to her, but whatever it was, it must have been bad. She obviously realised that she'd over-reacted, because half an hour later she came and took the plate away again.

I know a lot of people think therapy is about sitting around staring at your own navel - but it's staring at your own navel with a goal. And the goal is to one day to see the world in a better way and treat your loved ones with more kindness and have more to give.

You don't have to be rich to leave a positive legacy; you don't have to be intelligent, famous, powerful or even particularly well organised, let alone happy. You need only to treat people with kindness, compassion and respect, knowing they will have been enriched by their encounters with you.

To listen to someone means devoting time to the process, putting your own concerns on hold, remaining silent even when you're dying to say something. Patient listening also involves a willingness to postpone judgement about what is being said. Mostly, we want to rush in to agree, to disagree, to object, to correct; but listening demands the patience to let all that wait until the other person has finished saying to us what they want to say to us.

We do the right things because it's the right thing to do. We respond to others' needs because they have those needs. Our survival depends on cooperation. [p61, paraphrased]

Here's the cardinal rule of the good listener: receive before you respond. [p97]

Forgiveness calls on deep reserves of moral courage: the courage to break out of the spiral of self-pity; the courage to set aside resentment; the courage to rise above biterness; the courage to act well, when all our instincts call on us to act badly. p112

Indolent and unworthy the beggar may be—but that is not your concern: It is better, said Joseph Smith, to feed ten impostors than to run the risk of turning away one honest petition.

You can always somebody who is worse than you are to make you feel virtuous. It's a cheap shot: those awful terrorists, perverts, communists--they are the ones who need to repent! Yes, indeed they do, and for them repentance will be a full-time job, exactly as it is for all the rest of us.

Do I avoid looking a stranger in the eyes because I don't want to make him uncomfortable, or do I turn my eyes so he can't look into me?

No matter what we talk about, we are talking about ourselves

I talk because I feel, and I talk to you because I want you to know how I feel.

Today I acknowledge that I am not in position to judge what mistakes anyone is making or what lessons anyone needs to learn. I don't know how far someone has come or when that person will have a breakthrough, I simply don't know what other people should be doing. But when I think I do know, I clearly am not doing what I should be doing, which is taking responsibility for my own life.

We feel understood by people who like us; misunderstood by people who don't -- and those feelings are probably realistic.

Pacifism is not a panacea; it asks only that people should relinquish the habit of deliberate imposition of suffering.