Top 100 Quotes About Empathy
#1. If the other persons behavior is not in harmony with my own needs, the more I empathize with them and their needs, the more likely I am to get me own needs met.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
#2. To forgive a friend, one must practice generosity. To forgive an enemy, one must practice empathy. To forgive yourself requires charity. Forgiveness is a sacred act of gallantry.
Mac MacKenzie
#3. Thus evolved some members of the Core - not altruists, but desperate survivalists who realized that the only way ultimately to win their never-ending zero-sum game was to stop the game. And to stop the game they needed to evolve into a species capable of empathy.
Dan Simmons
#4. What songwriting does better than almost anything is empathy - it's incredibly empathetic. The reason people sat around in bars when they were bummed out and listened to country songs is because it made them feel better in the long run.
Steve Earle
#5. I was one of the haves, and one of the secrets of being a have is not wasting your time on empathy.
Peter S. Beagle
#6. I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.
Walt Whitman
#7. To experience visually, and to transform our visual experience into plastic terms, requires the faculty of empathy.
Hans Hofmann
#8. You cannot fully understand a person's need until you have endured the same need. As hard as you may try to predict and comprehend their situation and suffering, I guarantee you'll fall short until you've been there.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#11. One does not remember one's own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us
Anna Funder
#12. Some people are far more cognizant than others but sensitivity has its own cross to bear and ample insight, in many cases, can bring on disquietude.
Donna Lynn Hope
#13. I have empathy towards bullying. Not about punishing the bully but empowering the victim. We have a tendency to use the word "bully" and other words in the wrong situations, thus desensitizing and lessening the impact of the true situation.
Renee Lawless
#14. We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior.
Graydon Carter
#15. He laughed and the others laughed with him, except Babe, who resented slightly that what he felt so deeply could be reduced to a humor.
J.D. Salinger
#16. I have so much empathy for these young actors that are 19 and all of a sudden they're beautiful and famous and rich. I'm like, 'Oh my God, I'd be dead.'
Philip Seymour Hoffman
#17. The real test of love is loving those who we feel are the hardest ones to love.
Criss Jami
#19. Walking a mile in someone else's shoes isn't as much about the walk or the shoes; it's to be able to think like they think, feel what they feel, and understand why they are who and where they are. Every step is about empathy.
Toni Sorenson
#20. What takes the place of the strict rules of the Strict Father model is clarity of expectations and empathy. What takes the place of reward and punishment is interdependence, communication, and a true desire to remain affectionately connected to those you live with. F
George Lakoff
#21. 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
#22. The jury was a cynical, unsophisticated bunch, seemingly incapable of empathy, eager to embrace defense bromides however haphazardly delivered.
David Turner
#23. Every child must master empathy-based ethics because the rules are changing; the less they apply the less learning them has positive impact
Bill Drayton
#24. Most people know the physical senses, but a lot of people don't know the soul's senses: empathy, trust, intuition, love and harmony
Steven Aitchison
#25. Empathy requires us to step outside of our own agendas long enough to develop an understanding of the other person's perspective. It can be rightly stated that no relationship will be whole without ongoing displays of empathy.
Les Carter
#26. There are some men formed with feelings so blunt that they can hardly be said to be awake during the whole course of their lives.
Edmund Burke
#27. But if you trace even the biggest of these conflicts down to its roots, what you find are entrenched biases, and these sort-of calcified failures of empathy.
Anonymous
#28. When your boss listens to you carefully, reaches out to help you, and learns from you, it enhances your dignity and pride. Doing so also helps your boss gain empathy for you, to better understand how it feels to be you and what you need to succeed in your job and life.
Robert I. Sutton
#29. If you don't love yourself, it makes you incapable of knowing how to love another person.
Ellen J. Barrier
#30. Fiction gives us empathy: It puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.
Ray Bradbury
#31. If something doesnt feel normal to me, it must be wrong. Failing to have a shred of imaginative empathy is a virtue!
Gavin McInnes
#32. I am older and have more control over my empathy,' said Qwan. 'That's why I didn't throw up.' And having said that, he threw up.
Eoin Colfer
#33. Too many people are endowed with a feeling of entitlement, but born without God-given empathy.
C. JoyBell C.
#34. I will never tell another person, "I don't understand you ... " and why? Because if I say that, it means that I am disabled in a way. The inability to connect to another's perspective is, I believe, a disability.
C. JoyBell C.
#35. That person is most cultivated who is able to put himself in the place of the greatest number of other persons.
Jane Addams
#36. The biology of empathy allows us to comprehend our connection to each other, to other living things, and to the physical world that supports life.
George Lakoff
#37. The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they see him do.
Adam Smith
#38. Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
Barbara Kingsolver
#39. I will only take something or agree to do something that I feel like I understand, and inherent in understanding is empathy.
Gillian Anderson
#40. We so much want social connection that we become afraid to say something that might make another person reject us. And yet, being vulnerable and having empathy are the most connecting things we can practice.
Iben Dissing Sandahl
#41. I've been born into a broken world and my purpose is to make sure when I leave it, know I have left my mark of kindness on it somewhere.
Nikki Rowe
#42. It is through weakness and vulnerability that most of us learn empathy and compassion and discover our soul.
Desmond Tutu
#43. The pain on the inside is what keeps you human,' she said. 'Never forget that.
Taylor Stevens
#44. To listen with empathy is the most important human skill.
Stephen Covey
#45. There is a real comfort with the position of the victim, which can either result in true empathy or deep paranoia.
Jill Soloway
#46. When you see around you the human form suffering or dissolving, you have empathy on the human level. You share the suffering because it has to do with the fleetingness of form. But if that is the only level that operates in you, you haven't gone beyond suffering.
Eckhart Tolle
#47. 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
#48. Humankind seems to have an enormous capacity for savagery, for brutality, for lack of empathy, for lack of compassion.
Annie Lennox
#49. A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.
Anthony Marra
#50. As far as you can, get into the habit of asking yourself in relation to any action taken by another: "What is his point of reference here?" But begin with yourself: examine yourself first.
Marcus Aurelius
#51. The task of the architect is to encompass everything about the site, starting from the concrete conditions and the sensory impressions created by those, to memories of the place, through empathy to vision.
Jean Nouvel
#52. I'm not unintelligent, mind you. But wisdom means more than being intelligent, because it encompasses understanding, empathy, experience, inner peace, and intuition, and in retrospect, I obviously lack many of those traits. Here's
Nicholas Sparks
#53. Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
Barbara Kingsolver
#54. Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.
Sue Monk Kidd
#55. 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.
#56. Being autistic does not mean I don't have empathy. Stereotypes are harmful. If anything I hyper feel everything and have to try to shut off to cope.
Tina J. Richardson
#57. 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
#58. You know when ubuntu is there, and it is obvious when it is absent. It has to do with what it means to be truly human, to know that you are bound up with others in the bundle of life.
Desmond Tutu
#59. We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.
Rebecca Solnit
#60. George W. Bush: a person who is the ultimate outcome of the American condition. Someone promoted above ability because of circumstance and organisation and empathy. You don't have to be intelligent. A moron in a hurry could know that you don't prevent war by having a war.
David Lange
#61. Writing fiction, like reading fiction, is a practice in empathy.
Jennifer Haigh
#62. Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn.
Alice Miller
#63. What people get admired and appreciated for in community are their soft skills: their sense of humor and timing, their ability to listen, their courage and honesty, their capacity for empathy.
M. Scott Peck
#64. Empathy is key in the design process, especially when you start expanding outside of your comfort zone to new languages, cultures, and age groups. If you try to assume what those people want, you're likely to get it wrong.
Mike Krieger
#66. 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
#67. I always think that if you look at anyone in detail, you will have empathy for them because you recognize them as a human being, no matter what they've done.
Andrea Arnold
#68. When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them.
Criss Jami
#69. Empathy, the way that we can place ourselves, imaginatively, in the position of another person, is at the heart of what we do as readers, as people striving for a generous understanding of one another.
Brenda Walker
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.
Harper Lee
#73. Race prejudice is not only a shadow over the colored - it is a shadow over all of us, and the shadow is darkest over those who feel it least and allow its evil effects to go on.
Pearl S. Buck
#75. Laughter is the evidence that the chokehold of shame has been loosened. Knowing laughter is the moment we feel proof that our shame has been transformed. Like empathy, it strips shame to the bone, robs it of its power and forces it from the closet.
Brene Brown
#76. I don't think conservativism is about a deficiency. I think it's about a commitment to an ideology that has to in some ways devalue the usefulness of empathy. I do think empathy can be learned. And enhanced.
Jim Shepard
#77. I think people perceive my creatures as absurd because they look different, but at the same time, they are a little bit familiar. I want people to feel a kind of empathy with them. When you think about it, all nature is kind of strange looking.. in fact, I'm a strange a looking creature.
Patricia Piccinini
#78. Compassion, empathy and love are the real pillars we need to build with in ourselves to become human.
Loknath
#79. What I found in Kabul was a sisterhood unlike any I had seen before, marked by empathy, laughter, courage, curiosity about the world, and above all a passion for work.
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
#80. In Nurturant Parent morality, the teenage girl is "in trouble," she needs help and deserves empathy (moral-action Category 2 - helping).
George Lakoff
#81. I've always felt you don't have to be completely detached, emotionally uninvolved to make precise observations. There's nothing wrong with feeling great empathy for your subjects.
Jane Goodall
#82. You need to forgive people you don't understand; if not, try to understand people you want to forgive.
Shannon L. Alder
#83. To us post-moderns, empathy is a stranger in a strange land".
~R. Alan Woods [2012]
R. Alan Woods
#84. My own sense of well-being and purpose in the world. That comes from studying the world feelingly, with empathy in my work. It comes from staying alert and alive and involved in the lives of the people that I love and the people in the wider world who need my help.
Meryl Streep
#85. To make art is to realize another's sadness within, realize the hidden sadness in other people's lives, to feel sad with and for a stranger.
Marianne Wiggins
#86. 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
#87. And connected is helping people stay in touch and maintain empathy for each other, and bandwidth.
Mark Zuckerberg
#88. Sometimes the greatest gift you can give someone who needs comfort is empathy from a heart that understands.
Timothy Pina
#89. I didn't enjoy what was happening but I enjoyed who I was while I was watching it. It offered evidence of my own inclination toward empathy.
Leslie Jamison
#91. Our goal is to create a quality of empathic connection that allows everyone's needs to be met.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
#92. Sure, the outcome was favourable, but what was the cost? Wasn't changing the way she felt about something not far from taking away her free will altogether?
Cassandra Page
#93. Alas! we must suffer ourselves before we can feel for others.
Emile Gaboriau
#94. The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all sense a mysterious connection to each other.
Meryl Streep
#95. It is characteristic to believe that those in need are given to, that the squeaky hinge is the one that gets the oil, but in the realm of emotions this is not so. It is the person who does not solicit liking and love, admiration and respect, sympathy and empathy to whom they are freely given.
Jo Coudert
#96. Connecting to something keeps our empathy alive.
Eric Fischl
#97. The Curious Incident brims with imagination, empathy, and vision - plus it's a lot of fun to read.
Myla Goldberg
#98. Doing things for yourself (self-preservation) are ok in in small doses and when necessary but over-burdening you life with your own self will weaken your heart, soul connectivity with others
Paul Isaacs
#99. Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy.
Rebecca Solnit
#100. Only fiction has the power to cross the mental barricades, to make strangers intelligible to each other, because it moves people's hearts as well as engaging their minds.
Ian Leslie
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