Quotes About Empathy

identify with everything so easily—with your body, your thoughts, your opinions, your roles—and so you suffer. I have released all identification.

In truly listening to our most painful songs, we can learn the divine art of forgiveness.

To stop the war, we need to begin with ourselves. Mahatma Gandhi understood this when he said: I have only three enemies. My favorite enemy, the one most easily influenced for the better, is the British Empire. My second enemy the Indian people, is far more difficult. But my most formidable opponent is a man named Mohandas K. Gandhi. With him I seem to have very little influence.

When we take time to quiet ourselves, we can all sense that our life could be lived with greater compassion and greater weakness.

We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with Soul Force. We will not hate you, but we cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws. But we will soon wear you down with our capacity to suffer. And in winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win yours in the process. Martin

Like the mother of the world who carries the pain of the world in her heart, you are sharing in the totality of this pain and are called upon to meet it in compassion and joy instead of self-pity.

The Buddhist approach to this collective suffering is to turn toward it. We understand that genuine happiness and meaning will come through tending to suffering. We overcome out own despair bby helping other to overcome theirs.

What was love, anyway? he mused. She said it was caring, caring more about someone else than about yourself.

Nothing done in love that harms no one can be perverse.

Each time we come to a book we give it a different reading because we bring a different person to it. It is not you who reads the book, the book reads you.

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.

As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.

And now we don't go to priests and doctors and people with letters after their names we come to people who have been there we come to each other and we try and we don't have to die.

Bring a baby to any grown-up -- even the gruffest or most inhibited -- and watch what happens. Without exception, they will do something to try and make the baby laugh. Psychologists, anthropologists, and other experts have theories about why this is so. For me it's enough to believe that whenever a baby laughs, our humanity is somehow exalted.

The goal of radicalism is to improve the human condition, not to prove one's own moral superiority.

When I am cast in a movie where I feel that the woman's part is more interesting, I usually start thinking about Spencer Tracy and Fred Astaire. They seem to be the most clear actors when working with women.

It's a slight stretch of the imagination but most people are alike in most ways so I've never had any trouble identifying with the character that I'm playing.

Well, a girlfriend once told me never to fight with anybody you don't love.

This need not be the case. When Christians read the Bible through the lens of Jesus' gracious life and ministry, they will be able to see lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as their sisters and brothers, faced with all the usual human problems, and loved equally by God.

Jesus himself may have been subject to many of the same slurs as sexual minorities in his culture. The men around him wanted to talk about the law. Instead, Jesus showed that God's grace and love extends to everyone—especially those people who are disenfranchised, overlooked, or forgotten by traditional culture.

They did not look at each other. They did not say a word to each other... They knew that talk is meaningless when a common knowledge is already there. The silence bound them as no words ever could.

LEAD LIKE YOU'RE RIGHT, BUT LISTEN LIKE YOU'RE WRONG

You may conquer an army with superior tactics and men, but you can conquer a nation only by conquering the hearts of the people.

In one of his most important lessons, he told his sons that conquering an army is not the same as conquering a nation. You may conquer an army with superior tactics and men, but you can conquer a nation only by conquering the hearts of the people.