Quotes About Empathy

I'm not saying this to be trite or to make you feel better, but believe me when I say this: the people who matter will see you, no matter what.

Because if what started out as me just trying to be truthful and tell it like it is has struck a chord with other people feeling just as flawed and confused as I do – and if in some small way it's helped by showing them they're not alone; that I'm here and I hear them – then that's the biggest bonus of all.

Happy is the best way to be because then you can let other people be happy, too. Their own way.

Why don't you put on an animal's pelt and drag me to your house by my hair?

It's not about what you've done; it's how you've experienced whatever has happened to you. Matt Lawrence in The Overachievers

What is to give light must endure burning.' I think people who care for others understand. Caregiving is painful.

There is only one true heroism, and that is to know the world as it is and to love it. The great people of history, certainly the spiritually great, give evidence of this ability. HUGH DOWNS W

He had never been able to find any technique to handle that quality in her. Sometimes she acquiesced immediately to his requests, but on other occasions she refused them flatly and he could not reverse her. It never occurred to Lane that his wife sometimes concluded he was right and sometimes wrong. To Lane, it was approach not content that moved the world. He

In any case, I hadn't gone into the subject of dorm living too deeply with him, not because I hesitated to probe his tender spots but because I would have been probing my own. This is called tact, and is reputed to be a virtue.

Everyone makes a greater effort to hurt other people than to help himself.

Those that despise people will never get the best out of others and themselves.

An old dream is dead but a new one is being born, as a tree that pushes through the solid ground to recede. A new strength, born of pain and suffering, is pulsating in the veins and a new empathy and understanding is being born of past suffering.

You came in to this world with enough light to find your way out of the dark, enough kindness to save a soul, enough love to shift a planet. Don't worry, you are enquipped with all you could ever need. Look with in, you are drenched in magic.

Warren's guests had learnt about poverty, not from being poor themselves, in places where you did not hear the screams and yelling of help.

They kept poking him in his bony ribs, wanting to know: Who do you reckon you are? What his name was and why he kept saying that his house had disappeared and all that. It is very hard to lose a house. Why would anyone want to do that?

As Thomas Gordon pointed out, 'Parents who find unacceptable a great many things that their children do or say will inevitably foster in these children a deep feeling that they are unacceptable as persons.' That doesn't change just because the parents remember to say soothingly, 'We love you, honey; we just hate almost everything you do.

How we feel about our kids isn't as important as how they experience those feelings and how they regard the way we treat them.

We ought to love children, as my friend Deborah says, 'for no good reason.' Furthermore, what counts is not that we believe we love them unconditionally, but that they feel loved in that way.

the question is not whether more flies can be caught with honey than with vinegar, but why the flies are being caught in either case—and how this feels to the fly.

Children need to be loved as they are, and for who they are. When that happens, they can accept themselves as fundamentally good people, even when they screw up or fall short. And with this basic need met, they're also freer to accept (and help) other people. Unconditional love, in short, is what children require in order to flourish.

Obviously, things work best when parents and teachers are helping kids to become good people—and, better yet, when they're actively supporting one another's efforts.

Just because a child's action may have a negative effect on you doesn't mean that was the child's intention.

When you stand by and let bad things happen, your child experiences the twin disappointments that something went wrong and you did not seem to care enough about her to lift a finger to help prevent the mishap.

Our main question shouldn't be "How do I get my child to do what I say?" but "What does my child need - and how can I meet those needs?" In my experience, you can predict much of what happens in families just from knowing which of those questions is more important to the parents. You don't even have to know the answers they've found. The questions are what count.