1,354 Quotes About Empathy

We want the people around us to show us a satisfactory measure of genuine empathy, but no one has any idea what that looks like. This puts everyone in the precarious position of guaranteed failure. I know that no one knows how to deal with stuff like this. There are no experts here.

The experiences we endure as trials are what cultivate compassion in our hearts. We feel for others because we have suffered similarly. We know and empathize, having tasted the bitterness for ourselves. Sadly but truly, it is the harshest trials that tend to cultivate the deepest compassion. Trials are every person’s lot in life. You are not alone.

This is how we light the stars, again and again: by showing up with our ordinary, difficult bodies, when other ordinary, difficult bodies might need us. Which is the point - the again-and-again of it. You never get to live the wisdom just once, rise to the occasion of otherness just once. You have to keep living this willingness to look at other lives with grace, even when your own feels like shit, and you would do anything to crawl inside a different one.

The time has come for women and men to band together to jointly create gender harmony. We must gather in mixed group to plumb new depths of relational awareness, courageous truth-telling, compassionate listening, empathic sensitivity, and mutual healing.

It is arrogant to pretend to understand everybody, and doing it in order to live with them, or love them-- well. If it depended on understanding, there would not be any communities, or relationships. Worse, if you spend your life waiting to be understood or, something more horrible, waiting for the others to be like you. Well, it is as useless, as always shouting the same word until it means nothing else.

Affliction equips the suffering to empathize with others in anguish and not only does it strengthen them, it enables them to be consoling comforters in a world full of hurt.

You’re still human,” Shallan said, reaching across, putting her hand on Navani’s knee. “We can’t all be emotionless chunks of rock like Jasnah.”Navani smiled. “She sometimes had the empathy of a corpse, didn’t she?

To retain our dignity, we must sometimes refuse to live life at any cost

She seemed to be able to turn the accent on and off. She tended to turn it on for comforting people, and for threatening to kill them.