Quotes About Empathy

Of course you are. I'm sorry for many of the things I've done, too. Everyone is sorry. It's good to be sorry—but don't make a fetish of it.

You can recognize the people who live for others by the haunted look on the faces of the others. I would so much rather you wrote a book in order to entertain yourself than to help me. Or if your subject matter is darker and more serious, I would prefer that you made your art in order to save yourself or to relive yourself of some great psychic burden, rather than to save or relieve us.

Mandale luz y amor cuando te acuerdes de él y olvídate del tema

someday you will understand that nobody passes through this world without suffering—no matter what you may think of them and their supposed good fortune.

Everyone is sorry. It's good to be sorry—but don't make a fetish of it.

One can never know the state of another man's heart.

I thought my aunt was terrific. She had paid attention to me as a person, not a child, and that means everything to an eleven-year-old child who does not want to be seen as a child.

The fact that this was a fairly accurate portrait of my own mother is a quick indicator of how difficult it once was for me to tell the difference between myself and the powerful woman who had raised me.

His face is a comprehensive encyclopaedia of kindness.

But I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog's money, my dog's time -- everything.

the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one's humanity.

Estar con cuatro pies en la tierra, una cabeza hecha de follaje, mirando el mundo con el corazón.

Stones grow. Plants grow and live. Animals grow, live, and feel").

There were a few years there, lost in borderless despair, when I used to experience all the world's sadness as my own.

You can't give me your shame, because it's not a thing. We fucking invented it.

She reached up and touched his face. He allowed her. She explored his warm features. He had a kind face—she could feel that he did.

Able to exist without regular doses of romance or flattery from my solitary farmer of a father. Able to cheerfully plant gardens of daisies among the inexplicable stone walls of silence that my dad sometimes builds up around himself.

She and I respect each other, which makes up for the fact that we dislike each other.

Third, nobody ever really listens to anybody else's complaints, anyhow, because we're all too focused on our own holy struggle, so basically you're just talking to a brick wall.

When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.

I want to live in a world full of explorers and generous souls rather than people who have voluntarily become prisoners of their own fortresses. I want to live in a world full of people who look into each other's faces along the path of life and ask, "Who are you my friend and how can we serve each other?

Elizabeth Gilbert

I like you, kiddo, and once I like a person, I can only like them always. That's a rule of my life.

Then my mercy swelled, and for just a moment I felt mercy for everyone who has ever gotten involved in an impossibly messy story.