These empathetic quotes will inspire you. Empathetic, involving, characterized by, or based on empathy, or showing an ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging empathetic quotes, empathetic sayings, and empathetic proverbs.
Best Empathetic Quotes
- “When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.” ~ Susan Sarandon
- “I think to be empathetic is the greatest gift you can have as a designer. Hopefully, people will look at me and say, ‘He really loved women.'” ~ Michael Kors
- “People didn’t feel so much shame around it and that they didn’t feel so much humiliation around it. And the other thing that people have given me a lot of feedback about – something I’m very excited about – is all the stuff around chemo as an “empathetic warrior.”” ~ Eve Ensler
-
“I’m empathetic to a fault. I really do – embarrassingly enough – tear up when someone squishes a bug in front of me.” ~ Kristen Bell
- “Without television and mass communication, that knowledge wouldn’t exist. So I think it actually has the possibility of turning people into more understanding and more empathetic people.” ~ John Warnock
- “Theres a lot of lying and these are people who are incredibly flawed, and not in very sort of empathetic ways, either. Some of the things they do are pretty awful and some of the things they do to each other are pretty awful.” ~ Will Arnett
- “Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.” ~ Dean Koontz
-
“Staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.” ~ Ann Patchett
- “What is your personal definition of “good”?
A world in which everyone is universally empathetic and exercises love and respect with full change-making power.” ~ Bill Drayton - “Empathetic people are superb at recognizing and meeting the needs of clients, customers, or subordinates. They seem approachable, wanting to hear what people have to say. They listen carefully, picking up on what people are truly concerned about, and respond on the mark.” ~ Daniel Goleman
- “A role model for me is somebody who is really empathetic and has a calm strength to them. Sometimes you meet random people and they’re really inspiring because they seem wise; they’ve gone through things.” ~ BANKS
-
“Positive culture comes from being mindful, and respecting your coworkers, and being empathetic.” ~ Biz Stone
- “If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God’s name, it was bad theology.” ~ Karen Armstrong
- “If I want people to be empathetic to my struggle – they don’t see hate crimes at the mosque, they don’t see people screaming at their cousins, brothers, or sisters who wear a hijab to “go back to your country” – I have to do the same.” ~ Hasan Minhaj
- “To me, bringing mindfulness-bas ed practices to students, teachers and parents is some of the most important work we can be doing. If we can help the next generation become more self-aware, empathetic and emotionally resilient, they will bring their wisdom to healing the earth and creating a more peaceful world.” ~ Tara Brach
-
“There’s a lot of evidence in evolutionary sciences that show that altruism and acting in ways that are empathetic to others are actually beneficial on an evolutionary basis.” ~ Neill Blomkamp
- “There is an element in which anxiety co-represents with aspects of my personality I wouldnt want to give up. It allows you to have foresight. I may not be as empathetic. Its hard to figure out the difference between pathology and personality.” ~ Scott Stossel
- “When you research someone, you actually get beyond your own preconceptions and become aware of the human being other than the image. You become empathetic and sympathetic in turn.” ~ Jim Broadbent
- “We kid ourselves that we’re trying to be empathetic with the human condition from a distance, but I don’t think that is it at all. It’s stupid; it’s a waste of time. But when the earth flexes its muscles, that’s rather different. That’s a powerful reminder of where we are.” ~ Simon Winchester
-
“And after my mother’s death I became more open to and empathetic about other people’s struggles and losses.” ~ Meghan O’Rourke
- “You need to be empathetic in your own personal life and we help our neighbors and our friends out who are struggling in our neighborhoods. But we don’t make bad decisions based on empathy.” ~ Thomas Sowell
- “I live in New York City, but it doesn’t matter if you’re in any large, metropolitan area, there’s kind of a little bit of survival-of-the-fittest, so when you encounter kindness or people going out of their way in an empathetic way, it’s almost startling.” ~ Jim Gaffigan
- “I think there’s some evidence that when it comes to being a doctor or nurse, a police officer or therapist, that empathetic engagement leads to burn-out. Imagine if you’re dealing with severely ill children, and you felt their pain all the time, and the pain of their parents – you wouldn’t be able to do that job for very long. It would kill you.” ~ Paul Bloom
-
“On stage and in person, I think I am nice, thoughtful, and empathetic. But for some reason when I’m online, I become super aggressive and unhinged. I should probably get off of Twitter and see a therapist.” ~ Joe Mande
- “We all compromise ourselves, from time to time, because maybe it will lead to more opportunity…A ll of that’s cool, but we forget and we get caught up. If you want that nurturing, caring, empathetic, compassionate heart to keep on ticking and be around, and you want it to be strong, then don’t neglect #1. One way to feed it is just being truthful and listening to your heart.” ~ Paul Walker
- “I have this weird sort of Gemini thing where I can really be empathetic and a loving person. But if you piss me off, I can be one of the meanest, most sadistic people.” ~ Bill Burr
- “We have a lot to learn from [bonobos], because they’re a very egalitarian society and they’re a very empathetic society. Sexual behavior is not confined to one aspect of their life that they set aside. It permeates their entire life.” ~ Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
-
“So much in TV today, you don’t get to feel empathetic for the villain. The villains are the villains and the heroes are the heroes. It’s very black and white.” ~ Stella Maeve
- “As a musician and a songwriter it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.” ~ Bono
- “The novels I love, the ones I remember, the ones I re-read, have an empathetic human quality, or ’emotional truth’. This quality is difficult to fully define, but I always recognise it when I see it: it is different from honesty and more resilient than fact, something that exists not in the kind of fiction that explains but in the kind that shows.” ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- “What I am most proud of with the book On to the Next Dream is how I turned an intensely emotional experience into art. Anyone can run up to a rooftop, tear off their clothes, and scream about how screwed up the world is. But for the people down below, all they see is a person losing their mind. I wanted to make something that channeled that emotion in a way that elicited an empathetic response from the reader. So that after you read this book, you would want to run up to the rooftop and scream about how screwed up the world is.” ~ Paul Madonna , Empathetic quotes person
-
“I’ve become more empathetic, and my capacity to understand and be patient – to give people a break – has enlarged over the years.” ~ Stephen Lang
- “Anytime I get an acting role, I find a way to learn about something new, or heal a part of my life that I didn’t know was hurting. I think anybody could benefit from taking acting classes. You don’t necessarily have to want to be an actor or pursue the acting business. But just taking an acting class, you’re going to learn so much about life and what it’s like to walk in somebody else’s shoes. It helps you stop judging people. It does something to you where you become empathetic to people’s plights and journeys, and it makes you a little more understanding and caring.” ~ Travis Aaron Wade
- “‘Hoop Dreams’ brought us back to our roots in veríté filmmaking. What we saw in the powerful emotional scenes within it – at nearly three hours long and with no star power – was an outreach to a different and more important audiences. There were the similarly involved folks who saw it that were part of the struggle, but there was also a new audience that weren’t empathetic or sympathetic to the people we were portraying. They would never watch a film about inner city families, but they watched ‘Hoop Dreams.'” ~ Gordon Quinn
- “It’s not that I bounce ideas off of my children as much as it is that having children has had a profound effect on the way I see the world. They have mined my soul. They’ve made me a better person and therefore a more empathetic writer.” ~ Julianna Baggott
-
“And as such, we need to be empathetic and understanding.” ~ Linda D. Thompson
- “Surrendered people know themselves and are empathetic toward others. They don’t measure themselves by how much they are liked, nor do they compete for attention. When they sit quietly in a room, others always seem to come to them. They feel successful apart from their job or net worth.” ~ Judith Orloff
- “All too often, parents and kids struggle to find an empathetic ear when confronting bullying situation; these escalate and too often result in marginalization, on top of what may well be a daily gauntlet of harassment and abuse that is fundamentally torture.” ~ Lee Hirsch
- “There’s more empathetic representations than we’re used to seeing. I honestly feel like in the early days of Hollywood, women did have those. Women had very traditional roles in society of wife and mother, but when they went to the movies, they got to see women be, like, really cool, amazing characters and femme fatales and all of this. And then there was just this systemic reaction where it was all about, “How do we make money?” And everybody wants to sell things to boys. And then women’s entertainment became devalued in a way that I think is disrespectful and hurtful.” ~ Elizabeth Banks
-
“Our painful experiences strengthen us in becoming more empathetic, more caring, and deeper human beings. We grow in depth of understanding, with greater appreciation for the miracle of life.” ~ Alexandra Stoddard
- “One of the few times I’m hit emotionally is when I listen to the tapes sadists make of torturing their victims. There the person is currently suffering, you can hear them suffer, and that calls out for an empathic response. But when they’re dead, when they’re no longer suffering, when it’s over, it’s hard to feel empathetic for the corpse.” ~ Park Dietz
- “I was trained professionally to connect with people as a therapist. That’s job number one, having a empathetic regard towards someone who is sitting right across from you. Being able to pull whatever their needs are, their desires and the things that are troubling them and being able to address that in some way.” ~ William Fitzsimmons
- “What President Obama has done so masterfully of late is to say, in so many words, “I’m signing this executive order permitting federal funding for stem cell research, but I realize that many good, moral people are opposed to this, and I don’t take that lightly.” I think we can be more civil and empathetic in our discussions of public policy, and I hope my book can be a contribution to that tone.” ~ Kevin Roose
-
“The job of the art is to really convey and support that empathetic response. I always try to find where the character is mushy, and then bring that to the forefront.” ~ Ryan Hurst
- “Maybe that’s partly why I’m an actor, I’m a fairly empathetic, emotional person, so I get very, very involved when it’s really, really great when I’m watching – so it takes me a second to click back into reality again.” ~ Gabriel Mann
- “To close the empathetic gap, you really want to get the person emotionally identifying [with your subject and characters], and then when you do that, then you want sneak in a lesson about history and about politics and whatever else you might think about.” ~ Fred D’Aguiar
- “I love everything. I love being the empathetic characters. I love being the villains. I think it’s like when we’re kids, we like to play all kinds of crazy characters and dress up.” ~ Kathy Bates
-
“Hillary Clinton’s not seen as empathetic and compassionate.” ~ Kellyanne Conway
- “Sometimes it’s a little overwhelming to take on other people’s stories, that’s just the kind of person I am, maybe I’m empathetic to a fault, I internalize a lot, so it can be a bit hard sometimes, but I understand that that’s what they need, and if I can do it, then I’ll do it, but if I can’t, then I’ll try to take a knee.” ~ Frank Iero
- “Working with different people anyway is like life and meeting different people… as long as you can be empathetic, you can take a bit of them on and see what you can do to help their process. That said, my relationship with Woody Allen was trying to hang on his every word so that I could tell everybody what he said afterwards. But certainly, he was a very good example of somebody who you didn’t hear talk above a very low volume for the entire time he was on-set.” ~ Miranda Raison
- “At the core, I am an actress. And I think, in a way, that’s a good thing in that I am, I think, empathetic and sympathetic to the film. I would never pretend to have the discerning and acute critical eye that a lot of the great critics in our business do have. I don’t look at it as being a critic or placing a judgment on a film, and I do think, how do you decide which film is best anyway? It’s always a little bit of a mixed bag. But, I think it is just a collective group of people coming together to honor the work of an artist – that’s how I think of it.” ~ Patricia Clarkson
-
“We’re wired to be empathetic and to care about the needs of others, but also to be curious about others. And I think that’s just sort of in our DNA. And so portraiture is a very human act.” ~ Kehinde Wiley
- “The most influential person in the room isn’t the one who is being a bully, talking loudly, and imposing him- or herself on others. Surrendered people understand that true power comes from being respectful and listening. Surrendered people know themselves and are empathetic toward others. They don’t measure themselves by how much they are liked, nor do they compete for attention. When they sit quietly in a room, others always seem to come to them.” ~ Judith Orloff , Empathetic quotes listening
- “A more detailed world is a more complicated and complex one, and therefore a more empathetic one. I feel Gord’s Downie lyrics are exceptionally empathetic, or that’s what they accomplish. The fact that they can cross all those cultural cliques and boundaries really amplifies that, to me.” ~ John K. Samson
- “Gratitude is a mindful awareness of the benefits of life. It’s the greatest of virtues. Studies have linked the emotion with a variety of positive effects. Grateful people tend to be more empathetic and forgiving of others. People who keep a gratitude journal are more likely to have a positive outlook on life. Grateful individuals demonstrate less envy, materialism, and self-centeredness. Gratitude improves self-esteem and enhances relationships, quality of sleep, and longevity.” ~ Max Lucado
-
“We’ve reached a point where we are not a very empathetic people, and art without empathy is art without an audience. My basic viewpoint is that without art we’re alone.” ~ Jamake Highwater
- “That’s really the essence of what any fiction writer does. Some of it is research-based, but most of it is a really long-term, imaginative, empathetic effort to see the world the way someone whose experiences remote from yours might see it. Not every writer works that way; some writers make a wonderful career out of writing books that adhere very closely to how they view the world. The further I go with this, the more interested I get in trying to imagine my way into other perspectives that at first seem foreign to me.” ~ Jonathan Dee
- “I think a fairly common behavior among fiction writers is that they want to help. They’re generally charitable people. They’re interested in the world. They’re curious, they’re empathetic. They understand suffering. They don’t turn away from that. But what they do is essentially useless. Except for the sake of the thing itself.” ~ Joshua Ferris
- “Republicans rarely criticize Obama for lack of empathy – in part because liberals have traditionally been seen as standing up for the weak and the vulnerable. Conservatives can be just as empathetic. But they believe that, in most cases, it’s not government’s role to be the primary dispenser of empathy.” ~ Gary Bauer
-
“We have allowed the system to be so corrupted that many want justice to be “empathetic,” not blind.” ~ Glenn Beck
- “Empathetic people are superb at recognizing and meeting the needs of clients, customers, or subordinates. They seem approachable, wanting to hear what people have to say. They listen carefully, picking up on what people are truly concerned about, and respond on the mark.” ~ Daniel Goleman
- “… the socialization of boys regarding masculinity is often at the expense of women. I came to realize that we don’t raise boys to be men, we raise them not be women (or gay men). We teach boys that girls and women are “less than” and that leads to violence by some and silence by many. It’s important for men to stand up to not only stop men’s violence against women but, to teach young men a broader definition of masculinity that includes being empathetic, loving and non-violent.” ~ Don McPherson
-
“Empathetic listening is an awesome medication for the hurting heart.” ~ Gary Chapman
- “To me, a political song is also a personal song. Most political activism has been driven by empathy for other people and the desire for a world that’s less divisive. Even if songs aren’t overtly political, they can make a listener more empathetic.” ~ Conor Oberst
- “Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story, lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.” ~ Ann Patchett
