Quotes About Empathy

We do not have to let other people's irresponsible emotional expression alienate us from our feelings.

If this is what you suffered, you then grew up feeling that no one likes you. No one ever listened to you or seemed to want you around. No one had empathy for you, showed you warmth, or invited closeness. No one cared about what you thought, felt, did, wanted or dreamed of. You learned early that, no matter how hurt, alienated, or terrified you were, turning to a parent would do nothing more than exacerbate your experience of rejection.

Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.

Animals do not view freezing as a sign of inadequacy or weakness, nor should we.

When children are asked to "turn the other cheek," "put on a happy face," or "strike back" in situations where they are experiencing daily terror, they do not learn character. On the contrary, they lose self-confidence and a sense of safety necessary to succeed.

steam-rolling over a younger, weaker child or pet.

The power of goodness—in this case, the organism's innate capacity to restore itself to health and balance—is encouraged by a bystander, an empathetic witness who helps to prevent trauma by embodying kindness and acceptance.

By tending to yourself first, paradoxically, you are in a better position to tend to your child. When you can feel your center, can notice that your breath slows down and you experience the fluidity of changing sensations, you have moved out of a momentary "freeze." Your energy is now available to pay close attention to your child's needs and expression. In this way you will naturally circumvent complicating your child's reactions with your own.

To get from people you had to give a piece of yourself, a real piece that mattered. Just being nice was not enough.

There is hope for all the colored people in this country while one white woman can love one colored man.

At this moment we are as close as people can ever hope to be. Our hearts have beaten together, our bodies have merged. Right now I know what love is. I know how it feels to be not completely alone. Right now I know you as I have never known anybody else.

The community protects and shares out of caring; love is never far away.

To get from people you had to give a piece of yourself, a real piece that mattered.

He glanced at her in what she thought seemed a normal way. Everyone else was trying to peer into her soul, to measure the pain inside.

Forgiveness is a funny thing, it warms the heart and cools the sting.

Regarding his friend's insight after losing her spouse to cancer: "She told me she had plenty of people to do things with but nobody to do nothing with.

for all of their accomplishments, Americans should not fall in love with their own virtue, and should not expect non-Americans to take that virtue on faith.

don't mind. I just thought you might not want to." The three men

mean anything." She seemed subdued, sad.

The essential challenge is to transform the isolation and self-interest within our communities into connectedness and caring for the whole.

We can create structures of belonging even if we are introverted

2) Asking For The Order Doesn't Motivate People To Buy. What motivates people to buy is when they get that you "get" them—that you understand their world, and have shown how your product/service will impact their company in ways important to them. In most cases, the salesperson that wins the deal isn't the one with the best product or lowest price, but the one who best articulates the customer's point of view.

To possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others: this I think captures our love of and our need for novels, for fictional accounts of the world that let us experience it beyond the limits of our own pair of eyes, to imagine it, provisionally, as it is seen and felt by someone else, however different that person may be.

Cognitive psychologists have confirmed what we already knew: that readers of complex novels show a greater capacity for understanding the complexities of human interaction.8