Empathy Quotes

Jen Knox

Only by examining our personal biases can we truly grow as artists; only by cultivating empathy can we truly grow as people.

Tahereh Mafi

All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.

John Joseph Powell

It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive
It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.

Patrick Rothfuss

There are so many men, all endlessly attempting to sweep me off my feet. And there is one of you, trying just the opposite. Making sure my feet are firm beneath me, lest I fall.

Jeremy Aldana

It’s not so much the journey that’s important; as is the way that we treat those we encounter and those around us, along the way

Melody Robinette

Writing fiction is one of the greatest forms of empathy. It's not enough to simply write from the perspective of your characters...you have to feel what they feel.

Ashly Lorenzana

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.

Starley Ard

I had a dream that I was in someone else’s shoes for once…they were the wrong size.

Piers Anthony

Is it foolish to care for non-existent folk?
Then, leave me to my foolishness.

E.M. Forster

The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested.

Susan Kay

None of us can choose where we shall love...

Frederick Buechner

If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.

Aristotle

To perceive is to suffer.. Aristotle
To perceive is to suffer.

Ashly Lorenzana

Sooner or later in life, we will all take our own turn being in the position we once had someone else in.

Theodore Roosevelt

No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see

Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Each person you meet is an aspect of yourself, clamoring for love.. Eric Micha'el Leventhal
Each person you meet
is an aspect of yourself,
clamoring for love.

David Eagleman

Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: We are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.

Richelle E. Goodrich

I stumble and fall.
I weep and struggle to rise.
My mom feels it all.

Carson McCullers

For you see, when us people who know run into each other that's an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That's a bad thing. It's happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us.

Derrick A. Bell

Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform.

Mahatma Gandhi

I call him religious who understands the suffering of others.

Charles Ricketts

When in Reading Gaol he told me that the warders in the dock had been gentle and kind, but the visit of the chaplain in his first prison began with these words:

'Mr. Wilde, did you have morning prayers in your house?'

'I am sorry... I fear not.'

'You see where you are now!

Lailah Gifty Akita

Our stories hold unique inspiration for one another.

Ryan Lilly

Everyone breathing is broken. Keep breathing light into them until the stained glass collage takes your breath away.

Alice Fulton

Anguish is the universal language

Aberjhani

Humanity is not without answers or solutions regarding how to liberate itself from scenarios that invariably end with mass exterminations. Tools such as compassion, trust, empathy, love, and ethical discernment are already in our possession. The next sensible step would be to use them.

Stefan Molyneux

There is no key to open the heart of another - except curiosity.

Rachel Carson

By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished?

Edward O. Wilson

Social intelligence was therefore always at a high premium. A sharp sense of empathy can make a huge difference, and with it in an ability to manipulate, to gain cooperation, and to deceive.

James Baldwin

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

Any empathic person who knows how valuable time is will think twice before wasting another person's time, because losing time is losing a part of your life.

Elizabeth Goudge

Most of us tend to belittle all suffering except our own," said Mary. "I think it's fear. We don't want to come too near in case we're sucked in and have to share it.

Abraham Lincoln

When I get ready to talk to people, I spend two thirds of the time thinking what they want to hear and one third thinking about what I want to say.

Charlie Brooker

One of the benefits of aligning yourself with an indistinct cluster of people is that claiming to feel their pain is often enough.

Aspen Baker

I want a future abortion conversation known for its openness, respect and empathy, so instead of generating more heat, anger and conflict, I practice pro-voice.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.

Jennifer Steil

How does one develop compassion for someone with a completely different set of values without reading something from their point of view? Books are one of the ways in which we can truly get into the heads of people we would never meet in our ordinary lives and travel to countries we would otherwise never visit.

Matt De La Pena

Sometimes when you're surrounded by dirt, CJ, you're a better witness for what's beautiful.

Michael Bassey Johnson

Love is not all about loving everything perfect, it is when someones corrosive nature is the only thing that glues you to them which you wished it were never there.

Jennifer Tindugan-Adoviso

Without empathy, there'd be no harmony in diversity

Marianne Wiggins

...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.

William Deresiewicz

[...] 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.

Tobin Hart

When we fail to harmonize and integrate, living systems, from individuals to families and countries, tend to move toward either chaos or rigidity.

Julius Lester

History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another's pain in the heart our own.

Pat Barker

It's the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else's pain.

Frans De Waal

Ironically, torture requires empathy, too, in the sense that one cannot deliberately inflict pain without realizing what is painful.

Saru Singhal

You don't have to go through someone's pain to understand it. Empathy is enough.

James Baldwin

The way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain.

Joe Abercrombie

Empathy? What’s that?” Glokta winced as he rubbed at his aching leg. “It’s a sad fact, but pain only makes you sorry for yourself.

Leslie Jamison

Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

Leslie Jamison

Pain without cause is a pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.

Richelle E. Goodrich

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.

John Connolly

The nature of humanity, its essence, is to feel another's pain as one's own, and to act to take that pain away,. There is a nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness.

Leslie Jamison

Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia - em (into) and pathos (feeling) - a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person's pain as you'd enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?

Nenia Campbell

People rarely ventured outside the realm of their own hurts. They believed their own suffering was obvious to all, but might as well have been wearing blinders for all that they noticed anyone else's.

Paula Heller Garland

When we see others cry it is difficult, not because of feeling their pain, but your own.

Anne Lamott

Some people have a thick skin and you don't. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world.

Timothy W. Tron

God only knows the torment of the suffering soul and only he can take away the pain.

Azar Nafisi

Other people's sorrows and joys have a way of reminding us of our own; we partly emphasize with them because we ask ourselves: What about me? What does this say about my life, my pains, my anguish?

Taylor Stevens

The pain on the inside is what keeps you human,' she said. 'Never forget that.

Lois McMaster Bujold

But when he’s cut, I bleed.

Francesca Lia Block

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.

Meryl Streep

The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all sense a mysterious connection to each other.

Ben Harper

There's something in everyone only they know.

Ben Harper

All that we can't say is all we need to hear.

Margaret Atwood

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

Tiffany Madison

Nothing renews my faith in humanity more than the exchange of compassion so profound that mere words cannot embrace it.

Marcel Proust

I came to recognise that, apart from her [Françoise's] own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself.

Christina Westover

Shared emotions experienced by two souls,empathy on unequivocal level which Davey believed would change entire species of mankind if only secret of empathy could be telepathically shared with humanity,one soul after another, until every soul understood true meaning of love.

Niall Williams

Neither did she realise yet that grief is a kind of glue, too, that the essence of humanity is this empathy, and that we fall together in that moment of tenderest perception when we see and feel each other's wounds and know another's sorrow like a brother of our own.

Erol Ozan

Help someone, you earn a friend. Help someone too much, you make an enemy.

Aisha Mirza

They say compassion is the only voice; a gift which can help mend the broken, lift the fallen and soften the hardened.

Sarah Liss

I’m pretty sure all the individuals trying to control other people’s happiness have none in their own lives.

Kathryn Erskine

Understanding people’s difficulties and - just as crucial - helping people understand their own difficulties and teaching them concrete ways to help themselves will help them better deal with their own lives and, in turn, ours.

Tim Crawshaw

Because of the value placed on individual materialistic success in our society, we are surrounded by people primarily interested in getting something from others. Their attitudes are characterised by selfishness and a lack of empathy for others.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Appreciate youthfulness and empathize with elderly people.

Dean Koontz

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.

R.J. Palacio

I thought it would teach them a thing or two about empathy, and friendship, and loyalty. As it turns out, Jack Will didn't need to learn any of these virtues- he already had them in abundance.

Richelle E. Goodrich

I'm not asking you to walk in my shoes; I'd never wish my afflictions on anyone. But could you walk beside me on secure ground and reach to hold my hand?

Dennis Lehane

Sympathy’s easy. You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power. Empathy is getting down on your knees and looking someone else in the eye and realizing you could be them, and that all that separates you is luck.

Vironika Tugaleva

When you see a person acting violently, ask yourself whether he knows how powerful he is. If he knew his power, would he feel the need to assert it?

George Bernard Shaw

The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination

Milan Kundera

All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?

Neil Gaiman

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

Carla H. Krueger

Motivation is my problem: I’m almost too motivated. I lie awake thinking how Kris would dress for the occasion or why Benjamin would be upset in the field or how the hell Brianna will manage to give birth to the baby under all that stress.

Hugh Howey

Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.

Christopher Hitchens

The quality you most admire in a man? Courage moral and physical: 'anima' - the ability to think like a woman. Also a sense of the absurd.

The quality you most admire in a woman? Courage moral and physical: “anima” - the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd.

Anthon St. Maarten

Empaths did not come into this world to be victims, we came to be warriors. Be brave. Stay strong. We need all hands on deck.

Gerard De Marigny

To me, empathy and compassion are among the bravest of emotions ... and faith, the bravest of convictions.

Rob Liano

The news can be poison to your soul, don't let it kill your joy, be compassionate but not consumed. Be empathetic not enraged.

Nora Roberts

Feeling too much is a hell of a lot better than feeling nothing.

Sten Nadolny

Es gibt zwei Sorten von Männern. Die einen verstehen 'etwas von Frauen', die anderen sind solche, die einfach 'Frauen verstehen'. Ich weiß nicht, welche Sorte mir verdächtiger ist.

Bruce D. Perry

Surprisingly, it is often when wandering through the emotional carnage left by the worst of humankind that we find the best of humanity ad well.

Rasheed Ogunlaru

The internet and online communication is the window into your world - but real life, in person communication / connection is the door.

Simon Baron-Cohen

Parents who discipline their child by discussing the consequences of their actions produce children who have better moral development , compared to children whose parents use authoritarian methods and punishment.

Film Crit Hulk!

IT IS NOT ABOUT SYMPATHY OR LIKEABILITY, EITHER. EMPATHY IS ABOUT THE TRANSLATION OF FEELING.

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