Quotes about Empathy

We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear. We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott Joplin's music lives! We care because we know this: the life we save is our own.

My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house. I knew just what it was. In fact, when it happen, you can't miss it.

there could be no happy community in which there was one unhappy child.

Be what they do not want: Be thoughtful. Be skilled at loving. Be of good heart. Be of the world tribe.

remember one time you said your life made you feel so ashamed you couldn't even talk about it to God, you had to write it, bad as you thought your writing was. Well, now I know what you meant. And whether God will read letters or no, I know you will go on writing them; which is guidance enough for me. Anyway, when I don't write to you I feel as bad as I do when I don't pray, locked up in myself and choking on my own heart. I am so lonely, Celie.

The world was almost at the point of forgetting what a fine time people can have helping one other. That people like to work together and to kick back after work and share their expansiveness. What would happen if our foreign policy centered on the cultivation of joy rather than pain?

People who think nonviolence is easy don't realize that it's a spiritual discipline that requires a great deal of strength, growth, and purging of the self so that one can overcome almost any obstacle for the good of all without being concerned about one's own welfare.

They think, after the biggest of the white folks no longer on the earth, the only way to stop making somebody the serpent is for everybody to accept everybody else as a child of God, or one mother's children, no matter what they look like or how they act.

Quién soy yo para decirle a quién ha de querer? Lo mÃ

Try not to hold her fears against her. At the end she understood, and believed. And forgave-whatever there was to forgive.

Did people leave you, did their spirits simply take off, because you wouldn't read a book that turned them on? He now knew the answer was yes.

To love someone over many years is all the opportunity you need to learn how to love them back from anywhere.