Empathy Quotes

A word of consolation may sweetly touch the ear.Now and then a quiet songwill clear the mind of fear.A simple act of kindnesscan ease a load of care.Stories told in memorydiminish all despair.A whispered prayer of comfortdraws angel arms around.Counting blessings, great and small,helps gratitude abound.These acts, all sympathetic,will kindly play their part.But seldom do they dry the tearsshed mutely in the heart.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I’m so sorry,” he said, because after Pamela died, he promised himself that if anyone told him the smallest, saddest story, he would answer, I’m so sorry. Meaning, Yes, that happened. You couldn't believe the people who believed that not mentioning sadness was a kind of magic that could stave off the very sadness you didn't mention – as though grief were the opposite of Rumpelstiltskin and materialized only at the sound of its own name.

~ Elizabeth Mccracken

I always wondered what it must be like to lose a twin—if somehow Mary felt it like it was happening to her. If she felt physical pain.

~ Francesca Lia Block

Grief ate at these doctors, distracting them from both their families and their patients. Many reported withdrawing from emotional involvement with their patients and that their patients had noticed they weren't fully present.

~ Danielle Ofri

They say that animals are incapable of feelings and reasoning. This is false. No living thing on earth is void of either. They also say that man is the most intelligent — and the most superior — species on earth. This is also false. It is very arrogant to assume that we are the most intelligent species when we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. It has been shown that both rats and monkeys learn from making errors, yet we have not. Our history proves this. All creatures on earth have the capacity to love and grieve the same way we do. No life on the planet is more deserving than another. Those who think so, are the true savages.

~ Suzy Kassem

I couldn’t even tell if I had any sadness of my own, because I was so full of Abuelita’s sadness.

~ Sonia Sotomayor

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

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

It was the first time in months that somebody was explaining what was happening to me and assuring me that it was okay. It was the first time in months that somebody was talking to me like I mattered.It was the first time in months that I was being assured that I need not feel guilty for something that was out of my control.

~ Preeti Shenoy

I did not know how to reach him, how to catch up with him... The land of tears is so mysterious.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

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

I can’t look people in the eye and tell them that they’re going to die anymore.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

When people say they are happy for you it may mean they are sad for themselves.

~ Josephine Humphreys

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and, therefore, the foundation of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

~ J.k. Rowling

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

~ J.k. Rowling

The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis; something deeper is wreaking havoc across the land, a mercenary and utilitarian attitude that demonstrates little empathy for people's actual well-being, that dismisses imagination and thought, branding passion for knowledge as irrelevant.

~ Azar Nafisi

When you're living so intensely in your head there isn't any different between what you imagine and what actually takes place. Therefore, you're both omnipotent and powerless.

~ Chris Kraus

If imagination is what enables us to conceive of and enjoy stories other than our own, and if empathy is the act of taking other people’s stories seriously, certainty deadens or destroys both qualities. When we are caught up in our own convictions, other people’s stories—which is to say, other people—cease to matter to us.

~ Kathryn Schulz

Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

~ J.k. Rowling

I hate the assumption that you can't write about something because you haven't experienced it, and not just because it assumes a limit on the human imagination, which is basically limitless. It also suggests that some leaps of identification are impossible. I refuse to accept that, because it leads to the conclusion that real change is beyond us, and so is empathy.

~ Stephen King

The imagination is truly the enemy of bigotry and dogma.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

...Because a book is a little empathy machine. It puts you inside somebody else’s head. You see out of the world through somebody else’s eyes. It’s very hard to hate people of a certain kind when you’ve just read a book by one of those people.

~ Neil Gaiman

Children arrive animists. They learn about life, themselves, and empathy by imagining the liveliness of everything they come into contact with.

~ S. Kelley Harrell

Some of our friends are our friends only because we used to be friends.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

You're going to come across some truly gifted people in your lifetime that seem to know all the answers. However, they lost their personal relationship with God, along the way. Love them anyways, and do everything you can to help them restore that relationship. They are fighting a war that you don't know anything about.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Females and boys are the only creatures that propose others for friendship. As for the rest of us, friendship sort of just happens.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

As soon as we open our eyes in the morning, what we want most is to matter, to live a life and to do a work that has meaning. We have evolved to feel this way. Man's first thought was 'I AM'.

~ Bernadette Jiwa

Thanksgiving dinner's sad and thankless. Christmas dinner's dark and blue. When you stop and try to see it From the turkey's point of view.Sunday dinner isn't sunny. Easter feasts are just bad luck. When you see it from the viewpoint of a chicken or a duck. Oh how I once loved tuna salad Pork and lobsters, lamb chops too Till I stopped and looked at dinner From the dinner's point of view.

~ Shel Silverstein

Before you cut down the tree, think of the birds that take refuge on it

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

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

God hates sin not because he wants us to be good little boys and girls, but because he knows sin destroys that which he loves most: sinners.

~ Criss Jami

To care means first of all to empty our own cup and to allow the other to come close to us. It means to take away the many barriers which prevent us from entering into communion with the other. When we dare to care, then we discover that nothing human is foreign to us, but that all the hatred and love, cruelty and compassion, fear and joy can be found in our own hearts. When we dare to care, we have to confess that when others kill, I could have killed too. When others torture, I could have done the same. When others heal, I could have healed too. And when others give life, I could have done the same. Then we experience that we can be present to the soldier who kills, to the guard who pesters, to the young man who plays as if life has no end, and to the old man who stopped playing out of fear for death.By the honest recognition and confession of our human sameness, we can participate in the care of God who came, not to the powerful but powerless, not to be different but the same, not to take our pain away but to share it. Through this participation we can open our hearts to each other and form a new community.

~ Henri J.m. Nouwen

for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

~ Milan Kundera

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

Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection - or compassionate action.

~ Daniel Goleman

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.

As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.

~ Edith Wharton

Sometimes, you will go through awful trials in your life and then a miracle happens--God heals you. Don’t be disheartened when the people you love don’t see things like you do. There will be Pharisees in your life that will laugh it off, deny that it happened, or will mock your experience based on righteousness they think you don't possess. God won't deny you a spiritual experience because you are not a spiritual leader. He loves everyone equal. The only people that really matter in life are the people that can “see” your heart and rejoice with you.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Walk with me for a while, my friend—you in my shoes, I in yours—and then let us talk.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

The exaggerated dopamine sensitivity of the introvert leads one to believe that when in public, introverts, regardless of its validity, often feel to be the center of (unwanted) attention hence rarely craving attention. Extroverts, on the other hand, seem to never get enough attention. So on the flip side it seems as though the introvert is in a sense very external and the extrovert is in a sense very internal - the introvert constantly feels too much 'outerness' while the extrovert doesn't feel enough 'outerness'.

~ Criss Jami