"We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible."
Read quote
4 likes
Empathy quotes
Empathy
672 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Empathy
Browse quotes that often appear alongside empathy — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Empathy quotes (page 7 of 34)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Empathy is the antidote to shame."
Read quote
4 likes
"The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny."
Read quote
4 likes
"It's very rare in our lives that we're like "Ooh, I'm going to really screw this family up." You just don't. You work from a place of need, like I want to finish this movie or I want to feel loved at that moment or I need empathy right now. And then, you do things that are questionable."
Read quote
4 likes
"Empathy is even better than talking in one language"
Read quote
4 likes
"If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit down and rejoice with you, because you'd think I should to share those good things; but I should better to share in your trouble and your labour."
Read quote
4 likes
"I had an empathy for prisoners and did concerts for them back when I thought that it would make a difference - you know? - that they really were there to be rehabilitated."
Read quote
4 likes
"My own sense of well-being and purpose in the world. That comes from studying the world feelingly, with empathy in my work. It comes from staying alert and alive and involved in the lives of the people that I love and the people in the wider world who need my help."
Read quote
4 likes
"I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour."
Read quote
3 likes
"Let us join together across denominations, religions and cultures to make a habit of empathy and reach out to those most in need. To share the blessings we enjoy and to advance the cause of peace in all corners of our world."
Read quote
3 likes
"My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another's heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction."
Read quote
3 likes
"What is the empathy deficit? The inability of people to stand in other folks shoes. It's hard to empathize with people who have different values than you"
Read quote
3 likes
"The way I regard those who hurt me today will affect how I experience the world in the future. In any encounter, we have a choice: we can strengthen our resentment or our understanding and empathy. We can widen the gap between ourselves and others or lessen it."
Read quote
3 likes
"To improve communications, work not on the utter, but the recipient."
Read quote
3 likes
"the novel is inherently a political instrument, regardless of its subject. It invites you - more than invites you, induces you - to live inside another person's skin. It creates empathy. And that's the antidote to bigotry. The novel doesn't just tell you about another life, which is what a newspaper would do. It makes you live another life, inhabit another perspective. And that's very important."
Read quote
3 likes
"I do not think I will ever become deadened, because I live in other people's lives, I must admit there are times when it weighs medown because I can't do some of the things I want."
Read quote
3 likes
"Indeed, when I came to Italy, I expected to encounter a certain amount of resentment, but have received instead empathy from most Italians. In any reference to George Bush, people only nod to Berlusconi, saying","We understand how it is - we have one, too."
Read quote
3 likes
"As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation."
Read quote
3 likes
"That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be demonstrated by many obvious observations, if it should not be thought sufficiently evident of itself. When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer."
Read quote
3 likes
"Men of the most robust make, observe that in looking upon sore eyes they often feel a very sensible soreness in their own, which proceeds from the same reason; that organ being in the strongest man more delicate, than any other part of the body is in the weakest."
Read quote
3 likes