77 Special Empathy Quotes to Find Beauty and Compassion

Are you empathetic?

Are you able to understand and share the feelings of someone else, or do you judge them and move on?

Empathy is the glue that holds our relationships and communities together. When you empathize with others, you try to see a situation from their perspective and imagine what you would feel like if that was you. This allows you to act compassionately towards them as well as yourself. By making the effort to understand others and help them, you’re improving quality of life for both yourself and the other person.

The value of the emotion goes even further than this, as the behaviour can affect your health, social skills and the world we live in. Empathy comes with both health and work benefits, improves communication skills, creates prosocial behaviour and decreases negativity in the world. It’s definitely a needed trait for anyone who will take it.

The good news is, it’s never too late to develop the emotion, or deepen its current role in your mind, one day at a time. And if you start with these quotes, you’ll be quick to realise how beauty and compassion can surround your life in multiple areas you had never thought to look.

1. Never look down on anybody unless you’re helping him up.

Jesse Jackson

2. 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

3. When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

Ernest Hemingway

4. Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.

Theodore Roosevelt

5. Practicing kindness increases our ability to be empathetic. It helps keep our hearts open. And that, truly, is the best way to live.

Kristi Bowman

6. The struggle of my life created empathy – I could relate to pain, being abandoned, having people not love me.

Oprah Winfrey

7. Empaths did not come into this world to be victims, we came to be warriors. Be brave. Stay strong. We need all hands on deck.

Anthon St. Maarten

8. All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.

Tahereh Mafi

9. One of the most important things you can do on this earth is to let people know they are not alone.

Shannon L. Alder

10. Empathy means both understanding others on their own terms and bringing them within the orbit of one’s own experience.

Jacob A. Belzen

11. Empathy is connection; it’s a ladder out of the shame hole

Brené Brown

12. I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.

Maya Angelou

13. To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for unsentimental compassion and love.

Stephen Batchelor

14. Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.

Alfred Adler

15. You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.

John Steinbeck

16. It contributes greatly towards a man’s moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

17. I call him religious who understands the suffering of others.

Mahatma Gandhi

18. If you have never suffered through it, then you don’t understand it. There are no exceptions.

Richelle E. Goodrich

19. Empathy is simply listening, holding space, withholding judgment, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly healing message of you’re not alone.

Brene Brown

20. We have to teach empathy as we do literacy.

Bill Drayton

21. If you judge people, you have no time to love them.

Mother Teresa

22. Empathetic presence involves listening to someone’s pain with what I call the five A’s: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing.

David Richo

23. There are two side to every issue.

Ayn Rand

24. We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.

Epictetus

25. Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It’s the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else’s pain is as meaningful as your own.

Barbara Kingsolver

26. If you see someone without a smile, give them one of yours.

Dolly Parton

27. The highest form of knowledge is empathy.

Bill Bullard

28. The seeds of care and empathy are built into every human being and a variety of soils and fertilizers will allow those same seeds to grow and flourish.

Gudjon Bergmann

29. There is no greater loan than a sympathetic ear.

Frank Tyger

30. Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.

Mohsin Hamid

31. Don’t cast shadows on anyone unless you are providing shade.

Terri Guillemets

32. I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.

Roger Ebert

33. Empathy, sympathy, love, and justice create a place only in such character, where humanity fragrances and tongue stays sober.

Ehsan Sehgal

34. Empathy is a special way of coming to know another and yourself.

Carl R. Rogers

35. The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.

Albert Schweitzer

36. When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.

Susan Sarandon

37. If we can get man to the moon, we can get man to walk in each other’s shoes.

Mary Gordon

38. Empathy is the gateway; compassion is the way.

Scott Perry

39. The only way to change someone’s mind is to connect with them from the heart.

Rasheed Ogunlaru

40. Experiencing terrible pain opens our hearts and minds to express compassion for other people and communion with ourselves.

Kilroy J. Oldster

41. The little things you do can be very significant to others.

Wayne Gerard Trotman

42. It’s the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of someone else’s pain.

Pat Barker

43. When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them.

Criss Jami

44. The nature of humanity, its essence, is to feel another’s pain as one’s own, and to act to take that pain away,. There is a nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness.

John Connolly

45. Anyone who has experienced a certain amount of loss in their life has empathy for those who have experienced loss.

Anderson Cooper

46. Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant with the weak and wrong. Sometime in your life, you will have been all of these.

Gautama Buddha

47. Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing.

Leslie Jamison

48. Empathy is the starting point for creating a community and taking action. It’s the impetus for creating change.

Max Carver

49. You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know when it will be too late.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

50. Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.

Albert Einstein

51. What you don’t realize is that the world does not need more perfection. It needs more compassion and empathy.

Tessa Dare

52. Empathy is the greatest virtue. From it, all virtues flow. Without it, all virtues are an act.

Eric Zorn

53. Empathy represents the foundation skill for all the social competencies important for work.

Daniel Goleman

54. We need empathy, we need the eyes that still can weep.

Lydia Millet

55. 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

56. One friend, one person who is truly understanding, who takes the trouble to listen to us as we consider a problem, can change our whole outlook on the world.

E. H. Mayoli

57. Whenever you feel like criticizing any one…just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

Brené Brown

59. Sometimes all a person wants is an empathetic ear; all he or she needs is to talk it out. Just offering a listening ear and an understanding heart for his or her suffering can be a big comfort.

Roy T. Bennett

60. Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil

61. 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

62. Empathy may be the single most important quality that must be nurtured to give peace a fighting chance.

Arundhati Ray

63. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

64. Feeling too much is a hell of a lot better than feeling nothing.

Nora Roberts

65. The opposite of anger is not calmness, its empathy.

Mehmet Oz

66. Wearing another’s skin is the most effective way to learn sympathy.

A G Howard

67. When a good man is hurt all who would be called good must suffer with him.

Euripides

68. If you want more kindness in the world, put some there.

Zero Dean

69. The state of empathy, or being empathic, is to perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person.

Carl Rogers

70. Empathy is one of humankind’s prized possessions. Acts of consideration and kindness are inevitable when a person can mentally step into someone else’s shoes. Even if it’s just for a moment.

Izey Victoria Odiase

71. There is no force in the world better able to alter anything from its course than love.

Gregory Boyle

72. 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

73. Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not desire for the rest of humankind.

Baruch Spinoza

74. There are two types of empathy: the positive empathy and the negative empathy. When we are fully carried away by the unaware activities of the mirror neurons, we are under the trap of negative empathy. The negative empathy generates attachments. Out of these attachments suffering follows. Negative empathy is a kind of reaction to a situation, whereas positive empathy is internal response of peace love and tranquility…. In positive empathy, your deep tranquility, joy and peace activates the mirror neurons of the others, whereas in negative empathy your mirror neurons are activated by the disturbance of others.

Amit Ray

75. Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing.

Marshall B. Rosenberg

76. Any man filled with empathy is capable of gaining valuable insights on the human condition through the suffering of others. You do not need to suffer to know suffering, but you need empathy first to identify and feel the suffering of others around you.

Suzy Kassem

77. The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.

Meryl Streep