Empathy Quotes

Certain actions bring harm, other more wizened actions bring harmony.

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.

Niall Williams

Race prejudice is not only a shadow over the colored — it is a shadow over all of us, and the shadow is darkest over those who feel it least and allow its evil effects to go on.

Pearl S. Buck

Indeed, insight is the true hallmark of empathy. The power of true empathy is its ability to give us a fresh understanding of the other person's emotions and thoughts to illuminate an aspect of their experience that would not have been apparent to us had we not stepped into their shoes.

Guy Winch

•tPeople deserve a break. The stressed and unorganized person who doesn’t have the same priorities as you may be dealing with an autistic child, abusive spouse, fading parents, or cancer. Don’t judge people until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. Give them a break instead.

Guy Kawasaki

I am noticing a big difference in the way the hospital workers are looking at me as I approach Jess’s room.The look of sincere sympathy that used to be on their faces when they made eye contact with me is gone.It has been replaced by shear helplessness as they quickly walk past me with their heads tilted down and to the right.I feel like Bud Fox walking into his office with the Securities and Exchange Commission awaiting him.

JohnA Passaro

Humans are unique in having the astonishing capacity to extend our sympathies far beyond the here and now. through time and space, to anywhere and anything we choose. It is our culture that decides how large and inclusive our moral circle is, but it is each of us who makes up our culture. (p.250)

Andrew Westoll

To us post-moderns, empathy is a stranger in a strange land". ~R. Alan Woods [2012]

R. Alan Woods

She might have been born this way, without an empathy gene and other essentials. In that case, she would interpret any kindness as weakness. Among predatory beasts, any display of weakness is an invitation to attack.

Dean Koontz

I'm a citizen of the republic of empathy.

Sam Lipsyte

...if we do not know how to defend ourselves, our women and our places of worship by force of suffering, i.e., nonviolence, we must, if we are men, be at least able to defend all these by fighting." (MLK)"...If given a choice between violent resistance and passive acceptance, King and Gandhi both accepted violence..." "...like violence, it [non-violent resistance] was aggressive, but it was spiritually, bot physically, so." "...At the same time the mind and the emotions are active, actively trying to persuade the opponent to change his ways and convince him that he is mistaken and to lift him to a higher level of existence.

S. Nassir Ghaemi

Fellow-feeling. . .is the most important factor in producing a healthy political and social life. Neither our national nor our local civic life can be what it should be unless it is marked by the fellow-feeling, the mutual kindness, the mutual respect, the sense of common duties and common interests, which arise when men take the trouble to understand one another, and to associate together for a common object. A very large share of the rancor of political and social strife arises either from sheer misunderstanding by one section, or by one class, of another, or else from the fact that the two sections, or two classes, are so cut off from each other that neither appreciates the other’s passions, prejudices, and, indeed, point of view, while they are both entirely ignorant of their community of feeling as regards the essentials of manhood and humanity.

Theodore Roosevelt

Author says that, while Eisenhower had other intellectual mentors, he learned how to lead men from Gen. Walter Krueger. Krueger was the first American enlisted man to rise to four-star general, and he so identified with those he led that he once invited a sentry out of the rain and gave him his own dry uniform.

Jean Edward Smith

Traveling on, the shaft of his light reached now a great, dully shining oblong, and he stopped, surprised. Then, through the glass sides, he saw bright shapes of fish wheel in schools down the opaque water, startled by the illumination. Coming at last, and so suddenly, on life like his own, Mr. Lecky moved closer. The fixed flood of his light enveloped these small fish dimly, glowed back on him. They came sliding, drifting, mouths in motion, gills rippling, up the light, against the glass. Their senseless round eyes stared at Mr. Lecky. Idling with great grace, the extravagant products of selective breeding - fringetails, Korean, calico - passed, swayed about, came languidly back. Moving faster, stub-finned, crop-tailed danios from the Malabar coast appeared, hovered, taking the light on their fat flanks, now spotted, now iridescent pearl or opal.Seeing so many of them, so eager and attentive, Mr. Lecky felt an unexpected compunction. He was their only proprietor; and soon, trapped unnaturally here in the big tank, they would starve to death. His light went back to a counter he had just passed, showing him again the half-noticed packages - food for birds and pet animals, food, too, for fish. Returning to the tank, his light found many of the fish still waiting, the rest rushing back. He went and took a package, tore the top off, and poured the contents onto the rectangle of open water. It would perhaps postpone the time when, having eaten each other, the sick remainder must die anyway.

James Gould Cozzens

Life is always going to be a series of ouch-making moments, and the question was, was I going to go all fetal position, or was I going to woman up? I went into fetal position on the bed to think about this. Fetal position turned out to be very comfortable.

Maureen Johnson

As far as you can, get into the habit of asking yourself in relation to any action taken by another: "What is his point of reference here?" But begin with yourself: examine yourself first.

Marcus Aurelius

But love, honest love, requires empathy. It is a sharing—of joy, of pain, of laughter, and of tears. Honest love makes one’s soul a reflection of the partner’s moods. And as a room seems larger when it is lined with mirrors, so do the joys become amplified. And as the individual items within the mirrored room seem less acute, so does pain diminish and fade, stretched thin by the sharing. That is the beauty of love, whether in passion or friendship. A sharing that multiplies the joys and thins the pains.

R.A. Salvatore

We live close together and we live far apart. We all go through the same things-it's all just a different kind of the same thing.

Susan Glaspell

How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another's heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? Even if the world's rich and powerful were to put themselves in the shoes of the rest, how much would they really understand the wretched millions suffering around them? So it is when Orhan the novelist peers into the dark corners of his poet friend's difficult and painful life: How much can he really see?

Orhan Pamuk

Accustom yourself not to be disregarding of what someone else has to say: as far as possible enter into the mind of the speaker.

Marcus Aurelius

Some people are highly empathic, some people are telempathic, or telepathic, some are clairempathic, while others are claircognizant, clairvoyant, clairaliant, clairaudient, clairgustant, clairsentient; and a very few are all of the above. The great amount of confusion and inner strife that accompanies one or more of these conditions, can be calmed and soothed first by acceptance, second by the humility to be okay with the fact that you are stuck with it forever, and third by honing these conditions to their best possible uses and most polished states.

C. JoyBell C.

There comes a time in life that all you need is just someone to listen to you without judging or telling you what you should have done and should do, but simply just listening to you.

Bernard Kelvin Clive

Empathy is what separates human beings from teenage boys.

Victor LaValle

To help others, will be rewarded

Janis yingnan Ji

Help other people ,help themselves

Yanis Yingnan JI

But when he’s cut, I bleed.

Lois McMaster Bujold

You have to see everyone in relationship to you. Just because you understand the shit in someone else's life doesn't mean you don't stand up for your own

Chris Crutcher

Empathy is a big part of Sparkleponies, because it’s also my belief (as a history and political science major) that societies that don’t practice rational empathy inevitably collapse – either by fomenting conflict from within by oppressing a segment/s of their populace, or seeking conflict from without by taking from others and eventually getting into a fight they can’t win.

Chris Kluwe

Empathy needs no genius.

Toba Beta

King and Gandhi had found a way to use aggressive impulses to resist injustice without hurting others. Where did the aggression go? The answer, as King would later tell Poussaint, was this: into the courage needed to resist without fighting back physically...

S. Nassir Ghaemi

Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.

Leslie Jamison

We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.

Rebecca Solnit

Empathy Is An Endangered Instinct

Dean Cavanagh

We weep for the blood of a bird, but not for the blood of a fish. Blessed are those who have voice.

Mamoru Oshii

The third facilitative aspect of the relationship is empathic understanding. This means that the therapist senses accurately the feelings and personal meanings that the client is experiencing and communicates this understanding to the client. When functioning best, the therapist is so much inside the private world of the other that he or she can clarify not only the meanings of which the client is aware but even those just below the level of awareness. This kind of sensitive, active listening is exceedingly rare in our lives. We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know.

Carl R. Rogers

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

Sarah Liss

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

Paula Heller Garland

He sits in an old armchair in the corner covered with bits of blankets and a bucket behind the chair that stinks enough to make you sick and when you look at that old man in the dark corner you want to get a hose with hot water and strip him and wash him down and give him a big feed of rashers and eggs and mashed potatoes with loads of butter and salt and onions.I want to take the man from the Boer War and the pile of rags in the bed and put them in a big sunny house in the country with birds chirping away outside the window and a stream gurgling.

Frank McCourt

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.

Anne Lamott

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

Tobin Hart

Doing things for yourself (self-preservation) are ok in in small doses and when necessary but over-burdening you life with your own self will weaken your heart, soul connectivity with others

Paul Isaacs

It wasn't like the World Trade Center, something vile and astonishing within our own borders, happening to people who'd saved coins of the same currency in their piggybanks when they were children. I knew intellectually that shouldn't make a difference, but it seemed to.

Michael Marshall

Her father dropped her off in front of the place where she was to live and left the engine running. Lila Mae removed the two suitcases from the back of the pickup truck. The suitcases were new, with a formidable casing of green plastic. Scratchproof, supposedly. Her father had only been able to afford them because they were, manufacturer's oats aside, scratched — gouged actually, as if an animal had taken them in its fangs to teach them about hubris.

Colson Whitehead

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

Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.

Cherie Carter-Scott

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

Starley Ard

A writer is like a tuning fork: We respond when we’re struck by something. The thing is to pay attention, to be ready for radical empathy. If we empty ourselves of ourselves we’ll be able to vibrate in synchrony with something deep and powerful. If we’re lucky we’ll transmit a strong pure note, one that isn’t ours, but which passes through us. If we’re lucky, it will be a note that reverberates and expands, one that other people will hear and understand.

Roxana Robinson

I think if God came down and gave us all His version of Empathy then all the world’s problems would surely become a thing of the past.

Duane Hewitt

I wish I had the talent to paint the way I feel about you, for my words always feel inadequate. I imagine using red for your passion and pale blue for your kindness; forest green to reflect the depth of your empathy and bright yellow for your unflagging optimism. And still I wonder: can even an artist’s palette capture the full range of what you mean to me?

Nicholas Sparks

Digital age of business and world shall move up from apathy, to sympathy, to empathy.

Pearl Zhu

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

Saru Singhal

How often have our own tears blinded us to the tears of others.

Marty Rubin

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

Donna Lynn Hope

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

Empathy isn't just listening, it's asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.

Leslie Jamison

This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. It's a quick fix of empathy.

Leslie Jamison

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.

Leslie Jamison

Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destruction of other species and remote places, impinges on the imagination and perhaps prompts you to act.

Rebecca Solnit

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.

Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

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.

Joe Abercrombie

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Empathy Quotes

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