Quotes about Empathy

People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude.

Your people are a mirror of your attitude. If you have a poor attitude, you can't expect your people to be upbeat.

Every person is different. Yet often, those differences are not understood or valued by others.

It's been suggested that successful communication consists of 7 percent content, 38 percent tone of voice, and 55 percent nonverbal communication. We're usually aware of the content of what we're saying, but not nearly as aware of our tone of voice.

Love and Pain go together, for a time at least. If you would know Love, you must know pain too.

The wretch who digs the mine for bread, or ploughs, that others may be fed, feels less fatigued than that decreed to him who cannot think or read.

To live with another within the compass of one heart: I must move to the side, must make myself small, so that the other has space and does not feel crowded.

We may not ever understand why we suffer or be able to control the forces that cause our suffering, but we can have a lot to say about what suffering does to us, and what sort of people we become because of it. Pain makes some people bitter and envious. It makes others sensitive and compassionate. It is the result, not the cause, of pain that makes some experiences of pain meaningful and others empty and destructive.

Perhaps that is the only cure for jealousy, to realize that the people we resent and envy for having what we lack, probably have wounds and scars of their own. They may even be envying us.

I believe strongly that one of the primary goals of religion is to teach people to like themselves and feel good about themselves. All my experience has taught me that people who feel good about themselves will be more generous, more forgiving of others, less defensive about their mistakes, more assessable to change, and better able to cope with misfortune and adversity.

Instead of exhausting ourselves trying to reshape the world to fit our dreams, we are better off using our strength to comfort one another in a world that is almost certain to mock our dreams and break our hearts.

Perhaps they suspected that I thought less of them because I knew it. (I'm too aware of human frailty to have let that happen. If anything, I thought more of them for wanting to face up to what they had done and for trying to change.)