Empathy quotes:

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Empathy grows as we learn. -- Alice Miller
Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself. -- Mohsin Hamid
The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy. -- Meryl Streep
When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you. -- Susan Sarandon
Empathy and social skills are social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence. That's why they look alike. -- Daniel Goleman
Empathy is about standing in someone else's shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes. Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place. -- Daniel H. Pink
Empathy before education. -- Marshall B. Rosenberg
Empathy needs no genius. -- Toba Beta
Empathy cannot by definition oppress anyone. -- Simon Baron-Cohen
Empathy is the wellspring of creativity. -- Ami Vitale
Empathy is the most powerful weapon [...] -- Augusto Boal
Empathy comes from being empathized with. -- Stanley Greenspan
Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing. -- Leslie Jamison
Empathy is the key to great stories. -- Ami Vitale
Empathy is the stepping stone to respect -- Vusi JCK Maseko
Empathy is the most radical of human emotions. -- Gloria Steinem
Empathy is the ultimate form of customer insight. -- Don Peppers
Empathy during agony is a portion of divinity. -- Neal A. Maxwell
Empathy is the sunlight to the vampire of culture. -- Stefan Molyneux
Empathy is even better than talking in one language -- Rumi
Empathy is at the heart of the actor's art. -- Meryl Streep
Empathy is what separates human beings from teenage boys. -- Victor LaValle
Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing. -- Marshall B. Rosenberg
Empathy lies in our ability to be present without opinion. -- Marshall B. Rosenberg
Empathy gives you the ability to enjoy another person's pain. -- Marshall B. Rosenberg
Empathy: Emptying our mind and listening with our whole being -- Marshall B. Rosenberg
Empathy takes time, and efficiency is for things, not people. -- Stephen Covey
Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world. -- Barack Obama
Empathy is a virtue, but it should not be a guiding judicial principle. -- Gary Bauer
Empathy represents the foundation skill for all the social competencies important for work. -- Daniel Goleman
Empathy and a huge imagination explain a lot of mysteries in the universe. -- Shannon L. Alder
Empathy is intuitive, but it is also something you can work on intellectually. -- Tim Minchin
Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform. -- Derrick Bell
Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform. -- Derrick Bell
Empathy allows us to re-perceive our world in a new way and move forward. -- Marshall B. Rosenberg
Empathy works so well because it does not require a solution. It requires only understanding. -- John Medina
Empathy is born out of the old biblical injunction 'Love the neighbor as thyself.' -- George McGovern
Look what scares you in the face and try to understand it. Empathy is revolutionary. -- Jane Fonda
Empathy is the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person. -- Heinz Kohut
Empathy is the main thing, putting yourself in somebody else's shoes and trying not to judge. -- Keira Knightley
Empathy is the poor man's cocaine, and love is just a chemical by any other name -- Eyedea
Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it's very difficult to empathize across a moral divide -- Jonathan Haidt
Empathy in broadest sense refers to the reactions of one individual to the observed experiences of another -- Mark H. A. Davis
Empathy is the greatest virtue. From it, all virtues flow. Without it, all virtues are an act. -- Eric Zorn
Empathy involves the inner experience of sharing in and comprehending the momentary psychological state of another person. -- Roy Schafer
Empathy is the starting point for creating a community and taking action. It's the impetus for creating change. -- Max Carver
Empathy may be the single most important quality that must be nurtured to give peace a fighting chance. -- Arundhati Roy
Empathy is cloaked in our actions - as in, we might be experiencing empathy but not realize it's empathy. -- Leslie Jamison
Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals. -- Neil Gaiman
Empathy for the plight of the Goddess may be essential in seeing how to face our own plight on Earth. -- John Lamb Lash
Empathy zooms you in on an individual and, as a result, it's narrow, it's innumerate, it's racist, it's very biased. -- Paul Bloom
Empathy for the people you're working with and being aware of their needs...that's the "big kahuna" in managing people. -- Barbara Corcoran
Yes, last year in interviewing. Empathy is when you repeat the last three words the patient says and nod your head. -- Samuel Shem
Today's society is wanting in such a way that Honor, Integrity, Trust, Compassion, Empathy are left for the homeless and their pets. -- Solange nicole
Empathy is really important.. Only when our clever brain and our human heart work together in harmony can we achieve our full potential. -- Jane Goodall
Empathy frequently informs our earliest days with our infants as we try to figure out what they need, how to comfort and satisfy them. -- Katherine Ellison
Empathy is patiently and sincerely seeing the world through the other person's eyes. It is not learned in school; it is cultivated over a lifetime. -- Albert Einstein
I hope people learn the power of vulnerability through my songs. I think vulnerability can save the world. Empathy helps people connect with each other. -- Mary Lambert
Empathy has some unfortunate features - it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We're often at our best when we're smart enough not to rely on it. -- Paul Bloom
Empathy probably started out as a mechanism to improve maternal care. Mammalian mothers who were attentive to their young's needs were more likely to rear successful offspring. -- Frans de Waal
Empathy is not merely the basic principle of artistic creation. It is also the only path by which one can reach the truth about life and society. -- Kafu Nagai
Empathy makes you more aware of other people's suffering, but it's not clear it actually motivates you to take moral action or prevents you from taking immoral action. -- David Brooks
Empathy is at the core of family stability and love. I've never had a couple come to me and say, I want a divorce; my partner understands me. -- Warren Farrell
Empathy feels these thoughts; your hurt is in my heart, your loss is in my prayers, your sorrow is in my soul, and your tears are in my eyes. -- William Arthur Ward
Empathy is a special application of the imagination. The ability to imagine what it would be like to experience what someone else is experiencing can be crucial to moral sensitivity. -- Gene Edward Veith Jr.
Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels-the biggest sin is to be blind to others problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence. -- Azar Nafisi
Empathy took the edge off, and the truth is, we need our edge. Our edge is trying to speak to us, and we are too, too good at shutting it up. -- Deb Caletti
Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own. -- Barbara Kingsolver
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Empathy doesn't require that we have the exact same experiences as the person sharing their story with us...Empathy is connecting with the emotion that someone is experiencing, not the event or the circumstance. -- BrenÃ© Brown
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Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering. -- Matthieu Ricard
Because I teach and write about depression and bipolar illness, I am often asked what is the most important factor in treating bipolar disorder. My answer is competence. Empathy is important, but competence is essential. -- Kay Redfield Jamison
So often our sisters comfort others when their own needs are greater than those being comforted. That quality is like the generosity of Jesus on the cross. Empathy during agony is a portion of divinity! -- Neal A. Maxwell
The brain controls pain. It controls fear. Sleep. Empathy. Hunger. Everything we associate with the heart or the soul or the nervous system is actually controlled by the brain. Everything. What if you could control it? -- Dennis Lehane
Learning to stand in somebody else's shoes, to see through their eyes, that's how peace begins. And it's up to you to make that happen. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world. -- Barack Obama
Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope. -- Cornel West
I'm not a pacifist. I think the suffering of innocent people can be a catalyst for moral action. But empathy puts too much weight on the scale in favor of war. Empathy can really lead to violence. -- Paul Bloom
Empathy is a special way of coming to know another and ourself, a kind of attuning and understanding. When empathy is extended, it satisfies our needs and wish for intimacy, it rescues us from our feelings of aloneness. -- Carl Rogers
Empathy isn't as hard as it sounds because people have a lot of the same feelings. And it helps to understand other people because then you can actually care about them sometimes. And help them. And have a friend. -- Kathryn Erskine
Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech. -- Martin Farquhar Tupper
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen. -- Ernest Hemingway
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. -- Simone Weil
I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization. -- Roger Ebert
You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself. -- John Steinbeck
Know how to listen, and you will profit even from those who talk badly. -- Plutarch
I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it. -- Maya Angelou
The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others. -- Albert Schweitzer
Yet, taught by time, my heart has learned to glow for other's good, and melt at other's woe. -- Homer
Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? -- Henry David Thoreau
Anyone who has experienced a certain amount of loss in their life has empathy for those who have experienced loss. -- Anderson Cooper
Remember there's no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end. -- Scott Adams
I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate - it's apathy. It's not giving a damn. -- Leo Buscaglia
This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy. -- Alice Walker
There is something human about the way people react to and identify with suffering. There's a lot more empathy in the world than we perhaps realize. -- Edwidge Danticat
When you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That's when you can get more creative in solving problems. -- Stephen Covey
I always think that if you look at anyone in detail, you will have empathy for them because you recognize them as a human being, no matter what they've done. -- Andrea Arnold
It's got to do with putting yourself in other people's shoes and seeing how far you can come to truly understand them. I like the empathy that comes from acting. -- Christian Bale
I think I'm an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist. -- Susan Sarandon
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. -- Abraham Lincoln
I always feel that life can teach you how to act. I'm always looking at life through other people's eyes. By feeling empathy. And I do feel that I am constantly learning. -- Cara Delevingne
Learning a foreign language, and the culture that goes with it, is one of the most useful things we can do to broaden the empathy and imaginative sympathy and cultural outlook of children. -- Michael Gove
All leaders, male or female, innately possess feminine qualities like empathy, candor and vulnerability - the difference lies in which leaders choose to suppress those qualities, and which choose to leverage them as strengths. -- John Gerzema
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. -- Karl A. Menninger
We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior. -- Graydon Carter
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
Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. -- Leo Buscaglia
The youngest children have a great capacity for empathy and altruism. There's a recent study that shows even 14-month-olds will climb across a bunch of cushions and go across a room to give you a pen if you drop one. -- Alison Gopnik
Positive social emotions like compassion and empathy are generally good for us, and we want to encourage them. But do we know how to most reliably raise children to care about the suffering of other people? I'm not sure we do. -- Sam Harris
I have a profound empathy for people who are in the public eye, whether they manifest it themselves or whether it happened by accident - it doesn't matter to me. I think there's a great misunderstanding of what it is to be famous. -- Alanis Morissette
We shall listen, not lecture; learn, not threaten. We will enhance our safety by earning the respect of others and showing respect for them. In short, our foreign policy will rest on the traditional American values of restraint and empathy, not on military might. -- Theodore C. Sorensen
I've always thought of acting as more of an exercise in empathy, which is not to be confused with sympathy. You're trying to get inside a certain emotional reality or motivational reality and try to figure out what that's about so you can represent it. -- Edward Norton
When a mother quarrels with a daughter, she has a double dose of unhappiness hers from the conflict, and empathy with her daughter's from the conflict with her. Throughout her life a mother retains this special need to maintain a good relationship with her daughter. -- Terri Apter
If your emotional abilities aren't in hand, if you don't have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can't have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far. -- Daniel Goleman
We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old - and that's the criterion by which I'll be selecting my judges. -- Barack Obama
What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it - the process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialized language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve; empathy can be replaced by cynicism. -- Abraham Verghese
Empathy' is the latest code word for liberal activism, for treating the Constitution as malleable clay to be kneaded and molded in whatever form justices want. It represents an expansive view of the judiciary in which courts create policy that couldn't pass the legislative branch or, if it did, would generate voter backlash. -- Karl Rove

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