Quotes About Empathy

Strengthen me by sympathizing with my strength not by my weakness.

The cool thing about being a songwriter, or a writer, I guess, in general, you can take on a lot of different things, experience a lot of different things, just by writing about them.

The best way to know the soul of another country is to read its literature.

A conflict begins and ends in the hearts and minds of people, not in the hilltops.

When we revere our human form we respect other human beings, who are so similar to us, for their innate worth. This is the starting place for developing a social conscience.

The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to believe that others behave badly because of their personality while we ourselves behave badly because of factors beyond our control. People often jump to blaming others while letting themselves off the hook. Drivers think that someone cutting them off must be a jerk rather than wondering if there's an emergency or some other reason requiring them to drive that way.

When you're judging, you're not listening. And if you're not listening, you're missing out on one of the best ways to stimulate your smart vagus pathway and turn down the volume of your stress-response system. But if you're not judging, you can listen more and feel calmer, and this, in turn, will make interacting with others much easier and judging others less necessary.

the transformative power of relationships

I do not say what I feel, and people often take that for shyness, even kindness.

Learning to listen, letting people finish their sentences, and most of all, the habit of noticing the difference between what people say and how they say it. {on the habits of psychoanalytic training and practice applied to fiction writing} The gap between what people tell you and what's really going on is what interests me.

In a true partnership, the kind worth striving for, the kind worth insisting on and even, frankly, worth divorcing over, both people try to give as much or even a little more than they get. "Deserves" is not the point. And "owes" is certainly not the point. The point is to make the other person as happy as we can, because their happiness adds to ours. The point is, that in the right hands, everything that you give, you get.

These were my people: the abandoned, the unloved, the phenomenally unlucky.

Intimacy is being seen and known as the person you truly are.

Clare is good, spiky company, and she is the very best companion to have in a bad situation. Trouble brings out the cheer beneath her darkness, unlike everyday life, which tends to have the opposite effect

There are people you always love, no matter what they have done to you, no matter what you have done to them.

He said, You know what Oscar Wilde said—women are meant to be loved, not understood. Applies to both of them, darling. And I nodded, although it seemed to me that I was going to be a woman too and I would like it if someone thought they should understand me.

She said she remembered when Republicans compared President Roosevelt to Hitler and to Stalin and to Mussolini. She said she used to see people wearing I HATE ELEANOR buttons walk past her on the sidewalk and she wanted to spit, she wanted to kill them.

We love the attentiveness of powerful people, because it's such a pleasant, gratifying surprise, but Eleanor was not a grand light shining briefly on the lucky little people. She reached for the soul of everyone who spoke to her, every day. She bowed her head toward yours, as if there was nothing but the time and necessary space for two people to briefly love each other.

Perspective is useful, of course: It's why very few people want to be eighteen again. But the other side is having so much perspective, it's hard to give a damn about anything happening here in the real.

Removing your mask helps others remove theirs. Of course, this means acting as if you feel psychologically safe, even if you might not be fully there yet. Sometimes, you have to take an interpersonal risk to lower interpersonal risk.

As a Coptic priest in New York put it, "[H]umility is a mediator. It will always be the shortest distance between you and another person.

Without taking anything away from their important contributions across the globe, U.S. elites often seem to have more compassion for the world's poor than America's poor, perhaps because the former are easier to romanticize.

Before my dad died I saw the world as a place. By "place" I mean space. Fixed. Space did not move, but people moved in space. People and space could touch each other, but not very deeply. After he died, I saw that people and space are permeable to each other in a way that people and people are not. I saw that space is like water. People can go inside it.

He waits. "And I think that is what I would like love to be. Leaving room for each other, knowing that not every step is going to be side by side. Giving more than taking. Waiting. Trusting,