Quotes About Empathy

I have stretched in my spiritual practice to think and pray not only as a Christian, but as a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Native American, an atheist, a post-theist. I try on different hats as I light my candle, and while my thoughts might change or my prayers

Having no human companion I felt a spirit of comradeship for the objects of nature around me. In my childish way I communed with these as with my own soul; they became the sharers of my confidence.

The idea that the Natives must all be removed and confined in their own kraals is in my opinion the greatest nonsense I have ever heard.

The best we can do for others is work on ourselves.

If my client had not distracted his wife from her moments of unhappiness so that he could stay calm, she would have had the opportunity to learn to handle her own moods.

You were a child, you didn't mean to hurt my feelings. Children are ignorant. It takes an adult to choose to be cruel.

A] certain degree of un-understanding (not mis-, but un-) is the only possible sanctuary which one human being can offer to another in the midst of the devastating intimacy of a happy marriage.

Clem caught her eye across the table. It seemed to her sometimes that the most important thing about marriage was not a home or children or a remedy against sin, but simply there being always an eye to catch.

There's something singularly moving about that moment when this man—deaf and sick and misanthropic and self-torturing, at the same time one of the most extraordinary and boundlessly generous men our species has produced—greets us person to person, with glass raised, and hails us as friends.

He served humankind but never understood people, and though he yearned with all his heart for love and companionship, year after year he could bear humanity less and less in the flesh. His

forgetting that the one we are speaking with is a person, not a factory for granting wishes. He invites us to pray so we will engage him in conversation, and through conversation, get to know him.

It always feels better when someone understands that you're standing in a shit storm holding a broken umbrella.

No matter what happens to someone, at that exact moment, something that could be construed as worse is happening to someone else. That doesn't lessen our own heartache. It doesn't diminish the fact that right then, you're dealing with one of the worst things that's ever happened to you.

Walter asked me to marry him again," she said finally. Gertie gave me a knowing look. Bingo. She'd called that one correctly. "I'll bake him a chocolate cake," Gertie said. "It's his favorite. Might take some of the sting out of the rejection." Ida Belle looked over at us. "I didn't say no.

Life has a way of taking the joy out of living if you let it," Adelaide said. "I've seen so many couples just like you two get beaten down by responsibility and tragedy. And unfortunately, it's usually only one of them that keeps it all together. Then the one who got off easy complains about the lack of attention while the one who's been juggling all the balls resents having no help.

I nodded, completely understanding his desire to get away from people, especially people who were judging your ability to do your job when they really had zero idea what that job entailed.

The problem with society is that most people are too comfortable in their own lives to even try to imagine the difficulty of someone

Oh, I resented her at first. The whole 'in sickness and in health' thing, but I eventually came to realize it was for the best. If someone stays for any reason other than they want to be there, it will only lead to resentment. And then what do you have?" "Two miserable people," Ida Belle said. "Exactly," Nolan agreed.

I think the absence of hope removes all empathy. Then all you want is for the rest of the world to suffer like you do.

Gertie reached over and patted my hand. "It always feels better when someone understands that you're standing in a shit storm holding a broken umbrella." That pretty much summed it up.

My husband works all week, so on weekends, he tells me he doesn't want to "deal with" our sons. I'm amazed that he doesn't notice that I'm basically radiating hatred all the time.

Behavioral Change Stairway Model, five steps that include active listening, showing empathy, building rapport, and gaining influence—which leads, finally, to the fifth step: behavioral change.

... social advance depends quite as much upon an increase in moral sensibility as it does upon a sense of duty ...

We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by travelling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size of one another's burdens.