Quotes About Empathy

Learn the absolute pleasure of kindness.

Perhaps success should not mean that you have nothing to say to anyone, no time for anybody, and not a moment left in your calendar for someone whom you might suddenly realize you love.

Start a conversation with someone with whom you have "nothing in common" and no possibility of scoring with, networking with, or even seeing again. In other words, a conversation just for the civilized hell of it.

The lowest form of barbarism is smugly to berate someone for extending an act of kindness.

The most amazing thing about young men is how invisible they were to you when you were young. It is also the most poignant.

The most beautiful man in the world says everything with his eyes, and the rest with his hands and mouth.

Three great ways to lose a lover: Talk to him the way your mother talked to your father. Berate him in public because everybody loves an audience. Contrast him to your friends, and compare him with his predecessors.

Try to dwell on the people you'd like to love, instead of all the people you do loathe.

Reading is one of the important part of being a person.

To express nostalgia for a childhood we no longer share is to deny the actual significance and humanity of children.

I didn't have anything against them and they never did anything wrong to me, the way other people have all my life. Maybe they're just the ones who have to pay for it.

A selfish person will never learn the joy of giving and being a blessing to others.

You've lost sight of the fact that it is our weeniness that makes us human!

To see certain things, you have to be lying on your back with tears in your eyes and a scalding potato in your mouth. It's possible, I think, that you have to be hurt to see anything at all.

He did not understand what went on in a Chinese heart, that something like this could happen. The Indians made more sense.

And the justice in this world is that you don't have to break legs because somebody's broken yours.

Mental illness is a cruel disease.

I've never had one person whom I've helped say, 'Doc, I wish you would have left me crazy on the streets.

intercession is impossible until we allow the things that break God's heart to break our hearts as well.

The most powerful thing that can happen in the place of prayer is that you yourself become the prayer. You leave the prayer room as Jesus's hands and feet on earth. This is what it means to pray continually: to see with the eyes of Jesus and to hear with his ears with every waking moment.

Here's the question: Will we allow the things that break God's heart to break our hearts too? It'll mean more tears, more listening. It may even be the reason why so many of us struggle with our own personal burdens and heartaches - God is allowing us to feel the pain, to be weak and broken so that our prayers have power.

Rob's story reminds me that how we listen is sometimes (always?) more important than what is said. Maybe that's why Jesus was forever asking people if they had ears to hear what he was saying. And I suspect it's also why the very first word of the great Benedictine Rule, which has guided monastic communities for 1,500 years, is this one little word: listen. Fifteen centuries of successful community built on the power of mere listening.

In your life, I hope you will never oppress the Weak, that you will oppose Human Bondage in all its guises, that you will bend your Knee to no man.

The only way to fight nostalgia is to listen to somebody else's nostalgia