Quotes About Empathy

Even if we manage to get rid of Trump [...] the political left still needs a course correction. We need to stop devouring our own and canceling ourselves. We need fewer sensitivity readers and more empathy as a matter of course. We need to recognize that to deny people their complications and contradictions is to deny them their humanity.

At some point in my early forties I realized that my primary goal in just about any verbal exchange is to lighten the mood.

On my message boards a recurrent theme was having a partner who didn't help, who didn't get it, who even judged and blamed. Even partners who did help often couldn't feel the wave of need engulfing the ill person. And my god, the need. It felt shameful to need other people so much.

what happens to patients who don't have the energy or the means to persevere in connecting their disconnected doctors, he said, "They fall through the cracks, and they suffer in their own world, alone.

To become chronically ill is not only to have a disease that you have to manage, but to have a new story about yourself, a story that many people refuse to hear—because it is deeply unsatisfying, full of fits and starts, anger, resentment, chasms of unruly need. My own illness story has no destination.

Onlookers often respond to the experience of chronically ill people by focusing on the supposed positives, presumably because it makes the pain of witness bearable.

To be chronically ill is to be in a state of ever-present "camouflaged grieving," as the historian Jennifer Stitt puts it. It was this ever-present grief I felt was being swept under the rug when my friend counseled me to see the good that had come of my illness. She wasn't wrong that something had come of it—but her quick counsel negated the complexity of the quest.

As Virginia Woolf testified in On Being Ill, "English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. . . . The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.

As the surgeon Atul Gawande wrote of the medical profession, "Nothing is more threatening to who you think you are than a patient with a problem you cannot solve.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. . . . Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

care effect,' " Nathanael Johnson wrote in Wired in 2013, "the idea that the opportunity for patients to feel heard and cared for can improve their health.

But there is a discomfort that surrounds grief. It makes even the most well-intentioned people unsure of what to say. And so many of the freshly bereaved end up feeling even more alone.

Happiest is he who expects no happiness from others. Love delights and glorifies in giving, not receiving. So learn to love and give, and not to expect anything from others.

Forgiveness is the best charity. (It is easy to give the poor money and goods when one has plenty, but to forgive is hard; but it is the best thing if one can do it.)

Remember that the first step in spirituality is not to speak ill of others. All human beings have weaknesses and faults. Yet they are all God in their being. Until they become Realized, they have their imperfections. Therefore, before trying to find faults in others and speaking ill of them, try to find your own weaknesses and correct those.

No amount of prayer or meditation can do what helping others can do.

I love everybody. Each one plays the role they have to play...

Irrespective of their birth labels and belief tables, my blessings to all those who feel themselves to be oppressed, depressed and suppressed from any cause whatsoever!

A day in which you do goodness far away from the crowds is indeed a very good day!

A good man can never be the enemy of someone; if he did, he ain't a good man!

A life which did not touch the life of others is a wasted life!

A lighthouse is not interested in who gets its light! It just gives it without thinking! Giving light is its nature!

A politician who has no compassion is nothing but an evil apparition; he is just a ghost, not a real man!

All cultures have things to learn from all other cultures. Don't get stuck in your culture! Go beyond it! Get out of your aquarium; get out of your farm; get out of your castle; break your bell jar! Give chance to other cultures and to other opinions! This is the best way for you to see the insufficiencies, absurdities and stupidities in your culture!