Empathy Quotes

The foxes run. The foxes die. I mourn them, but I understand that there is danger in mourning for those who would not mourn for you in return. Empathy is for those who can afford it. Empathy is for the privileged. Empathy is not for Nature. ~ Tanya Tagaq

the whole point of literature, I think, is that it's the best technology we have for communicating what another person's life feels like from the inside. ~ Garth Greenwell

Ask yourself if you're taking the time to see beyond the surface. ~ Arthur P. Ciaramicoli

A lack of empathy is the biggest crime of all. ~ A.S.L.

Like any value, empathy must be acted upon. ~ Barack Obama

When someone is suffering, there is a deep, visceral reaction in the core of our being, a flood of empathy and a frightfully desperate compulsion to give aid. ~ Bryant McGill

We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy: characters our audience will care for and, as a result, will care about what happens to them and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character's journey. ~ Greg Rucka

Beyond their immaculate design, the reason sharks rule the ocean is their complete indifference to everything except feeding, procreation, and defending their territory. The shark does not love. It feels no empathy. It trusts nothing. It lives in perfect harmony with its environment because it has no aspirations or desires. And no pity. A shark feels no sorrow, no remorse, hopes for nothing, dreams of nothing, has no illusions about itself or anything beyond itself. ~ Rick Yancey

The law of empathy, by which he could, by his will, transfer himself into an object or a work of art, and thus inflence the outer world. He did not feel redeemed by the work he did. He did not seek redemption. He sought to see what others did not, the projection of his imagination. ~ Patti Smith

Allah, Most High, has truly blessed us. He has created just for us the mysterious spirit that He has breathed into us and by so doing distinguished us from all other physical creation. He has adorned us with our incomparable intellect, which further distinguishes us from all else in this creation. What other creature on this planet -another gift He has blessed us with- can even begin to create the likes of this Internet? Will we not stop, give thanks to our Merciful and Generous Lord? Will we not stop and realize how precious our lives are and begin to show each other more love, mercy, kindness and empathy? Will we not stop, take time, and reflect? ~ Imam Zaid Shakir

The opposite of anger is not calmness, its empathy. ~ Mehmet Oz

We need to infuse politics with ideas like compassion and empathy, and a sense that we live in an interdependent world. ~ Pankaj Mishra

I grew up with a lot of compassion and empathy. I notice when I meet other friends of mine that were raised Christian sometimes we have similar model of sensitivity, whether to our advantage or disadvantage. ~ Weyes Blood

You get your heart stomped by the opposite sex, and you're hurting so badly that you write 'Sometimes When We Touch.' But then what happens when you've been married for 25 years? You can't rely on those emotional male-female roller coasters. You have to start using your imagination and the powers of empathy more. ~ Dan Hill

I'm less interested in slasher, and go more for roles that can affect you on a personal level. I'm interested in human empathy in the movies I see, and in the ones I am a part of. ~ Joshua Leonard

The trouble with a lecture is that it answers questions that haven't been asked. ~ Alan Alda

Good pictures. Tragedy and violence certainly make powerful images. It is what we get paid for.But there is a price extracted with every such frame: some of the emotion, the vulnerability, the empathy that makes us human, is lost every time the shutter is released. ~ Greg Marinovich

being looked down upon is good for the soul, good for empathy, good training for a human. ~ Monica Byrne

Sympathy was to respect the feelings of another. Empathy was to actually share those feelings. ~ Stephen King

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

Desperation, weakness, vulnerability - these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy. ~ Zadie Smith

As a child, I lived with being punier than other boys in class. The only consolation was my parents' empathy - they encouraged constant trips to the local drugstore for chocolate milk shakes to fatten me up. The shakes made me happy, but still, all through grammar school, other kids shoved me around. ~ James D. Watson

The art of integrating the ego and the impulse for empathy in a dynamic call and response. ~ Mary Gaitskill

Design. Story. Symphony. Empathy. Play. Meaning. These six senses increasingly will guide our lives and shape our world. ~ Daniel H. Pink

I realized that it is these two things that staying with regrets offers: It can become the seed of compassion and empathy so that you can stand in the shoes of other people because you're feeling exactly what they feel. And it spurs you on to help people in the future rather than hurt them. ~ Pema Chodron

Before hurting anyone, especially those who cannot protect themselves, feel their pain with your heart. Take care of them as your little child. ~ Debasish Mridha

The emotions of the spectator will still be very apt to fall short of the violence of what is felt by the sufferer. Mankind, though naturally sympathetic, never conceive, for what has befallen another, that degree of passion which naturally animates the person principally concerned. ~ Adam Smith

Never give up your right to be wrong, and be sure to give others that right too. ~ Tim Fargo

It has been a period where people have been far nicer to one another in every possible way. I'm not saying it's because we're dropping our empathy that we're nicer to each other, just that the drop doesn't seem to be causing any harm. ~ Paul Bloom

Studies have shown that empathy is a vital life skill that helps determine our success even more than a high IQ does. ~ Kim Russo

Now, I admire The Sims as a game, but from a story viewpoint, there are two glaring problems. First, your relationship with those characters is like they're bugs in a jar. There's no empathy. And secondly, you've got this clunky, chemistry-set interface between you and them, with bars to show how tired or angry they are. It's all tell not show. ~ Dave Morris

The process of categorisation is as old as men, yet as old as man alone, for no other animal species categorises itself so neatly. Yet the ultimate, most vulnerable and weakest victim of categorisation is empathy. Categorisation is a process that destroys the very empathy that enlivens communities: the empathy that traditionally binds diverse communities together. ~ Joshua Krook

When the heart is supple, it can be "broken open" into a greater capacity to hold our own and the world's pain: it happens every day. When we hold our suffering in a way that opens us to greater compassion, heartbreak becomes a source of healing, deepening our empathy for others who suffer and extending our ability to reach out to them. ~ Parker J. Palmer

The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another. But the hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty to the ear, or to the mind. ~ Zhuangzi

There is a defect in us
as human beings
because we think ourselves
a fortress, a mountain, unbreakable
but at the center
in that stillness of being
there is a chasm
of love
which echoes hope, compassion, empathy
try again, it says
and though the fault lines are full of darkness
we are held together by
the optimism and foolishness
of a single spark ~ Nadia Hasan

In the beginning was the relationship. ~ Martin Buber

We all must support the arts, as it is our culture. It makes us better people. It makes us happy; it gives us empathy and shows us how to live. It is so important. ~ Imelda Staunton

People often seem surprised that I choose to write science fiction and fantasy - I think they expect a history professor to write historical fiction, or literary fiction, associating academia with the kinds of novels that academic lit critics prefer. But I feel that speculative fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy, is a lot more like the pre-modern literature I spend most of my time studying than most modern literature is. Ursula Le Guin has described speculative fiction authors as "realists of a larger reality" because we imagine other ways of being, alternatives to how people live now, different worlds, and raise questions about hope and change and possibilities that different worlds contain.

....

Writing for a more distant audience, authors tended to be speculative, using exotic perspectives, fantastic creatures, imaginary lands, allegories, prophecies, stories within stories, techniques which, like science fiction and fantasy, use alternatives rather than one reality in order to ask questions, not about the way things are, but about plural ways things have been and could be. Such works have an empathy across time, expecting and welcoming an audience as alien as the other worlds that they describe. When I read Voltaire responding to Francis Bacon, responding to Petrarch, responding to Boethius, responding to Seneca, responding to Plutarch, I want to respond to them too, to pass it on. So it makes sense to me to answer in the genre people ha ~ Ada Palmer

We have to teach empathy as we do literacy. ~ Bill Drayton

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

Give children kindness, presence, and respect to help them develop a deeper sense of empathy. The art of seeing and meeting others as they are. ~ Iben Dissing Sandahl

IT IS SAID that time is unrelated to everything else. It goes on and on, unnoticing of our actions, our falls, our triumphs. Who's to care then, if time does not remember us? It flies by, fleeting, inattentive and disinterested in any occupants of this earth. What are we, then, if time thinks so little of everyone it passes? Time is truly apathetic to the many to whom a little empathy would mean so much.
~April~
Disarming Reign of Blood ~ Alexia Purdy

Have empathy, gratitude and respect for every position in the company. ~ Kat Cole

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

If your moon sign is in Leo, you have a lot of empathy for Leos. You empathize with their approach and their aims and their aura. ~ Ian Svenonius

In a high-IQ job pool, soft skills like discipline, drive and empathy mark those who emerge as outstanding. ~ Daniel Goleman

Let us join together across denominations, religions and cultures to make a habit of empathy and reach out to those most in need. To share the blessings we enjoy and to advance the cause of peace in all corners of our world. ~ Barack Obama

Good leaders motivate others by their listening skills. We are to: avoid prejudicial first impressions; become less self-centered; withhold initial criticism; stay calm; listen with empathy; be active listeners; clarify what we hear; and recognize the healing power of listening. Then we are to act on what we hear ~ John C. Maxwell

You're part of the human fabric of experience. You don't have to have cancer to write about cancer. You don't have to have somebody close to you die to understand what death is. Definitely, the more you live, the more experiences fall into your spectrum. As a writer, you must have been told: Write about what you know. But Kafka didn't. Gogol didn't. Did Shakespeare write only what he knew? Our own selves are limitless. And our capacity for empathy is giant. ~ Regina Spektor

CEOs having psychopathic tendencies and how their lack of empathy helped them in a corporate setting. ~ E.H. Reinhard

Judgement is always based on experience and sometimes you will battle a person's history first, before commonsense will ever win the war. ~ Shannon L. Alder

Giving up alcohol is an asceticism for the modern do-gooder, drinking being, like sex, a pleasure that humans have always indulged in, involving a loss of self-control, the renunciation of which marks the renouncer as different and separate from other people.

To drink, to get drunk, is to lower yourself on purpose for the sake of good fellowship. You abandon yourself, for a time, to life and fate. You allow yourself to become stupider and less distinct. Your boundaries become blurry: you open your self and feel connected to people around you. You throw off your moral scruples, and suspect it was only those scruples that prevented the feeling of connection before. You feel more empathy for your fellow, but at the same time, because you are drunk, you render yourself unable to help him; so, to drink is to say, I am a sinner, I have chosen not to help. ~ Larissa MacFarquhar

There was a certain luxury to charity that she could not identify with and did not have. To take "charity" for granted, to revel in this charity towards people whom one did not know - perhaps it came from having had a yesterday and having today and expecting to have tomorrow. She envied them this ... Ifemelu wanted, suddenly and desperately, to be from the country of people who gave and not those who received, to be one of those who had and could therefore bask in the grace of having given. To be among those who could afford copious pity and empathy. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Patience and empathy are anger's mortal enemies. ~ Gary Rudz

The deep, salty, black sea rolls toward us, cold and indifferent, lacking all empathy. Detached, merely itself. This is what the ocean does every day. It doesn't need us for anything. It doesn't care about our hopes and fears, not does it give a damn about our descriptions. The dark weight of the sea is a superior power. Many have been in this situation every since some of our overconfident ancestors set a hollowed out tree trunk in the water and paddled off on languid waves, only to venture out too far where the currents were stronger than their arms or paddles. Or maybe like us, they were surprised by a storm. All of them must have felt the same cold shiver when they realized the sea is truly without sentimentality or memory. Whatever it swallows is gone, becoming food for the fish, crabs and annelid worms. For the lamprey, hag fish, flat worms, ring worms, and all the parasites of the deep. To be drowned and embraced by the eternal, indeterminate all. ~ Morten A. Strøksnes

I believe in love. I believe it transforms, transports, and transcends. I believe it fine-tunes goodness, solidifies strength, ripens resolve, eradicates rage, alleviates stress, and elevates empathy. ~ Lisa Kogan

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

Did you know, Maynard, that there is nothing worse than a disloyal friend? A disloyal friend is not truly a friend let alone a person. Empathy, integrity, and reliability make for good friendship, Maynard. But a friend is no friend without loyalty. Without loyalty, those friends are more like flowers. They might be beneficial. Perhaps they make life easier for you. Perhaps, even, they make you happy.

But all of that is incidental as it is incidental for a flower to grow. You never had to ask the flower to grow. The flower doesn't have the foresight to grow because you desire it to. The flower grows only for itself. ~ D.C. McNeill

Apathy is, too often, a result of overexposure to stressful, highly emotional situations. To rekindle empathy, sometimes we need some space. It's okay to walk away so that you can feel love for someone again. Sometimes for a moment. Sometimes forever. ~ Vironika Tugaleva

When someone shares their distress or their inadequacies, the natural inclination is to comfort them. To mollify. When we do this we brush over their emotions, often because they make us uncomfortable. Most times, people don't want a blanket. They want someone who is willing to stand outside and shiver with them in the cold. ~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

Learning how to do psychotherapy is a complex process, much of which is transacted in the relationship between the beginning therapists and experienced supervisors. When the beginning therapists encounter problems that are beyond their range of experience, the supervisors usually assist in several ways. First, the supervisors offer an intellectual
framework in which to understand the problem. References to the professional literature are often suggested. Second, the supervisors offer practical, problem-solving help with the strategies of therapy. Third and most important, the supervisors help the less experienced therapists to deal with feelings of their own that have been evoked by the patients. With the support of competent supervisors, the therapists are usually able to master their own troubled feelings and put them in perspective.
This done, the therapists are better able to attend to patients with empathy, and with a confidence in their ability to offer help. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

No matter how shut in we are by weather, by physical handicaps or by such mental conditions as we manufacture for ourselves, we are still free people as long as the mind functions, the imagination is stirred and the desire to reach out, to experience, feel and know, is with us; as long as the heart beats and with it the pulses of love, interest, and empathy for and with other people. ~ Faith Baldwin

mirror neurons create bonds of empathy, emotional attunement, and reciprocity between people. ~ Fran Cohen Praver

I'm not sure what gave me empathy for animals, but I do know that I have always loved animals since I was a very young child. I always felt a need to nurture and protect them. Perhaps I could see they needed that, and caring for them made me happy. ~ Alison Eastwood

As far as I'm concerned, the most important thing you need when inventing characters is empathy. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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

Most people assume that autistic people are not capable of empathy. ~ Claire Danes

Play, Incorporating Animistic and Magical Thinking Is Important Because It:
Fosters the healthy, creative and emotional growth of a child;
Forms the best foundation for later intellectual growth.
Provides a way in which children get to know the world and creates possibilities for different ways of responding to it.
Fosters empathy and wonder. ~ Rachel Carson

My worst vice is also my best vice. It's my empathy and my love for people-it can wear me out. I rarely can turn a person in need down or because I love people, I love energy. ~ Meredith Brooks

Being emotional is normal, all part of the job." Her words twirled around my mind. "These are precious new lives at their most fragile. You wouldn't be human if you didn't feel the weight on your heart."
Oh I felt the brick crushing my chest, the question was whether I was strong enough to lift it off and breathe myself.
"It's a balancing act between empathy, confidence, and trusting your skills. ~ Riley Mackenzie

The energy we put out in the world is the energy we get back. So if you want more love in your life, set your intention to be more loving. If you seek kindness, focus your energy on empathy and compassion. Conversely, if you wonder why there are so many angry people in your life, look no further than the resentment you hold in your own heart. ~ Oprah Winfrey

Productive collaborations between family and school, therefore, will demand that parents and teachers recognize the critical importance of each other's participation in the life of the child. This mutuality of knowledge, understanding, and empathy comes not only with a recognition of the child as the central purpose for the collaboration but also with a recognition of the need to maintain roles and relationships with children that are comprehensive, dynamic, and differentiated. ~ Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

NVC enhances inner communication by helping us translate negative internal messages into feelings and needs. Our ability to distinguish our own feelings and needs and to empathize with them can free us from depression. ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg

The near enemy. It's a psychological concept. Two emotions that look the same but are actually opposites. The one parades as the other, is mistaken for the other, but one is healthy and the other's sick, twisted. There are three couplings. Attachment masquerades as Love, Pity as Compassion, and Indifference as Equanimity.

Compassion involves empathy. You see the stricken person as an equal. Pity doesn't. If you pity someone, you feel superior. As long as the pity's in place there's not room for compassion. It squeezes out the nobler emotion. ~ Louise Penny

Empathy before education. ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg

Imagine if we were capable of a form of empathy that lets us know one another by savoring the aura we leave on the things we have touched. We would go to a dump to get drunk on one another's souls. ~ Robin Nagle

Certain actions bring harm, other more wizened actions bring harmony. ~ Mango Wodzak

Confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones. ~ Leslie Jamison

The agony of the empath is feeling their pain but being unable to save them from it. ~ Donna Lynn Hope

Pink reminds me of my love for dance. My youth. The innocence of being young. Tutus. Strawberry frosting on a vanilla cake (my favorite). And lipstick. I love lipstick. It also reminds me that I should take pride in my feminine traits, in being a woman. There is nothing remotely wrong with enjoying femininity. Curves. Hips. Lips. Empathy. Vulnerability. Sensuality. Patience. Intuition. ~ R.B. O'Brien

Misery comes to miser; joy comes to wiser. (A Very Hot Cup of Tea, Empathy)
Juvenile invites, youth tries, adult applies, and the old man dies. (A Straw Man, Empathy)
In everyone, there lives a superhero. (The Medicine Man, Empathy)
Faith is the strongest word in any dictionary. (The Wisdom Beard, Empathy)
I've entered into your feelings; it's your turn now. (Empathy) ~ D.R. Mirror

There's no emotion more revolutionary than empathy. ~ Gloria Steinem

You are full of empathy, kindness, and caring because you very well know the value of love. ~ Patricia Dsouza

Reducing the economic gap may be impossible without also addressing the gap in empathy. ~ Daniel Goleman

Susie-Q, said Daniel with a smirk-like grin indicating both earnest disapproval and a kind of fondness toward Seroquel and its intense, often uncomfortable tranquilizing effects - as if, believing Susie-Q wasn't malicious, he could forgive her every time she induced twelve hours of sleep followed by twelve to twenty-four hours of feeling lost and irritable, therefore she functioned, if inadvertently, as a teacher of forgiveness and acceptance and empathy, for which he was grateful. ~ Tao Lin

I've had my share, less than so many though, but enough to feel empathy. It's tough and I see it so much on Earth, too much suffering. The loss of free will I find unacceptable - what most of us refer to as rights. ~ Kristin Bauer Van Straten

The worst of it was that those people out there-the fear, the suffering the wholesale death-did not really touch him. Crake used to say that Homo sapiens sapiens was not hard-wired to individuate other people in numbers above two hundred, the size of a primal tribe, and Jimmy would reduce that number to two. ~ Margaret Atwood

Anguish is the universal language ~ Alice Fulton

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

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. ~ John Connolly

For every decision a 'man' makes, he makes it with the best of the depth of knowledge he possess at that particular instant and the quality of experiences he's passed through. It's not an excuse though for mediocrity, but an avenue to learn, rise, and conquer your inefficient self. By inference, beyond an extreme line, there might not necessarily be a qualification of a choice as wrong or right, but an avenue to grow depending on how the intricacies of such a choice and its consequences are handled. ~ Ufuoma Apoki

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

Bless you for your jealousy; it is a sign of empathy. ~ Yoko Ono

Doubt was nothing more than an epistemological humility: a deep and practical awareness that outside our sphere of knowledge there existed information and experiences that might show our position to be in error. Doubt causes us to hold a strong position a bit more loosely, such that an acknowledgment of ignorance or error doesn't crush our sense of self or leave us totally unmoored if our position proves untenable. Certainty is the opposite: it hampers inquiry and hinders growth. It teaches us to ignore evidence that contradicts our ideas, and encourages us to defend our position at all costs, even as it reveals itself as indefensible. Certainty sees compromise as weak, hypocritical, evil, suppressing empathy and allowing us to justify inflicting horrible pain on others. ~ Megan Phelps-Roper

If we begin to get in touch with whatever we feel with some kind of kindness, our protective shells will melt, and we'll find that more areas of our lives are workable. AS we learn to have compassion for ourselves, the circle of compassion for others-what and whom we can work with, and how-becomes wider. ~ Pema Chodron

Over the years, however, the research evidence keeps piling up, and it points strongly to the conclusion that a high degree of empathy in a relationship is possibly the most potent and certainly one of the most potent factors in bringing about change and learning. ~ Carl Rogers

For some, life may be a playground to undermine the brainwaves of others or simply a vainglorious game with an armory of theatrics, illustrating only bleak self-deception, haughty narcissism and dim deficiency in empathy. ("Another empty room") ~ Erik Pevernagie

But at the bottom of all the gloom, there is a sense that we are responsible for each other
if not for each other's happiness. There is empathy, admiration, respect for the other's intelligence and honesty. ~ Erica Jong

I'm cursed with empathy. I'm also by nature way too opinionated. ~ John Shirley

In the midst of a burning-hot shaming, calling for patience and context and understanding and empathy can really land you in trouble. ~ Jon Ronson