Quotes about Empathy

Encouraging someone and speaking truth into someone's life when God asks you to do so are healthy and wonderful things—but it's never right to make a quick, dismissive judgment. Our judgments based on external appearances don't have all the information and wisdom that

I have now learned that we do not even know what "happy" is until we forget about ourselves, start focusing on others, and become generous givers.

Be not ashamed women, ... You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God.

I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there.

If you're angry at a loved one, hug that person. And mean it. You may not want to hug — which is all the more reason to do so. It's hard to stay angry when someone shows they love you, and that's precisely what happens when we hug each other.

Good listeners, like precious gems, are to be treasured.

Gathering God, draw us out beyond our cramped circles of care. Draw us toward the neighbor, the other, the outsider, the hurting one. May we practice compassion. Amen.

Humanness depends on being faithfully heard. And being faithfully heard depends on risky speech of self-disclosure uttered in freedom before a faithful listener.

The judge remembers to be a parent: a father in wistfulness, a mother in yearning, a God of grief flowing with tears beside the deathbed. The angry God remembers to be a God who cares about the beloved partner. God has noticed. God has noticed the mocking and the dying, the denial and the irrepressible pain. To

Clearly, human transformative activity depends upon a transformed imagination. Numbness does not hurt like torture, but in a quite parallel way, numbness robs us of our capability for humanity.

Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.