Quotes About Empathy

There is no wisdom without love.

we have developed a corollary that is neither love nor forgiveness—namely, tolerance. The problem with this is clear: I can "tolerate" you without it costing me anything very much. I can shrug my shoulders, walk away, and leave you to do your own thing. That, admittedly, is preferable to my taking you by the throat and shaking you until you agree with me. But it is certainly not love.

The church's task in the world is to model genuine humanness as a sign and an invitation to those around.

The question for us, as we learn again and again the lessons of hope for ourselves, is how we can be for the world what Jesus was for Thomas: how we can show to the world the signs of love, how we can reach out our hands in love, wounded though they will be if the love has been true, how we can invite those whose hearts have grown shrunken and shriveled with sorrow and disbelief to come and see what love has done, what love is doing, in our communities, our neighborhoods:

To hope for a better future in this world—for the poor, the sick, the lonely and depressed, for the slaves, the refugees, the hungry and homeless, for the abused, the paranoid, the downtrodden and despairing, and in fact for the whole wide, wonderful, and wounded world—is not something else, something extra, something tacked on to the gospel as an afterthought.

We are like a frightened bird before him, shrinking away lest his demand crush us completely. But when we eventually yield—when he corners us and finally takes us into his hand—we find to our astonishment that he is infinitely gentle and that his only aim is to release us from our prison, to set us free to be the people he made us to be. But when we fly out into the sunshine, how can we not then offer the same gentle gift of freedom, of forgiveness, to those around us?

The fact is that when we forgive someone we not only release them from the burden of our anger and its possible consequences; we release ourselves from the burden of whatever it was they had done to us, and from the crippled emotional state in which we shall go on living if we don't forgive them and instead cling to our anger and bitterness.

You cannot rescue someone from the scars of an abusive upbringing by replaying the same narrative on a cosmic scale and mouthing the word "love" as you do so.

History is always a matter of trying to think into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves.

Jesus's way of life is the path of self-giving love

We expect God to be, as we might say, 'in charge': taking control, sorting things out, getting things done. But the God we see in Jesus is the God who wept at the tomb of his friend. The God we see in Jesus is the God-the-Spirit who groans without words. The God we see in Jesus is the one who, to demonstrate what his kind of 'being in charge' would look like, did the job of a slave and washed his disciples' feet.

Being a good friend is like being a lifesaver.

I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.

All great artists know that part of their task is to light up the distance between two human beings.

Love was the result of having caught a glimpse of another's loneliness.

A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.

Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white's front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.

Love doesn't cast out fear but makes it possible to weep, howl, at least.

Minimize your needs and Maximize your deeds.

Elena. Hush, let me talk to the crazy lady.

I will fight you endlessly if I think you're wrong but I will never judge you.

I'm sorry. I never meant to hurt you." " Then why were you carrying a gun?

He didn't know what else to do, how to comfort her, so he simply held her, held the only person in the world who had ever cried for him

Riley knelt down, clasping the fur at the back of her neck. "You're fucking bruised all down your back. Why the hell didn't you tell me it hurt?" Because it didn't at the time, genius.