Quotes About Empathy

To consider, Is this man of our own or an alien? is a mark of little-minded persons; but the whole earth is of kin to the generous-hearted.*

Pankaj Mishra (#iampm)

Pankaj Mishra (#iampm)

sometimes we hate something so much that we wind up identifying with it.

I've learned in my travels not to ask too many questions. It's better to talk about yourself. Offer something of yourself and your own story so that the dialogue turns into a bartering of firsts.

Çok, çok olduklar? ölçüde, "kendini evinde hissetmeme" duygusunu paylaÅŸanlar ve asl?nda bu deneyimi kendi toplumsal ve politik pratiklerinin merkezine yerleÅŸtirenlerden oluÅŸur.

Let my soul smile through my heart and my heart smile through my eyes, that I may scatter rich smiles in sad hearts.

Making others happy, through kindness of speech and sincerity of right advice, is a sign of true greatness. To hurt another soul by sarcastic words, looks, or suggestions, is despicable.

The best accessory a girl can have is her best friend.

I'm just saying, grace is available to all of us if we make it available to each other.

Girl-shaming as a sport and industry needs to be over.

How things look on the outside of us depends on how things are on the inside of us.

Lovers have a language that can be lost--how to speak, how to touch, when to try.

The civility we need will not come from watching our tongues. It will come from valuing our differences.

We suffer, ironically, from our indifference to those among us who suffer.

The people who help us grow toward true self offer unconditional love, neither judging us to be deficient nor trying to force us to change but accepting us exactly as we are. And yet this unconditional love does not lead us to rest on our laurels. Instead, it surrounds us with a charged force field that makes us want to grow from the inside out — a force field that is safe enough to take the risks and endure the failures that growth requires.

We find common bonds in the shared details of the human journey, not in the divergent conclusions we draw from those details.

Violence is what we get when we do not know what else to do with our suffering.

The writer Anne Lamott says, "You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."28

Teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see I have a chance to gain self knowledge and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject. In fact, knowing my students and my subject depends heavily on self knowledge.

When the heart is supple, it can be "broken open" into a greater capacity to hold our own and the world's pain: it happens every day. When we hold our suffering in a way that opens us to greater compassion, heartbreak becomes a source of healing, deepening our empathy for others who suffer and extending our ability to reach out to them.

If you hold your knowledge of self and world wholeheartedly, your heart will at times get broken by loss, failure, defeat, betrayal, or death. What happens next in you and the world around you depends on how your heart breaks. If it breaks apart into a thousand pieces, the result may be anger, depression, and disengagement. If it breaks open into greater capacity to hold the complexities and contradictions of human experience, the result may be new life.

Each time I walk into a classroom, I can choose the place within myself from which my teaching will come, just as I can choose the place within my students toward which my teaching will be aimed. I need not teach from a fearful place: I can teach from my curiosity or hope or empathy or honesty, places that are as real within me as are my fears. I can have fear, but I need not be fear - if I am willing to stand somewhere else in my inner landscape.

No habit of the heart is more crucial to making "We the People" a reality than extending hospitality to those who appear alien to us.