Top 265 Empathy Quotes

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.

Books by women, people of color, LGBTQ authors, differently abled people, and non-Americans are a great way of broadening horizons and building empathy.

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.

Weight is an intensely personal, sensitive and often tricky issue for women and it is something women talk about a lot among themselves, usually with empathy and support.

In order to be a good emergency contact, you need a lot of friend-patience and empathy. Often, this comes from personal experience with anxiety, trauma, and depression.

My theory is that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, and that the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.

While we have to take personal responsibility for our actions, I have a great deal of empathy for people who are unconsciously racially biased, and indeed count myself among their number.

I have a lot of empathy for quarterbacks.

Because I was a dancer when I was a kid, I have so much empathy for these young girls who are so drawn to something lovely in music and in movement, and yet they encounter a world full of judgment and criticism of 11-year-old artists and bodies.

‘Me Too’ is about letting – using the power of empathy to stomp out shame.

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you’re a writer.

As authors, most – most authors, our art is portraying the human condition. Trying to show you what it’s like to be somebody else, trying to make you feel for somebody else. That means you have to have a high degree of empathy.

If you can use songs as a tool, vehicle for empathy and a deeper understanding of how people are feeling and how people’s emotions work, there’s a lot of good that can come from that.

When we watch stories, we learn empathy, we learn compassion, and hopefully we achieve some sort of understanding.

I am a big one for subtlety and empathy. My dad was softly spoken and didn’t carry his honours and accomplishments for everyone to see.

In my work as an actor, I have been given even greater insights and have been guided towards empathy and a consciousness of those who are less fortunate.

I do have a bit of empathy I suppose, but it has come more recently as I’m knocking on 30’s door and I think I’m getting there.

I think I identify as a comedian before kind of anything else. Before I identify as a person, as a human being with empathy.

It’s hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It’s so easy to make a damaged character repugnant.

This precious thing of empathy and love and understanding is something we have to hold and appreciate and protect.

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.

There are justifiable case-by-case situations wherein an educator might exhibit targeted sensitivity to a student’s unique circumstances. This is humane and laudable. In most instances though, trigger warnings are not a manifestation of justified empathy but are symptomatic of an ailing culture.

The idea of faking empathy to take a step forward to understanding – it’s a really powerful idea.

Despair is despair, sorrow is sorrow, death is death. It’s not about who is experiencing it; it’s about building a bridge of empathy across these experiences.

Machines are becoming devastatingly capable of things like killing. Those machines have no place for empathy. There’s billions of dollars being spent on that. Character robotics could plant the seed for robots that actually have empathy.

Empathy, humanity and support for each other is more important than revenue, than growth.

Insects are living metaphors for me. They are so alien and so remote and so perfect, but also they are emotionless; they don’t have any human or mammalian instincts. They’ll eat their young at the drop of a hat; they can eat your house! There’s no empathy – none.

I don’t think there’s any reason in journalism not to approach stories we cover with humility, empathy, compassion, and intellectual openness. I mean, I think those are just important human traits. I don’t think that precludes scrutiny, negativity, where it’s appropriate.

My grandmother was an unparalleled storyteller who gave me a preview of how life might turn out, and also fortified my empathy.

The mobile revolution has dramatically changed our world view, empowered women, and increased our empathy. Corrupt governments have been toppled and wars avoided because our species has become so digitally connected.

American popular culture has long been marked by an absence of empathy for American Indians. Westerns doubled as a campaign against so-called savages in a way that desensitized us to the savages we’d become.

Disability is articulated as a struggle, an unnecessary burden that one must overcome to the soundtrack of a string crescendo. But disabled lives are multi-faceted – brimming with personality, pride, ambition, love, empathy, and wit.

I have empathy; I am humane. I understand human misery.

When we used to go to the car-wash where people would wipe the windows, my dad would go out and help them and then tip them as well, so I learned my empathy from my dad, and my mum is very empathetic too, but in a very stern way; she will always check my ego.

Trump’s lying, his self-regard, his self-soothing, his lack of empathy, his narcissistic rage, his contempt for norms, rules, laws, facts and simple truths – have all come home to roost.

There should be characters and situations that we cannot identify with, that retain either too much horror or too much wonder to allow for simple identification. That feels to me like an accurate depiction of what it is like to be in the world, rather than a neutered register of continual empathy.

We often want the world to think we are strong and everything is perfect, when the reality is sometimes we are hurting and need a shoulder to cry on or just compassion or empathy.

The only way to combat hate is by demonstrating empathy and love.

Empathy is one of our greatest tools of business that is most underused.

If evil is empathy erosion, and empathy erosion is a form of illness, then evil turns out to be nothing more than a particularly awful psychological disorder.

Democracy is based upon empathy and the recognition that some decisions are solely for the community’s benefit without regard to one’s own narrow self-interest.

I have a lot of empathy, and I think that’s where mothering starts. You are there to empathise and facilitate.

Acting is probably the only profession where you are relying only on empathy.

Almost all human beings have the capacity for empathy. Everyone has the potential to be at least troubled, or feel genuine anguish, about the suffering of other human beings.

What we call politics now and what most political writers write about is the empathy and the bonding and the word choice and the horse rights, and it has nothing to do with what’s really happening to people’s lives.

One important lesson I learned over and over is that, when you walk into any troubled organization, there is a delicate balance between expressing human empathy and yet not passively sweeping hard truths under the rug.

I look for a role that hopefully I feel empathy with and that I can understand and love, but also that has that challenge for me to play – a different kind of role, a different type of character, a different time period.

The opposite of anger is not calmness, its empathy.

We need to see kindness and we need to see empathy and compassion. That’s something we need to see in leadership as well.

I think I lead with empathy and connection to our people. I find that the most effective leadership style for me is to just talk and listen. It sounds simple, but it’s so effective.

One result of moviemaking – and a side effect of moviegoing – is familiarity. If an actor is particularly good, familiarity opens into something deeper: care, concern, identification, empathy. Yet even those concepts can feel inadequate for some actors.

The thing that enchants me the most is the ability women have to feel other people’s pain. The total empathy that women have is extraordinary.

If you aren’t humble, whatever empathy you claim is false and probably results from some arrogance or the desire to control. But true empathy is rooted in humility and the understanding that there are many people with as much to contribute in life as you.

I have absolutely no empathy for camels. I didn’t care for being abused in the Middle East by those horrible, horrible, horrible creatures. They don’t like people. It’s not at all like the relationship between horses and humans.