Quotes About Empathy

You need only to have glimpsed it once to know there's a window out of all this black and sleepless night. Then you must use it to hope on. Key to the dream country where all your people are whole again, and the gunboats can't reach you, and the Empire of Hate is rubble. You and your secret dream of freedom are the tidal wave. Keep watch, every night if you have to. As for sleeping, you can sleep when you're dead.

Tears are part of the leeway of the common areas of a hospital, since so many have to do their crying away from the patient's bed. You don't care who sees you cry in the lobby: it was port of entry for all the sorrows, and one gave up all one's previous citizenship at the border.

The better you get at being just a shoulder, the more unsexed you become.

What Richard wants is what I want, what everyone in the world wants. To be accepted, to be loved for who we are, not for some playacting phony version of ourselves.

Every time I get a script it's a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It's like falling in love. You can't give a reason why.

There are so many qualities that make up a human being... by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it is irrelevant.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

Honey, Don't go shooting all the dogs 'cause one of them's got fleas

I dislike myself when I act like a passive wimp or an aggressive bully. It feels good to feel good, and I want all the good feeling I can get. Essentially, emotional maturity demands on-going, total acceptance of people, places, things and situations as they are, rather than as I might wish them to be.

Am I now going to mimic that person's bad attitude and make the situation worse, or am I going to be the person I want to be?

I forget that my greatest defense lies in my defenselessness. Being basically powerless, I have no defense. Having no defense, I choose to rise above the immediate situation rather than lower myself to that person's standard of behavior.

skill in dealing with emotions (yours and someone else's) and in communicating effectively on an interpersonal level.

tells people how to recognize and deal with their feelings, and how to help others do the same thing by working through their mutual communications problems. Like Hendrix, he places great emphasis on listening. He lists three phases of ethical persuasion: First, exploring the other's position (listening), then explaining your viewpoint, and finally creating resolution.

early in sobriety I routinely threw my sobriety at other drivers on the freeway, people who didn't even want it.

Having appointed ourselves judge, jury and executioner, and having declared someone else "wrong," we feel superior to that person.

people who know about such things insist there are only two basic emotions: Love and Fear. All other emotions, they say, are variations on either of these two themes. At every moment of every day we choose either love or fear.

I'm sorry, but for my own serenity, I can't afford to hear the details. I love you. I respect you, and I know you'll make the right decision.

allow the offending person to "make" them feel bad today. Such situations result in self pity, an emotion with absolutely no redeeming social value, but which obviously feels good, at least for a brief interval, or it wouldn't be so popular.

I have also made the decision to believe that you and I and every one of us have been doing the best we could at every moment of every day of our lives up to and including this moment. If we could have done better, we would have done better.

Furthermore, if this is true for me, then it is true for you and for every one of us. All along, we did the best we could under the circumstances at that particular time.

Intimacy in a relationship develops as a result of working through problems. Handled in this manner, a problem truly becomes a win/win situation. Everybody wins.

Senator, I started my life in a house without water or electricity. So I don't cede to you the high moral ground of not knowing what life is like in a ditch. to Senator Robert Byrd at a budget hearing

Stop looking for love and start showing it.

most of the problems we think we have stem from too much self-focus rather than too little.