Quotes about Empathy

Ultimately we're all just walking each other home.

If you want to feel loving, I coached myself, do something loving. This is basic soul care.

This is the work of the Holy Spirit and our operating instructions, to be cooling breezes to sad or worried people, including ourselves, in this sometimes hot stuffy joint [the world].

When you're kind to people, and you pay attention, you make a field of comfort around them, and you get it back—the Golden Rule meets the Law of Karma meets Murphy's Law.

To heal, it seems we have to stand in the middle of the horror, at the foot of the cross, and wait out another's suffering where that person can see us.

When we try to see a damaged person as one of God's regular old customers, instead of a lost cause, it takes the pressure off everybody. We can then loosen our death grip on the person, which usually results in progress for everyone, also known in certain circles as grace.

She quoted the Reverend James Forbes as saying, "Nobody gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.

You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Mercy is radical kindness. Mercy means offering or being offered aid in desperate straits. Mercy is not deserved. It involves absolving the unabsolvable, forgiving the unforgiveable.

Kindness toward others and radical kindness to ourselves buy us a shot at a warm and generous heart, which is the greatest prize of all.

Mercy means compassion, empathy, a heart for someone's troubles. It's not something you do — it is something in you, accessed, revealed, or cultivated through use, like a muscle. We find it in the most unlikely places, never where we first look.

Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein.