Quotes about Empathy

Why is it, she wondered, that things that hurt people make them deeper and more understanding?

We want nothing from you that you do without grace," Mrs Whatsit said, "or that you do without understanding.

Everything that we do either draws the Kingdom of love closer, or pushes it further off.

I can't do it for love of God, like Tom Tallis, or for heaven's sake, as Mr. Frost said. But because I love people I have to act according to it—to the fact that I love them.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' For our sakes Jesus went through all the suffering we may ever have to endure, and because he cried out those words we may cry them out, too.

When two people, lovers, or sometimes friends, have an enduring care for each other, allow each other to be human, faulted, flawed, but real, then being human becomes a glorious thing to be. If the human race ever makes progress, that is how.

Expand my love, Lord, so I can help to bear the pain, help your love move my love into the tired prostitute with false eyelashes and bunioned feet, the corrupt policeman with his hand open for graft, the addict, the derelict, the woman in the mink coat and discontented mouth, the high school girl with heavy books and frightened eyes. Help me through these scandalous particulars to understand your love. Help me to pray.

Love isn't how you feel. It's what you do.

If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn't need to hate. That's why we still need

Mercy. It didn't mean that everything was okay, could or should be condoned. But we can't move out of ourselves and our own self-justifications until we look in the mirror and know, yes, I, too, could have done this. Or worse. My anger at my mother. At Mama for telling me things I don't want to know.

God doesn't plan the horrors. They happen. But God can come into them.

Only a human being can say I'm sorry. Forgive me. This is part of our particularity. It is part of what makes us capable of tears, capable of laughter.