Quotes About Empathy

Integral to being emotionally healthy is to have a mother who has the ability to respect her child's differences and not perceive them as betrayals.

At the same time, the daughters, in adulthood, must also make the effort to really know their mothers—which many daughters do not—in order to understand what forces shaped those mothers. These daughters need to discover what torment may have unwittingly informed their mothers' parental choices, and to see their mothers as composites of strengths and weaknesses, rather than as all good or all bad.

Most people can recall schoolyard confrontations with with bullies. Boys were expected to deal with them by standing their ground and slugging it out, even, as one man told me, "if you knew you were going to get your head bashed in. You had to show you could take it, and you'd die rather than cry." But for girls, the surest and safest way to avoid being picked on or terrorized is to get the bully to like you.

Hairdressers are a wonderful breed. You work one-on-one with another human being and the object is to make them feel so much better and to look at themselves with a twinkle in their eye.

It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends

Remember that the best medical treatment is a sense of relativism. No matter how badly you might feel, take comfort in knowing there's someone who feels much worse.

That was when I fell in love with my son, when I understood how insignificant I was, and how marvelous he was, and how one day he'd feel the exact same thing.

My weakness for sympathizing with others has much to do with my status as a bastard, which is not to say that being a bastard naturally predisposes one to sympathy. Many bastards behave like bastards, and I credit my gentle mother with teaching me the idea that blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior.

Love is being able to talk to someone else without effort, without hiding, and at the same time to feel absolutely comfortable not saying a word.

I am a sleeper, a spy, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not a misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, though some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides.

My weakness for sympathizing with others has much to do with my status as a bastard, which is not to say that being a bastard naturally predisposes one to sympathy.

blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior. After

Before I only wanted to change the world. I still want that, but it was ironic how I never wanted to change myself. Yet that's where revolutions start! And it's the only way revolutions can continue, if we keep looking inward, looking at how others might see us. That's what happened when I met Sofia. I saw myself the way she saw me.

One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private. We

I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace,

One must listen to them carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly private. We cannot know whether our pain is like anybody else's pain until we talk about it. Once we do that, we speak and think in ways cultural and individual.

Perhaps forgiveness is overrated,

I cannot be the only one who believes that if others just saw who I really was, then I would be understood and, perhaps, loved.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That sounds good, but things are never that simple. The problem, you see, is how to know what we want to have done to us.

Even then I understood that if the rich could only spare all the hungry a bowl of rice, they would be less rich but they would not starve.

blurring the lines between us and them can be a worthy behavior.

Here's to you, Claude, I said, raising my glass to him. Congratulations. For what? he said, raising his own. Now you know what it feels like to be one of us. His laugh was short and bitter. I was thinking the exact same thing.

But what is more revolutionary than helping one's enemy and his kin? What is more radical than forgiveness?

We cannot know whether our pain is like anybody else's pain until we talk about it. Once we do that, we speak and think in ways cultural and individual. In this country, for example, someone fleeing for his life will think he should call for the police. This is a reasonable way to cope with the threat of pain. But in my country, no one calls for the police, since it is often the police who inflict the pain.