Nothing renews my faith in humanity more than the exchange of compassion so profound that mere words cannot embrace it.

Empathy is what separates human beings from teenage boys.

The news can be poison to your soul, don’t let it kill your joy, be compassionate but not consumed. Be empathetic not enraged.

Sometimes all you can do is hug a friend tightly and wish that their pain could be transferred by touch to your own emotional hard drive.

One of his greatest talents was empathy; no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.

A writer is like a tuning fork: We respond when we’re struck by something. The thing is to pay attention, to be ready for radical empathy. If we empty ourselves of ourselves we’ll be able to vibrate in synchrony with something deep and powerful. If we’re lucky we’ll transmit a strong pure note, one that...

God only knows the torment of the suffering soul and only he can take away the pain.

Only show compassion and empathy to those you can trust.” If we did that, we would be burying homeless people every day.

Maybe, it is just enough to believe with a positive heart that people didn’t let you down. It could be just this: They couldn’t give you the compassion you really wanted based on where their heart is right now. Maybe, not now, but years later they will catch the memory of you in a quiet...

Blessed are those with cracks in their broken heart because that is how the light gets in.

Mental illness is not a fraternity or a social club for like minds. It is its own religion to each person that has it. Their mind is their pastor, their feelings are their scriptures and their delusions are their own bible story. To break them free, is to break their faith in signs. That is...

In my judgment, the woman is the equal of the man. She has all the rights I have and one more, and that is the right to be protected. That is my doctrine. You are married; try and make the woman you love happy. Whoever marries simply for himself will make a mistake; but whoever...

It’s hard to sit here and do cartwheels, … I understand the USC situation. I have empathy for them. But at the end of the day, I have little doubt that the Rose Bowl game between USC and Michigan will be a fabulous football game.

What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world, where...

Never give up your right to be wrong, and be sure to give others that right too.

What people don’t understand about depression is how much it hurts. It’s like your brain is convinced that it’s dying and produces an acid that eats away at you from the inside, until all that’s less is a scary hollowness. Your mind fills with dark thoughts; you become convinced that your friends secretly hate you,...

My mother always tells me that anyone who gets enjoyment from other people’s misery will eventually get the greatest discomfort from his or her own miseries.

My knowledge of myself is direct, synthetic, from within outwards; my knowledge of other persons is indirect, analytical, from outside inwards. My knowledge of myself starts at the core; that of others at the crust.

Understanding did not provide solace or make the pain go away; in many ways, understanding was just more salt in the emotional wound. Ignorance allowed one to fight back with unfettered cruelty. Understanding inspired empathy, which led to guilt, as well as suffering.She looked at Gavin, supine, unconcerned, contented, and thought that perhaps there was...

People rarely ventured outside the realm of their own hurts. They believed their own suffering was obvious to all, but might as well have been wearing blinders for all that they noticed anyone else’s.

…the best way to forgive someone is to enter into their sufferings …

Sometimes when you’re surrounded by dirt, CJ, you’re a better witness for what’s beautiful.

Being heartbroken doesn’t mean you stop feeling. Just the opposite — it means you feel it all more. With your heart in fragments, every sensation is sharper, every emotion more acute. Your feelings are enhanced, like a blind man with an impeccable sense of smell, or a deaf woman whose eyes can perceive things a...

Successful hunting, it could be said, is an act of terminal empathy: the kill depends on how successfully a hunter inserts himself into the umwelt of his prey–even to the point of disguising himself as that animal and mimicking its behavior.

Accustom yourself not to be disregarding of what someone else has to say: as far as possible enter into the mind of the speaker.

As far as you can, get into the habit of asking yourself in relation to any action taken by another: “What is his point of reference here?” But begin with yourself: examine yourself first.

If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. (95)

The misery of other people is only an abstraction […] something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one’s own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence.

…treat people with understanding when you can, and fake it when you can’tuntil you do understand.

A book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else’s head. You see out of the world through somebody else’s eyes. It’s very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you’ve just read a book by one of those people.

You can’t love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can’t be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that’s not what I mean). Show me the tyrants who have been great lovers.

If a palmist grasp my palm, and look into it, without seeing a single line, what would he read?

for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don’t read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and...

We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface hidden tension that is already alive

We weep for the blood of a bird, but not for the blood of a fish. Blessed are those who have voice.

Our stories hold unique inspiration for one another.

Indeed, insight is the true hallmark of empathy. The power of true empathy is its ability to give us a fresh understanding of the other person’s emotions and thoughts to illuminate an aspect of their experience that would not have been apparent to us had we not stepped into their shoes.

No matter what the situation may be, I still take pleasure in witnessing the joy of others.

You can’t fix things with a hug, but you can’t make them any worse either.

Positivity can be a negative,” I tell her, “if it’s used to diminish events that should be cause for concern. Saying ‘bad things happen to good people’ or “God doesn’t give anyone more than they can handle’, for instance, isn’t necessarily helpful to the person to whom something bad happened–it is much more beneficial to...

Yo no soy tan fuerte. A mi me importa que me entiendan. Hay personas a quienes quiero comprender y quiero que me comprendan. Hasta cierto punto, pienso que es inevitable que el resto de la gnete no lo haga. Ya me he hecho a la idea. Así que no me ocurre lo mismo que a...

He sits in an old armchair in the corner covered with bits of blankets and a bucket behind the chair that stinks enough to make you sick and when you look at that old man in the dark corner you want to get a hose with hot water and strip him and wash him down...

It’s not so much the journey that’s important; as is the way that we treat those we encounter and those around us, along the way

Some people are far more cognizant than others but sensitivity has its own cross to bear and ample insight, in many cases, can bring on disquietude.

This is what differentiates sympathy from empathy. No matter how much I care for you, it’s not until I recognize me in you and you in me that the veil of gauze is lifted on the world.

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us – a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain – it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for,...

Sure, some news is bigger news than other news. War is bigger news than a girl having mixed feelings about the way some guy fucked her and didn’t call. But I don’t believe in a finite economy of empathy; I happen to think that paying attention yields as much as it taxes.

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all sense a mysterious connection to each other.

The emotional states are liberated inside water, we calm down emotionally, we become more sensitive, we are able to “touch” deeper ourselves and other beings. Empathy is echoing back to us giving subtle vibrations from the realm of the senses. Find your water ~