Quotes About Empathy

Uncle Cor once had asked Vincent if he would feel anything for a woman or a girl who was beautiful, 'but I said I would have more feeling for and would prefer to be involved with one who was ugly or old or impoverished or in some way unhappy, who has acquired understanding and a soul through experience of life and trial and error, or sorrow.' -Vincent Van Gogh

More than any woman I ever knew, she comforted.' -Mrs. Huxley about Emma

We shall me much less miserable together.' -Emma Darwin to husband Charles upon grief for loss of daughter Annie

I know you're fond of brooding, but I'm an old man. Your silences make me wonder whether I've actually gone deaf.

But it takes a different kind of bravery to talk to the ones we love, ask forgiveness, and move on. Sometimes all we can do is take one step at a time.

I love Black Beauty, but it's just a story, of course. What matters is. . . I don't know. . . what you do once the story is inside you.

When our father does the things he needs to do in the world, we understand it is his due. If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she had abandoned us. It is a miracle she survives our mixed messages, written in society's most poisoned ink. It is enough to drive her mad.

Empathy is more painful than medusa stings.

It is not enough to feel love. More important is how we express love.

He doesn't care about his own life so he doesn't care about the lives of others.

I felt at ease with myself, which must have meant that she did not regard me as strange and so I had no reason to imitate someone who was less strange and had been saved from doing the chameleon thing.

I am upset today, Lapinski, because my friend is dying... I spread my loneliness out like a fan in front of you. He is my comrade, Lapinski. Holding on to the hands of the clock with his fingertips. For me. We hang on for each other.

The Poet wipes her eyes on the corner of my tablecloth. 'Perhaps the modern tragedy, Lapinski, is that we weep and do not know what we are weeping for. This is quite different from catharsis.' She suddenly throws back her head and roars with laughter; her gold teeth rattle

We learned that it takes months, even years, to see some ideas take shape. Above all, we recognized that caring for others is very hard to do if you don't see yourself as capable of being helpful to them. There is a terrible and seemingly pointless pain in powerless caring, and it erodes the capacity for affection. To hear a story and be faced with either ignoring it or being a martyr to everyone else's woes are the usual choices available. A school that is a community has other possibilities.

Remember you are everything, or you are nothing. If you are everything, then your heart is so big it can hold all of humanity within itself, you have no jealousy or narrowness. You are in the heart of every creature and every creature is in your heart. There is only bliss. Intro to Part 2, Chapter 4. Credit given to Swami Purna.

So we sit, inside our separate skins, and every now and then lean forward to gaze hard at another person and read his or her looks. We ask, 'how's the weather in there?' And if they can answer, if they so choose, we're privileged to share for a brief time what it means to be other than who we are. Might it be that animals share--to varying degrees, inside their varied skins--these same shadowy contents from which love, terror, grief, compassion, and shame spring?

These new people were her people. So what that she'd only recently met these women. In their hearts they were all the same: women yearning for rich lives, someone to love & someone to love them in return, friends to laugh with, drink with & cry with.

What is in our hearts is never a one-way street. Only as children when we're too young to understand the signs do we love unrequitedly. If you love, it's because you feel its power reflected back on you.

It is the interaction of the two styles - his withdrawal and her insistence that he tell her what she did wrong - that is devastating to both.

One woman put it this way: "...I'm a compassionate person, but I also don't want to be friends with somebody who doesn't full show up as well.

You're so real. That's why we love you." ... Her friend's response reflected the reciprocity of showing vulnerability. It is a gift not only to the one who has the meltdown but also to the ones who witness it.

These are the signals that combine with what is said to make up the devices we use to show we're listening, interested, sympathetic, or teasing—and that we're the right sort of people.

the metamessage yields heart meaning.

Our deepest wish is to be understood and approved of by our mothers and our daughters. We can get closer to that goal by listening to the ways we talk to each other, and by learning to talk to each other in new ways.