Quotes About Empathy

When people want to inspire you to turn against some group of people, they'll often use empathy. When Obama wanted to bomb Syria, he drew our attention to the victims of chemical warfare. And in both of the Iraq wars, politicians said, "Look at the horrific things that are happening." 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.

For the most part, people use "empathy" to mean everything good. For instance, many medical schools have courses in empathy. But if you look at what they mean, they just want medical students to be nicer to their patients, to listen to them, to respect them, to understand them. What's not to like? If they were really teaching empathy, then I'd say there is a world of problems there.

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.

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.

I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways...It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being.

This enthusiasm [for empathy] may be misplaced. 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.

We need empathy to give empathy.

Leadership is about empathy.

Every child must master empathy-based ethics because the rules are changing; the less they apply the less learning them has positive impact

Empathy lies in our ability to be present without opinion.

We now know, from the latest research about neurons, that we are hard-wired for empathy. We're hard-wired for cooperation. That is something about what we are as people - what it means to be a human being. And what Barack Obama was addressing was not just race or just the nature of politics. The great speeches address who we are as people, what it means to be a human being.

Imagine what Ivanka Trump life has been like? She's been eaten alive by the media. I have empathy for that.

When people are really suffering, and we know they're suffering, that question can be a very difficult one. Inadvertently, I think without anyone meaning it, it communicates a lack of empathy.

Most people assume that autistic people are not capable of empathy.

Sympathy feels like a performative word, whereas empathy is human.

It was a strange thing, this feeling of empathy. He'd never experienced it before. He realized that what hurt this woman hurt him as well, that what made her bleed caused a hemorrhage of pain within his soul.

If you think ahead to what to say next - like how to fix it or make the person feel better - BOOM! Off the board. You're into the future. Empathy requires staying with the energy that's here right now. Not using any technique. Just being present. When I have really connected to this energy, it's like I wasn't there. I call this "watching the magic show". In this presence, a very precious energy works through us that can heal anything, and this relieves me from my "fix-it" tendencies.

Writing is an act of empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own--and work is often the keyhole through which you peer.

Reducing the economic gap may be impossible without also addressing the gap in empathy.

Compared to other parents, remarried parents seem more desirous of their child's approval, more alert to the child's emotional state, and more sensitive in their parent-child relations. Perhaps this is the result of heightened empathy for the child's suffering, perhaps it is a guilt reaction; in either case, it gives the child a potent weapon--the power to disrupt the new household and come between parent and the new spouse.

Like many people, most Libertarians feel empathy and sympathy for less fortunate people. But they know you can't have perfection in a world of limited resources.

Because of empathy, stories of the suffering of one person could lead us into a war that could kill millions of people.

I've had empathy toward what Carson McCullers calls "the invisible people" all my life and was inherently interested in what redeemed Mancil Travis, what fueled Mancil, what destroyed Mancil, etc. I think everyone wants redemption including Mancil.

The stories I love the most are where the author has a lot of empathy for everyone. The author loves their characters and takes their situations really seriously, and you feel like you're just dropped into a different world.

Bless you for your jealousy; it is a sign of empathy.

What I mean by "empathy" is putting yourself in other people's shoes, feeling what they feel.

Most women prefer circles of sharing to pyramids and hierarchies. They prefer conversation to construction. They will usually choose nurturance and empathy over competition and climbing. They will normally choose connection over simple performance games.

Women's networks are a necessary part of life. A mixture of empathy and brainstorming can move mountains.

When you hear about what someone else is going through, and you are unable to distance yourself from it or in any way muzzle your empathy and are inspired to actually do something, these are moments to learn from.

If you take the time to listen to an upset child's story with empathy, and guide the child toward figuring out the root of the problem, then the result is often that the child not only calms down, but also in the future is less likely to get so upset.

Of all the things we are wrong about, error might well top the list ... We are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honourable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.

Films to the degree that they glorify mindlessness and short attention span they are bad, to the degree that they encourage empathy with people not like ourselves and encourage us to think about life, they are good.

If I were God, I'd work on the reach of empathy.

A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic - not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. 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.

Empathy and social skills are social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence. That's why they look alike.

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

Self-empathy in NVC means checking in with your own feelings and needs.

If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can't survive.

I don't mean to criticize anyone in any way that I wouldn't criticize myself. I think people should have fun, and have a good time, and enjoy the luck that we have to be lazy and dwell in consumerism. But I think that it's a balance. And our job as actors is empathy.

Out of the house and on my own, I faced the fact I didn't much like who I was. I didn't like my judgmentalism; I didn't like my absolutism. I didn't like my repression of natural empathy, my pinched lack of emotional generosity. How I had been thinking politically had less to do with what was wrong with the world and more to do with what was wrong with me, with my fears and insecurities, failings, weaknesses.

The recurring theme of all religions is a sympathy, empathy, connection, capacity between the human and the divine - that we were made for union with one another. They might express this through different rituals, doctrines, dogmas, or beliefs, but at the higher levels they're talking about the same goal. And the goal is always union with the divine.

Who taught me that animals were put on this Earth for food? Who taught me to disrespect animals and view them as mere commodities? Who stole my compassion, my empathy and my conscience? Who lied to me? Who instilled this vicious mindset of human-to-animal exploitation as standard operating procedure?

Love is that enviable state that knows no envy or vanity, only empathy and a longing to be greater than oneself.

I think that you have to experience darkness to feel empathy. For all of my failings - and I have many - I do have a complete ability to emphasize with people. And that all goes down to being "other." When you're young you think otherness is a state only you possess. When you get older you realize, "Actually, there's so many of us." In that we find community.

True empathy is always free of any evaluative or diagnostic quality. This comes across to the recipient with some surprise. "If I am not being judged, perhaps I am not so evil or abnormal as I have thought".

I don't want people to write programmatic environmental poems, but I think sustainability should become deeply a part of the consciousness of poetry - an impulse toward compassion, empathy, and social justice.

The realization that you're not always standing down there on the field merely to win, to be successful, was very liberating. One can be successful by helping the team, the other players. All of a sudden I felt the kind of empathy for people that I hadn't felt before.

I think empathy is a beautiful thing. I think that's the power of film though. We have one of the most powerful, one of the greatest communicative tools known to man.