Quotes About Empathy

Why should a poem please even a majority of readers or listeners? Perhaps someone needs the particular poem that you wrote. You probably do, at any rate.

You should not face the world if you are unable to give to the world

Whatever you want in life, other people are going to want it too. Believe in yourself enough to accept the idea that you have an equal right to it.

Of course I loved books more than people.

What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?

Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so.

I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.

One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.

Then I didn't think much about it, I just did it. I started wearing some of the things he left behind, especially his bathrobe, some shirts too, but only in the house. I read his books, I am embarrassed at this. I also did some things to the place I knew he would like. He always complained about my plants, so I got rid of them. It seems strange to think about it now, but at the time I found some comfort in it. [ACCOUNTANT, AGE 38, SEPARATED AFTER LIVING TOGETHER 13 YEARS]

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.

To learn more about them, people should use you.

I have to put the worst of her into her.

If suffering like hers had any use, she reasoned, it was not to the sufferer. The only way that an individual's pain gained meaning was through its communication to others.

Our own difficulties shouldn't blind us to the difficulties of others.

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people. ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL. Earl

If you take one lesson and one lesson only from this book, I want it to be this: God doesn't function in a currency of shame. Shame isn't from God, it isn't of God, and it isn't something Christians should engage in. Shame is not nor will it ever be a useful response to a person's experience of the world, especially when it comes to sexual experiences.

Whoever you are, you are loved by a God who finds you beautiful and wants you to be fulfilled in life. Be a safe space for yourself first; then you can learn to be a safe space for others.

In evangelical-speak, this is meeting people where they are. But I would add the following caveat: we must meet people where they are without a desire to change them into our image of what they should be.

The Christian is responsible to care for the hurting and the downtrodden, and should not be in the business of creating further pain.

I do not care for prejudice in any form. In my opinion, we women have been subjected to so much of it that I cannot see how anyone of my sex could fail to identify with those similarly oppressed.

Death of a wife is the biggest Silent Treatment you'll ever receive, so be good to her.

One of his central commands is a commonplace of ancient philosophy, and is a conclusion at which most world religions eventually arrive: 'whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them' – what has come to be known as the Golden Rule.18

You listen to people, you listen so deeply that you can hear their past lives, The crackle of their funeral pyres,

Logic doesn't stop you feeling. You can behave logically and it can hurt like hell. Or it can comfort you. Or release you. Or all at the same time