#comp

I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person. ↗

— Walt Whitman

#empathy #empathy

We all of us need to be toppled off the throne of self, my dear," he said. "Perched up there the tears of others are never upon our own cheek. ↗

— Elizabeth Goudge

#empathy #pride #selfishness #empathy

I could really use someone else's smile today. ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#empathy #helping #helping-others #kindness #richelle

I like to borrow a metaphor from the great poet and mystic Rumi who talks about living like a drawing compass. One leg of the compass is static. It is fixed and rooted in a certain spot. Meanwhile, the other leg draws a huge wide circle around the first one, constantly moving. Just like that, one part of my writing is based in Istanbul. It has strong local roots. Yet at the same time the other part travels the whole wide world, feeling connected to several cities, cultures, and peoples. ↗

— Elif Shafak

#rumi #mysticism

His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#curiosity #desire #life #love #passion

Ah. I smiled. I'm not really here to keep you from freaking out. I'm here to be with you while you freak out, or grieve or laugh or suffer or sing. It is a ministry of presence. It is showing up with a loving heart. ↗

— Kate Braestrup

#ministry #love

To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for unsentimental compassion and love. (157) ↗

— Stephen Batchelor

#empathy #love #suffering #love

Live in the wisdom of accepted tenderness. Tenderness awakens within the security of knowing we are thoroughly and sincerely liked by someone... Scripture suggests that the essence of the divine nature is compassion and that the heart of God is defined by tenderness. ↗

— Brennan Manning

#gentleness #god #identity #love #self

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the only thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationships between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. ↗

— John Fowles

#gender-identity #men #war #women #imagination

Sympathy is the child of imagination ↗

— Clarence Darrow

#imagination #vision #imagination