Empathy Quotes

LOVE of others is the appreciation of one's self. MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy.

~ Mina Loy

Close both eyes see with the other one. Then we are no longer saddled by the burden of our persistent judgments our ceaseless withholding our constant exclusion. Our sphere has widened and we find ourselves quite unexpectedly in a new expansive location in a place of endless acceptance and infinite love.

~ Gregory J. Boyle

There is no small act of kindness.Every compassionate act makes large the world.

~ Mary Anne Radmacher

One of the most important things you can do on this earth is to let people know they are not alone.

~ Shannon L. Alder

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

...It also taught me that while cruelty can be fun for a few moments, compassion has a much longer shelf life.

~ Doreen Orion

one does not remember one’s own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us

~ Anna Funder

If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. (95)

~ Karen Armstrong

If bullies actually believe that somebody loves them and believes in them, they will love themselves, they will become better people, and many will even become saviors to the bullied.

~ Dan Pearce

What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears.

~ Rosa Luxemburg

Should I, too, prefer the title of 'non-Jewish Jew'? For some time, I would have identified myself strongly with the attitude expressed by Rosa Luxemburg, writing from prison in 1917 to her anguished friend Mathilde Wurm:An inordinate proportion of the Marxists I have known would probably have formulated their own views in much the same way. It was almost a point of honor not to engage in 'thinking with the blood,' to borrow a notable phrase from D.H. Lawrence, and to immerse Jewishness in other and wider struggles. Indeed, the old canard about 'rootless cosmopolitanism' finds a perverse sort of endorsement in Jewish internationalism: the more emphatically somebody stresses that sort of rhetoric about the suffering of others, the more likely I would be to assume that the speaker was a Jew. Does this mean that I think there are Jewish 'characteristics'? Yes, I think it must mean that.

~ Christopher Hitchens

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

I think people believe empathy to be compassion, that compassion is an inner sense (a sense of the soul). But empathy is a sense, while compassion isn't a sense. Empathy is an affinity, a communion, a comprehension. They say that empathy is compassion, but I think that the two are independent of each other. You see, through empathy you will feel what another is feeling, including all those plans for manipulation and persuasion. You will feel everything, not just the parts that make you take compassion for the person, but also all the red flags! You see, empathy is a sense that works with the other senses such as foresight and intuition. So, we can feel compassion but we have to move with empathy.

~ C. Joybell C.

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

I couldn’t think of anyone I’d ever felt sorry for. There were plenty of kids I was envious of. There were others I achingly admired, but that might simply be another form of jealousy. Then there were those I feared, dreaded. And the worst of them, the man who shamed me. I could see my father’s angry features looming over my mother. I could clearly picture her beside him in his truck, cowering against the door while he belittled and assaulted her. I guess I did know someone I felt sorry for.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

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

By revealing to Tomas her dream about jabbing needles under her fingernails, Tereza unwittingly revealed that she had gone through his desk. If Tereza had been any other woman, Tomas would never have spoken to her again. Aware of that, Tereza said to him, Throw me out! But instead of throwing her out, he seized her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers, because at that moment he himself felt the pain under her fingernails as surely as if the nerves of her fingers led straight to his own brain.Anyone who has failed to benefit from the Devil’s gift of compassion (co-feeling) will condemn Tereza coldly for her deed, because privacy is sacred and drawers containing intimate correspondence are not to be opened. But because compassion was Tomas’s fate (or curse), he felt that he himself had knelt before the open desk drawer, unable to tear his eyes from Sabina’s letter. He understood Tereza, and not only was he incapable of being angry with her, he loved her all the more.

~ Milan Kundera

Everyone has it within their heart to be vegan, but each time they eat anything from an animal they deny that this is so, they deny that they have enough love in their hearts to show these animals mercy and free them from our tyranny.This is a blatant lie that they keep telling themselves, time and time again. They would rather argue that they don't care about animals and find excuses to justify and continue harming them, than acknowledge any 'sissy' ability they might have to feel compassion for them.What they don't understand is, that they hurt themselves by not acknowledging this latent ability within their hearts though, and with this they deny themselves love too, for what is given out always comes back multifold.

~ Mango Wodzak

I am an artist, and a rebel one at that. I live in the voluptuous dimension of imagination, so if you're expecting normalcy (dullness) from me, sorry to disappoint, but you're quite mistaken. Ordinary is not my best attire, I've tried it and normal just never fit quite right. I will always be the crazy one who believes in magic, unicorns and impossible dreams. But also love, compassion and empathy.

~ Melody Lee

It is better to err on the side of feeling.

~ Marty Rubin

We can only come to terms with our own place in the world by compassionately commiserating with the pang of longing that our brethren experience.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

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

It is Christlike to assume that people are trying to do the best they can. I know I am a better person when I cultivate empathy, and I have been blessed for having received it from others. As members of the body of Christ, we are each responsible for creating a space not only of acceptance, but of joy and encouragement for our sisters and brothers and the stories they are working so hard to live well.

~ Ashley Mae Hoiland

Sympathy is imagining the pain. Empathy is having suffered through it first.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Empathy is a hand thick with scars offering you a bandage.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I appreciate anyone that tries to make this world a better place.

~ Renae A.sauter

When you can identify the insecurities inside the person that is hurting you then you can begin to heal. It isn't about you. It is about their past.

~ Shannon L. Alder

I am not interested in whether you've stood with the great, I am interested in whether you've sat with the broken.

~ Unknown

I am not interested in whether you have stood with the great, I am interested in whether you have sat with the broken.

~ Unknown

I am not interested in whether you've stood with the great. I am interested in whether you've sat broken.

~ Unknown

Have greater compassion and empathy for others, and don't judge anyone, because you have no idea what's going on in their life.

~ Sandra Vischer

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

The time has come for women and men to band together to jointly create gender harmony. We must gather in mixed group to plumb new depths of relational awareness, courageous truth-telling, compassionate listening, empathic sensitivity, and mutual healing.

~ William Keepin

Choose empathy over apathy.

~ Mango Wodzak

Truth is on the side of compassion.

~ Christina Hoff Sommers

When someone is cruel, harsh, mean, to not take their words personally is one thing, but to hear the silent cry within those words is another. This sort of perspective can not only liberate us from crippling self-doubt in the face of criticism, it can also liberate us from automatically becoming blind participants in the interaction patterns that the cruel person has become accustomed to—a favour we do for the other person as much as for ourselves.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

Let those feelings out. Talk about it. Even if you’re talking to your journal by yourself in an empty room. That still counts. That still matters.If you know someone who’s struggling and isolated, help them talk about it. Even if they don’t have the right words. Even if you sit in silence as they try to feel safe. Even if they shower you with complaints, excuses, and justifications. Even if you can see they’re just playing small, being irrational, blaming circumstances. Just be there. It all counts. It all matters.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

The day you find out who you are is when you look back and realize that it was never the words, rather your actions that defined you.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Unless we understand how the twists and turns of life operate to make us, we cannot comprehend who and what we are. Without self-awareness, we are blind to registering the intertexture of other people’s inner life. Gracefully enduring personal hardships expands our minds to extend sympathy and empathy for other people. By casting our personal life experiences into a supple storytelling casing, we create the translucent membrane that quarters the fusion of our flesh, nerves, blood, and bones. Self-understanding is an essential step in loving the entire world.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A person’s attitude creates the tone of his or her life. The highest expression of human dignity is to live a purposeful life devoted to principles and exhibiting compassion for other people.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster