These empathy quotes will inspire you. Empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging empathy quotes, empathy sayings, and empathy proverbs.
Inspirational Empathy Quotes
- “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 a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing.” ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg
- “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
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“Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
- “Leadership is about empathy. It is about having the ability to relate to and connect with people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives.” ~ Oprah Winfrey
- “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing. Instead of offering empathy, we often have a strong urge to give advice or reassurance and to explain our own position or feeling. Empathy, however, calls upon us to empty our mind and listen to others with our whole being.” ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg
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“When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.” ~ Susan Sarandon
- “If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.” ~ Frederick Buechner
- “We live in a culture that discourages empathy. A culture that too often tells us our principal goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained.” ~ Barack Obama
- “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
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“There is no greater intelligence than kindness and empathy.” ~ Bryant H. McGill
- “True contentment comes with empathy.” ~ Tim Finn
- “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.” ~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
- “Anyone who has experienced a certain amount of loss in their life has empathy for those who have experienced loss.” ~ Anderson Cooper , Empathy quotes for loss
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“Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.” ~ Marge Piercy
- “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.” ~ Harper Lee
- “I’ll be there for you, I will care for you, I keep thinking you just don’t know. Tryna run from that, say you’re done wit that, on your face girl it just don’t show.” ~ Drake
- “Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?” ~ Marcus Aurelius
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“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.” ~ Walt Whitman
- “When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.” ~ Henri Nouwen
- “Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy.” ~ Dean Koontz
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“Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.” ~ Barack Obama
- “I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.” ~ Roger Ebert
- “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 Rogers
- “There are many respects in which America if it can bring itself to act with the magnanimity and the empathy appropriate to its size and power, can be an intelligent example to the world.” ~ J. William Fulbright
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“You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.” ~ John Steinbeck
- “I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.” ~ Maya Angelou
- “The opposite of anger is not calmness, its empathy.” ~ Mehmet Oz
- “There is also a natural and very, very strong empathy with the underdog, with people who have suffered, people who have been pushed around by foreigners in particular, but also by their own people.” ~ Lakhdar Brahimi
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“When you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air.” ~ Stephen Covey
- “I hope to leave my children a sense of empathy and pity and a will to right social wrongs” ~ Anita Roddick
- “I think we are living in selfish times. I’m the first one to say that I’m the most selfish. We live in the so-called ‘first world,’ and we may be first in a lot of things like technology, but we are behind in empathy.” ~ Javier Bardem
- “Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.” ~ Barbara Kingsolver
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“We need empathy, we need the eyes that still can weep.” ~ Lydia Millet
- “Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.” ~ Steven Pinker , Empathy quotes human nature
- “Have you ever been surfing? Imagine you’re on your surfboard now, waiting for the big one to come. Get ready to get carried with that energy. Now, here it comes. That’s empathy. No words – just being with that energy. When I connect with what’s alive in another person, I have feelings similar to when I’m surfing.” ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg
- “The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.” ~ Albert Schweitzer
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“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” ~ Simone Weil
- “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
- “Remember there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.” ~ Scott Adams
- “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” ~ Dalai Lama
- “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
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“The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.” ~ Meryl Streep
- “Deep listening is the kind of listening that can help relieve the suffering of another person. You can call it compassionate listening. You listen with only one purpose: to help him or her to empty his heart.” ~ Nhat Hanh
- “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” ~ Albert Einstein , Empathy quotes peace
- “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
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“Yet, taught by time, my heart has learned to glow for other’s good, and melt at other’s woe.” ~ Homer
- “Suffering and joy teach us, if we allow them, how to make the leap of empathy, which transports us into the soul and heart of another person.” ~ William Fritz
- “Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.” ~ Pema Chodron
- “Remember that everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something, and has lost something.” ~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
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“Empathy takes time, and efficiency is for things, not people.” ~ Stephen Covey
- “The Chinese philosopher Chuang-Tzu stated that true empathy requires listening with the whole being: 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. Hence it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right there before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind.” ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg
- “Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence, we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life. Silence is a place of great power and healing.” ~ Rachel Naomi Remen
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“Know how to listen, and you will profit even from those who talk badly.” ~ Plutarch
- “The way of being with another person which is termed empathic…means temporarily living in their life, moving about in it delicately without making judgment… to be with another in this way means that for the time being you lay aside the views and values you hold for yourself in order to enter the other’s world without prejudice…a complex, demanding, strong yet subtle and gentle way of being.” ~ Carl Rogers
- “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
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“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.” ~ Harper Lee
- “The most important thing is that we need to be understood. We need someone to be able to listen to us and to understand us. Then we will suffer less.” ~ Nhat Hanh
- “Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.” ~ Martin Farquhar Tupper
- “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
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“To perceive is to suffer.” ~ Aristotle
- “There is no reconciliation until you recognize the dignity of the other until you see their view- you have to enter into the pain of the people. You’ve got to feel their need.” ~ John M. Perkins
- “True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one’s own the suffering and joys of others.” ~ Andre Gide
- “If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather. Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.” ~ Stephen Fry
Summary: Empathy, it’s understanding how others feel and be compassionate toward them.
