Top 73 Sympathy Empathy Quotes
#1. Just as white light consists of colored rays, so reverence for life contains all the components of ethics: love, kindliness, sympathy, empathy, peacefulness and power to forgive.
Albert Schweitzer
#2. His words had caused her to laugh, cry, yell, throw things across the room, and feel sympathy, empathy, anger, arousal and disgust. It was the best non-novel she had ever read.
Ella Dominguez
#3. The answer was simple. It was the difference between sympathy and empathy. Carl
Ted Chiang
#4. If only this great concern we have for our own sensitive feelings expanded to encompass the feelings of our fellow men.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#5. Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others ...
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#6. Ultimately, knowing God and reading the Word, it helps with patience with people, understanding, empathy and sympathy that they might not have that I have. If God gave it to me, why not exercise it?
Trai Byers
#7. Compassion only plagues those with hearts, much like a field of thorns only troubles those who bleed.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#9. We Americans pride ourselves on our freedom to speak, to say what we believe. But of what use is it to speak if only those who already agree with us listen? A first step toward the abolition of war is learning to listen with respect and sympathy.
Nel Noddings
#10. People do not emphasize with victims and give them limitless sympathy, but can very quickly switch to aggression and rejection
Natascha Kampusch
#11. This is what differentiates sympathy from empathy. No matter how much I care for you, it's not until I recognize me in you and you in me that the veil of gauze is lifted on the world.
Jackson Galaxy
#12. You have to have sympathy for and an empathy with a character in order to play them.
Laura Carmichael
#13. Empathy is the accurate understanding of another person'ts internal experience. It has nothing to do with agreeing or disagreeing with that experience. Unlike sympathy, it makes no assumptions about how the other person is feeling.
Madeline Levine
#14. Obviously, Jay-Z is one of the greatest entertainers of the world today. Not only is he a remarkable rhetorical genius, he's also a man of deep sympathy and empathy for those who are lost and vulnerable, but especially under-educated youth of all cultures and stripes.
Michael Eric Dyson
#15. A compassionate government does not need to pay too much attention to those who don't have needs. True leadership is to fulfill a need of the needy. People who have needs need attention indeed! Be a true leader!
Israelmore Ayivor
#16. It's hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It's so easy to make a damaged character repugnant.
Siri Hustvedt
#17. I felt the nauseous shiver in my stomach - everything from rage to empathy to morning sickness - that I had grown used to and now thought of as being love.
Olivia Sudjic
#18. Like many people, most Libertarians feel empathy and sympathy for less fortunate people. But they know you can't have perfection in a world of limited resources.
Harry Browne
#19. If we possess narrative sympathy - enabling us to see the world from other's point of view - we cannot kill. If we do not, we cannot love.
Richard Kearney
#20. Digital age of business and world shall move up from apathy, to sympathy, to empathy.
Pearl Zhu
#21. The glory of fame isn't in having so many people know you, but in having so many people know you care. Otherwise, it's like being drawn to a fire to find no warmth.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#22. I don't think of compassion as sympathy but rather as empathy. An understanding of how people are feeling, which often translates into action.
Hazel Hawke
#24. If everyone realized the value of life, the world would be peaceful. The meaning of these words, "Do unto others as you would have them, do unto you," would be understood: It would be practiced.
Ellen J. Barrier
#25. Why must you know the details of my troubles to have compassion? Is it not enough to show compassion simply because you know that everyone has troubles?
Richelle E. Goodrich
#26. The next time you wish you could find the right words to say to someone who is hurting, just remember that dogs are a man's best friend without ever speaking a word to them. Simply be present and have sympathy.
Ashly Lorenzana
#27. Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence.
Germaine Greer
#28. I know you want me to feel some sympathy for them, but that's not who I am. I care only about those I know, and even then, not all that deeply. Strangers get nothing from me.
Rachel Caine
#29. IT IS NOT ABOUT SYMPATHY OR LIKEABILITY, EITHER. EMPATHY IS ABOUT THE TRANSLATION OF FEELING.
Film Crit Hulk!
#30. I can't look people in the eye and tell them that they're going to die anymore.
Rebecca McNutt
#31. When you know the truth about a person then they become real to you, not just a face that you can forget.
Drea Damara
#32. While my sister and I were reminded we did not cause this pain, it was knowing that because we broke our silence about what had been done to us, our parents were hurting. That knowledge was hard on us.
Erin Merryn
#33. Sympathy is to love thy neighbor. Empathy is to leave her alone.
Anthony Marais
#34. People mean well; they just aren't here enough to get what we are dealing with or what home means to my mother. Everyone thinks they know what should be done, and their suggestions make me suspect they must consider me an idiot who doesn't comprehend the situation.
George Hodgman
#35. By becoming interested in the cause, we are less likely to dislike the effect.
Dale Carnegie
#36. Remember how strong we are in our happiness and how weak he is in his misery!
Charles Dickens
#37. The moral crisis she'd just gone through made her feel indulgent toward the faults, the delinquencies of others. How thoroughly a human being can be buffeted and over-mastered by fate had been borne in upon her with appalling force.
Emmuska Orczy
#38. Sympathy was to respect the feelings of another. Empathy was to actually share those feelings.
Stephen King
#39. Sit with me, and I'll not be alone.
Hold my hand, and I'll not feel alone.
Cry with me, and I'll no longer suffer alone.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#40. Is it so hard to offer your help and sympathy to somebody in grief? It takes a little to make one step, but, in an inexplicable manner, it stretches into thousands of kilometers. All of us are full of empathy and consolation but always prefer to express it from a distance.
Igor Eliseev
#41. Sorry' isn't a synonym for 'guilty.' It's a way to say you're listening.
Martina Boone
#42. As a kid my heart would break for the villains.
Criss Jami
#44. I've always thought of acting as more of an exercise in empathy, which is not to be confused with sympathy. You're trying to get inside a certain emotional reality or motivational reality and try to figure out what that's about so you can represent it.
Edward Norton
#45. Sympathy is imagining the pain. Empathy is having suffered through it first.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#46. Empathy is walking a mile in somebody else's moccasins. Sympathy is being sorry their feet hurt.
Rebecca O'Donnell
#47. An empath is capable of taking on the grief of another in order to lessen their suffering. In order to not be consumed with pain, an empath should have an outlet for that pain lest they lose themselves in feeling for others.
Donna Lynn Hope
#48. 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
#49. It's frustrating when our best efforts to help people fail. But if we could see life through their weary eyes and experience their trials with the same frayed emotions, we might understand why.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#50. 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
#51. When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them.
Criss Jami
#52. 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
#53. If you don't love yourself, it makes you incapable of knowing how to love another person.
Ellen J. Barrier
#54. The real test of love is loving those who we feel are the hardest ones to love.
Criss Jami
#55. 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
#56. I believe that lack of empathy is behind many problems, and I believe that it's disrupting our society. In Great Britain, there is a steady decline in the willingness to be truly generous, and by that I don't mean monetary generosity, but friendship and sympathy for others.
J.K. Rowling
#57. Sympathy is what you have for someone after they die, pity you have for someone when they don't have a date to the biggest dance of the year. Empathy is what I do to you when you judge me. Envy is having pity on yourself. Can you discern the rest for yourself?
Mahatma Gandhi
#58. I did not know how to reach him, how to catch up with him ... The land of tears is so mysterious.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#59. None of us can choose where we shall love...
Susan Kay
#60. Because whenever a woman kills her child, every other mother - at least, every one who's honest with herself - has a flash of sympathy. Not empathy. They don't want to have done it, cannot imagine doing it. But they know.
Laura Lippman
#61. Most survivors are cope-aholics, people who cope with whatever is thrown at them without reliance on others. They do not seek sympathy for their pain and feel undeserving if it is offered. They are especially adverse to sympathy from others.
Renee Fredrickson
#62. Walk with me for a while, my friend - you in my shoes, I in yours - and then let us talk.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#63. Sometimes all you can do is hug a friend tightly and wish that their pain could be transferred by touch to your own emotional hard drive.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#65. They ran past him without notice, but I paused and stood over the boy. I wanted to feel something--wanted to find some understanding in his actions; some empathy in his upbringing; at least a fragment of sympathy for the secret he carried.
Christopher Scotton
#67. 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
#68. Sympathy is a characteristic trait of politicians and empathy an emotion of the masses.
Amit Abraham
#69. Learning a foreign language, and the culture that goes with it, is one of the most useful things we can do to broaden the empathy and imaginative sympathy and cultural outlook of children.
Michael Gove
#70. No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#71. It is very difficult for a man to differentiate between empathy and sympathy. He hates to be pitied.
John Gray
#72. Once you take the time to consider the other person's perspective, you will become sympathetic to his feel ins and ideas. You will be able to authentically and honestly say, I don't blame you for feeling as you do. If I were in your position, I would feel just as you do.
Dale Carnegie
#73. He came up straight to her father, whose hands he took and wrung without a word - holding them in his for a minute or two, during which time his face, his eyes, his look, told of more sympathy than could be put into words.
Elizabeth Gaskell
