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Empathy Quotes

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Empathy Quotes

“...will those who seek power and resist change destroy our country before we get to make it better?... Will our entire world as we know it be destroyed before we get to make it better? Is there even a path to better...? The chaos may bring clarity, may breed heros and artists and empathy, but it also destroys. I think we are each trying to find how best to resist the despair that such evil breeds and relies upon, and find a way forward that finds (or makes) meaning, value, some kind of order. What else can we do?”

“Surround yourself with people who make you happy, folks who reliably care about you. They are the ones that are worthy of custody in your life.”

“Because of the value placed on individual materialistic success in our society, we are surrounded by people primarily interested in getting something from others. Their attitudes are characterised by selfishness and a lack of empathy for others.”

“He'd told Alejandra this many times, but his comments had been so small in the grand scheme of things. She now knew that the largest parts of people escaped in tiny ways, tiny words, and tiny looks. One was not permitted to let themselves go and because they gripped so tightly trying to keep together the puppet they presented, parts of identity snuck their way out of holes, and released, transforming into something like a harmless quip their lover would forget. But their lover would remember it. Afterward. The schedule of human understanding was almost always set: afterward.”

“Seek a man that doesn't ask you to prove your love. Seek a man that will prove God's love.”

“Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.”

“Highly sensitive people are too often perceived as weaklings or damaged goods. To feel intensely is not a symptom of weakness, it is the trademark of the truly alive and compassionate. It is not the empath who is broken, it is society that has become dysfunctional and emotionally disabled. There is no shame in expressing your authentic feelings. Those who are at times described as being a 'hot mess' or having 'too many issues' are the very fabric of what keeps the dream alive for a more caring, humane world. Never be ashamed to let your tears shine a light in this world.”

“The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the developement of humility, objectivity and reason. I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person's reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears.”

“Should I, too, prefer the title of 'non-Jewish Jew'? For some time, I would have identified myself strongly with the attitude expressed by Rosa Luxemburg, writing from prison in 1917 to her anguished friend Mathilde Wurm: What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears. An inordinate proportion of the Marxists I have known would probably have formulated their own views in much the same way. It was almost a point of honor not to engage in 'thinking with the blood,' to borrow a notable phrase from D.H. Lawrence, and to immerse Jewishness in other and wider struggles. Indeed, the old canard about 'rootless cosmopolitanism' finds a perverse sort of endorsement in Jewish internationalism: the more emphatically somebody stresses that sort of rhetoric about the suffering of others, the more likely I would be to assume that the speaker was a Jew. Does this mean that I think there are Jewish 'characteristics'? Yes, I think it must mean that.”

“I think people believe empathy to be compassion, that compassion is an inner sense (a sense of the soul). But empathy is a sense, while compassion isn't a sense. Empathy is an affinity, a communion, a comprehension. They say that empathy is compassion, but I think that the two are independent of each other. You see, through empathy you will feel what another is feeling, including all those plans for manipulation and persuasion. You will feel everything, not just the parts that make you take compassion for the person, but also all the red flags! You see, empathy is a sense that works with the other senses such as foresight and intuition. So, we can feel compassion but we have to move with empathy.”

“I lowered my hands and stared at the tiny horse, considering his question. I couldn’t think of anyone I’d ever felt sorry for. There were plenty of kids I envied. There were others I achingly admired, but that might simply be another form of jealousy. Then there were those I feared, dreaded. And the worst of them, the man who shamed me. I could see my father’s angry features looming over my mother. I could clearly picture her beside him in his truck, cowering against the door while he belittled and assaulted her. I guess I did know someone I felt sorry for.”

“In a Vietnamese village, as reported in a recent TV program, gas bombs had been thrown into holes and huts to drive out of hiding any remaining Viet Cong. Only women and children came out of the holes. One child, about two, routed out with his mother, sat on her lap looking up at a large Negro marine. The side of the child's face was dirty with the smoke and soot from the smoke bomb; he had been crying. He looked up with an expression of bewilderment, now beyond crying, not knowing what to make of such a world. But the camera shifted immediately to the black American marine looking down at the child, commanding and somewhat hideous in his battle uniform. He had exactly the same expression: bewilderment, his eyes wide as he stared down at the child, his mouth slightly ajar; but his stare did not move, remaining fixed on that child. What should he make of a world in which he does this? While the announcer of the program rattled on about how the gas is harmful for only ten minutes and then leaves no deleterious effects, the cameraman kept his camera focused on the face of the marine. Was the marine recalling that he too had once been a child in some Southern state, driven from caves and huts where he had been playing, recognizing that he too was of a race held to be 'inferior'? That he too was once a child in a world at which he could only look out and up, a world causing pain for reasons no child can begin to fathom? Does he see himself in this child, see his bewilderment as a black child?”

“By revealing to Tomas her dream about jabbing needles under her fingernails, Tereza unwittingly revealed that she had gone through his desk. If Tereza had been any other woman, Tomas would never have spoken to her again. Aware of that, Tereza said to him, Throw me out! But instead of throwing her out, he seized her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers, because at that moment he himself felt the pain under her fingernails as surely as if the nerves of her fingers led straight to his own brain. Anyone who has failed to benefit from the Devil’s gift of compassion (co-feeling) will condemn Tereza coldly for her deed, because privacy is sacred and drawers containing intimate correspondence are not to be opened. But because compassion was Tomas’s fate (or curse), he felt that he himself had knelt before the open desk drawer, unable to tear his eyes from Sabina’s letter. He understood Tereza, and not only was he incapable of being angry with her, he loved her all the more.”

“Tenderness is spontaneous and disinterested; it goes far beyond empathetic fellow feeling. Instead it is the conscious, though perhaps slightly melancholy, common sharing of fate. Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time. Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and sameness between us. It is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself. Literature is built on tenderness toward any being other than ourselves. It is the basic psychological mechanism of the novel. Thanks to this miraculous tool, the most sophisticated means of human communication, our experience can travel through time, reaching those who have not yet been born, but who will one day turn to what we have written, the stories we told about ourselves and our world.”

“For this Rosh Hashonah--the Jewish New Year-- this is what I am reflecting on: Sh'mirat Ha'Lashon, guarding our speech. These are not the worst possible times our country has known but it may well be leading to them. While we are holding out for truth, freedom, and equity/parity/diversity/inclusivity, we must also hold out for (and require from ourselves) gentleness, compassion, empathy, and perspective.”

“Let me say this—it's not that there's no value in sharing our experiences, but your grief is your own, and it's something that only you can carry, and it can't be compared to my grief. Nothing is better or worse. In the truest sense, I can't understand your pain, Amane-kun, nor can you understand mine. What I can do is accept your sadness and support you... just like you've done for me. I want to be there for you, and I want you to rely on me.”