Quotes About Empathy

The best way to combat racism is to have blacks and whites relate to one another as individuals, rather than as racial abstractions.... It becomes much harder to make a nasty generalization about another group after you have spent time in the home of one if its members.

Suffering is no guarantee of empathy and the decent behavior it engenders. When people emerge from pain and oppression, they have two options: they can use their anger over their suffering to legitimize their oppression of others; or they can use the memory of their pain to empathize with others. Suffering ennobles only those who want to be ennobled by it.

While shared values aren't sufficient for friendship, friendship is impossible without shared values. In fact, one reason people are hurt by those they had considered friends is that friends are too often chosen without attention to their values.

If you really serious 'bout helpin' somebody, crawl down in the ditch with 'em, bandage up their wounds, and stick with 'em until they is strong enough to crawl up on your back and get out

He taught us that everyone has a good story and the more of others you understand, the better your grasp of human nature, a gift given great weight in my family (73). - Bill Clinton, Paying Attention

Similarly, forcing your beliefs onto someone else damages your relationship. The damage may not be easy to spot at first, like tiny cracks in a wooden wheel, but it's just a matter of time before the wheel splits apart.

We ought not to do to our future selves what it would be wrong to do to other people.

I do not live in you, I bear my house inside me, everywhere until your winters grow more kind by the dancing firelight of mind where knobs of brass do not exist whose doors dissolve in tenderness House that lets in, at last, those fears that are its guests, to sit on chairs feasts on their human faces, and takes pity simply by the hand shows her her room, and feels the hum of wood and brick becoming home.

How one suffered for one's children — all their upsets a hurt; all their joys a triumph. 'And

Our maturity will be judged by how well we are able to agree to disagree and yet continue to love one another, to care for one another, and cherish one another and seek the greater good of the other.

If you are setting out to be joyful you are not going to end up being joyful. You're going to find yourself turned in on yourself. It's like a flower. You open, you blossom, really because of other people. And I think some suffering, maybe even intense suffering, is a necessary ingredient for life, certainly for developing compassion.

Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.

You show your humanity by how you see yourself not as apart from others but from your connection to others.

We are wired to be caring for the other and generous to one another. We shrivel when we are not able to interact. I mean that is part of the reason why solitary confinement is such a horrendous punishment. We depend on the other in order for us to be fully who we are. (...) The concept of Ubuntu says: A person is a person through other persons.

There is a certain kind of dignity we admire, and to which we aspire, in the person who refuses to meet anger with anger, violence with violence, or hatred with hatred.

We are always at our best when compassion enables us to recognize the unique pressures and singular stories of the people on the other side of our conflicts.

My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.

When we ignore the pain, it grows bigger and bigger, and like an abscess that is never drained, eventually it will rupture. When that happens, it can reach into every area of our lives—our health, our families, our jobs, our friendships, our faith, and our very ability to feel joy may be diminished by the fallout from resentments, anger, and hurts that are never named.

It is true that when we harm others, we harm ourselves; but it is just as true that when we help others, we also help ourselves.

I would like to share with you two simple truths: there is nothing that cannot be forgiven, and there is no one un-deserving of forgiveness.

do not heal in isolation. Connecting with others is how we develop compassion for others and for ourselves.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality

To forgive is not just to be altruistic.

To treat anyone as if they were less than human, less than a brother or a sister, no matter what they have done, is to contravene the very laws of our humanity.