Top 100 Empathy Compassion Quotes
#1. I don't think there's any reason in journalism not to approach stories we cover with humility, empathy, compassion, and intellectual openness. I mean, I think those are just important human traits. I don't think that precludes scrutiny, negativity, where it's appropriate.
David Gregory
#2. Understanding Subtle & Not-So-Subtle Motivations, Helps Grow Consideration, Empathy & Compassion, Which Leads to Forgiveness
Miriam Sachael
#3. One does not remember one's own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us
Anna Funder
#4. The real test of love is loving those who we feel are the hardest ones to love.
Criss Jami
#5. Once we are able to combine a feeling of empathy for others with a profound understanding of the suffering they experience, we become able to generate genuine compassion for them. We must work at this continually.
Dalai Lama XIV
#6. If you don't love yourself, it makes you incapable of knowing how to love another person.
Ellen J. Barrier
#7. It is through weakness and vulnerability that most of us learn empathy and compassion and discover our soul.
Desmond Tutu
#8. The pain on the inside is what keeps you human,' she said. 'Never forget that.
Taylor Stevens
#9. When you can begin to see the similarities between you and your work colleagues in respect of 'being human' and the collective challenges we all face, it makes life much easier to deal with, especially when met with overbearing behaviour.
Christopher Dines
#10. Humankind seems to have an enormous capacity for savagery, for brutality, for lack of empathy, for lack of compassion.
Annie Lennox
#11. The only time you look in your neighbor's bowl is to make sure that they have enough. You don't look in your neighbor's bowl to see if you have as much as them.
Louis C.K.
#12. If we simply imagined that everyone who crossed our path was living out his or her very last day on Earth, we might treat people as kindly as we ought to each day they lived.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#14. We must be able to love other people or forever endure the stain of disgraceful loneliness. By recognizing and expressing empathy for other people, we come to accept our own fallibility.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#15. When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them.
Criss Jami
#16. Nothing is more important than empathy for another human being's suffering. Nothing. Not a career, not wealth, not intelligence, certainly not status. We have to feel for one another if we're going to survive with dignity.
Audrey Hepburn
#17. 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
#18. Compassion, empathy and love are the real pillars we need to build with in ourselves to become human.
Loknath
#19. We live in a culture that discourages empathy. A culture that too often tells us our principle goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained.
Barack Obama
#21. By "empathy," some people mean everything that is good - compassion, kindness, warmth, love, being a mensch, changing the world - and I'm for all of those things. I'm not a monster.
Paul Bloom
#22. There is something so awe-inspiring in great afflictions that even in the worst times the first emotion of a crowd has generally been to sympathise with the sufferer in a great catastrophe.
Alexandre Dumas
#23. For those constantly full of joy, they sometimes feel a little guilty for always feeling so good. That guilt is compassion: it flies in with an attempt to share one's joy with others who do not have it.
Criss Jami
#24. 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
#26. Sometimes when you're surrounded by dirt ... you're a better witness for what's beautiful.
Matt De La Pena
#27. As an actor, I function from a place of compassion and empathy - you have to believe 100 percent what your character is doing, because otherwise it will look like it's not real.
Clare Bowen
#28. I was trying to keep God's pain at arms length.
Mike Weaver
#29. When we take into consideration the needs of both ourselves and others, we communicate honestly, compassionately and effectively.
Aletheia Luna
#30. Depression can seem absurdly self aggrandizing to those who do not experience it, But that does not make it any less painful to those who do.
Richard Brookhiser
#31. Empathy, as we have seen, leads to caring, altruism, and compassion. Seeing things from another's perspective breaks down biased stereotypes, and so breeds tolerance and acceptance of differences.
Daniel Goleman
#32. Difficult situations require compassion, level-headedness & the empathy to see issues from somebody else's perspective.
Ben Parr
#33. Manners are really the basis for how we treat other people - manners are born out of compassion, empathy, the "golden rule." Manners are, quite simply, making people feel welcome, comfortable, and respected.
Brian Grazer
#34. Sympathy is imagining the pain. Empathy is having suffered through it first.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#35. They say compassion is the only voice; a gift which can help mend the broken, lift the fallen and soften the hardened.
Aisha Mirza
#36. Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy.
Dean Koontz
#38. People differ in where they direct their empathy and their compassion. Many people are intensely concerned about the suffering of non-human animals, and some do not care at all. There are cultural differences.
Paul Bloom
#39. As a kid my heart would break for the villains.
Criss Jami
#40. It is not rubbish! It is the part of people that you do not understand.
E. M. Forster
#41. You can't fix things with a hug, but you can't make them any worse either.
Dean Koontz
#42. If you ask anyone, what is morality based on? These are the two factors that always come out: One is reciprocity, ... a sense of fairness, and the other one is empathy and compassion.
Frans De Waal
#43. There is no small act of kindness.
Every compassionate act makes large the world.
Mary Anne Radmacher
#44. I'm not alone in having obese people in my circle and in my family. I have loved morbidly obese people, and I don't approach obesity with revulsion or judgment but with empathy and compassion.
Lori Lansens
#45. A best friend is the one person that doesn't leave you worse off by their actions or yours.
Shannon L. Alder
#46. While each of us must walk this path alone, we need not do so without the empathy, the encouragement and the love of others who are travelling, or have travelled, this terrain - or those who having lived life long and deep and can meet us there, with wisdom and compassion.
Meryn G. Callander
#47. All wars derive from lack of empathy: the incapacity of one to understand and accept the likeness or difference of another. Whether in nations or the encounters of race and sex, competition then replaces compassion, subjection excludes mutuality.
Marya Mannes
#48. Our treatment of animals, in every department, is deeply and systematically immoral. Becoming a vegetarian is only the most minimal ethical response to the magnitude of the evil.
Colin McGinn
#49. Simple kindness as a means to no other end than itself is not something that springs up and flourishes on its own. Compassion is cultivated. Empathy needs watching over. It's not enough to simply plant the seeds. Their fruits are not native to the soil. Left to itself, the untended heart grows cold.
Marc Parent
#50. The circle of indifference has the self at its centre. The circle of compassion has others at the centre.
The former leads to apathy; the latter to empathy.
Shubha Vilas
#51. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#52. Humans have long since possessed the tools for crafting a better world. Where love, compassion, altruism and justice have failed, genetic manipulation will not succeed.
Gina Maranto
#53. People with lower incomes tend to give a greater percentage of their incomes to help others and show greater empathy and compassion - perhaps because they know they might face the same circumstances.
Kavita Ramdas
#54. When the positive revolution takes hold it will no longer be enough for politicians to gain points through attack or being negative. Politicians will be expected to be constructive.
Edward De Bono
#55. But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got.
Cheryl Strayed
#56. To me, empathy and compassion are among the bravest of emotions ... and faith, the bravest of convictions.
Gerard De Marigny
#57. All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.
Tahereh Mafi
#58. When we watch stories, we learn empathy, we learn compassion, and hopefully we achieve some sort of understanding.
Gavin Hood
#59. [ ... ] art instills the fundamental moral lesson: That you aren't the center of the universe. That others weren't created for your benefit. That they are just as real as you, with equal claimes to dignity and understanding.
William Deresiewicz
#60. So many people of liberal persuasion value their own progressive opinions more than they value the people they hold those opinions about.
Stephen L. Carter
#61. Self-compassion is key because when we're able to be gentle with ourselves in the midst of shame, we're more likely to reach out, connect, and experience empathy.
Brene Brown
#62. One-time rival and subsequent usurper Secretary of State Seward finally settled into an assessment of Lincoln that, His confidence and compassion increase every day.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#63. What dooms our best efforts to cultivate empathy and compassion is always, of course, other people.
Tim Kreider
#64. The more love you put off to the world in all aspects, the more it will return to you.
Brian A. Jackson
#66. You can unlock spiritual things only from within.
Richard Rohr
#67. Relational trust is built on movements of the human heart such as empathy, commitment, compassion, patience, and the capacity to forgive.
Parker J. Palmer
#68. Because silence is the birthplace of happiness. Silence is where we get our bursts of inspiration, our tender feelings of compassion and empathy, our sense of love.
Deepak Chopra
#69. Love is a combination of virtues. The amount you receive from someone is based on the percentage of those virtues learned and applied. Unhappiness in a relationship is not a lack of love, but a lack of virtues in the percentages your significant other needs.
Shannon L. Alder
#70. As we learn to embrace our authentic longings and feelings - and cultivate self-empathy and the corresponding compassion toward others - our society will gradually evolve in a direction that is more tolerant, humane, and enlightened.
John Amodeo
#71. I think it's really healing to see movies that are based on true stories. It builds so much more compassion and empathy.
Vanessa Hudgens
#72. Love is not without its flaws. The stronger the love, the more it tests you. Compassion and empathy will make true love persist.
Khalil Gibran
#73. Every day, bring some flowers to your life. Every day bring some blessings in someone's life.
Amit Ray
#74. You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.
Paul Haggis
#75. I don't want people to write programmatic environmental poems, but I think sustainability should become deeply a part of the consciousness of poetry - an impulse toward compassion, empathy, and social justice.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#76. Infusing the cultural war with love, respect and empathy is the responsibility of every one who cares about the health and wellbeing of women, our families and communities, and our democracy.
Aspen Baker
#77. If you truly have compassion in your heart, show it by keeping your doubts to yourself and sharing your hope with those who love change!
Israelmore Ayivor
#78. In my view, compassion takes empathy to another level. With compassion, there is an internal calling to move empathy into action. Compassion is love in action.
Christopher Dines
#79. Empathy is a special application of the imagination. The ability to imagine what it would be like to experience what someone else is experiencing can be crucial to moral sensitivity.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
#81. I would hope that people might view their fellow beings, all beings, with more empathy, more compassion, with a desire to understand. Even if they can't know why people are the way they are, to understand that they're probably that way for a good reason.
Peter Hedges
#82. Empathy is not merely the basic principle of artistic creation. It is also the only path by which one can reach the truth about life and society.
Kafu Nagai
#83. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
Leo Buscaglia
#84. An animal in pain is the saddest thing on Earth.
Sanober Khan
#85. I realized I could only play-act at the spiritual life as long as my appetites were stronger than my empathy.
Victoria Moran
#86. Earl: Augh! They're trying to take the wolf off the endangered list .
Mooch: I know. But did you hear what they're putting back on the endangered list?
Earl: What?
Mooch: Empathy and compassion.
Patrick McDonnell
#87. Simple inattention kills empathy, let alone compassion. So the first step in compassion is to notice the other's need. It all begins with the simple act of attention.
Daniel Goleman
#89. The solution to nearly every problem in the world comes down to greater awareness, compassion, and empathy.
Bryant McGill
#90. Understanding begets empathy and compassion even for the meanest beggar - Oromis
Christopher Paolini
#91. If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit down and rejoice with you, because you'd think I should like to share those good things; but I should like better to share in your trouble and your labour.
George Eliot
#92. Mercy is compassion, kindness, empathy, forgiveness. While grace might be described as blessings and favor from God that we do not necessarily deserve, mercy represents not receiving what we do deserve because of the patience, love, and atonement of the Master.
Brent L. Top
#93. Everything is going to be alright' doesn't mean stubbing your toe won't hurt anymore, but it reinforces that what takes place today, good or bad, is just a small piece of the larger puzzle
Brian A. Jackson
#94. Walk with me for a while, my friend - you in my shoes, I in yours - and then let us talk.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#95. I draw a lot from Buddhism, which focuses on compassion and kindness, loving kindness, as they call it, but rejects empathy because it's a poor moral guide. And I think there's a lot of evidence suggesting that they're right.
Paul Bloom
#96. I don't know if it is a spiritual, physiological or psychological phenomenon, but I believe now more than ever that singing is a universal, built-in mechanism designed to cultivate empathy and compassion.
Eric Whitacre
#97. I am not interested in whether you have stood with the great; I am interested in whether you have sat with the broken.
Unknown
#98. Opportunities to share love and compassion are all around us. Its going to take an army of compassionate people to heal our world. How will you show yours?
Renae A. Sauter
#99. If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.
Yann Martel
#100. If empathy is the skill or ability to tap into our own experiences in order to connect with an experience someone is relating to us, compassion is the willingness to be open to this process.
Brene Brown
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