41+ Empathy Quotes About Kindness And Compassion (2023)

41+ Empathy Quotes About Kindness And Compassion (2023)

Looking for quotes about empathy?

Empathy is the emotion that deals with understanding the pain of others. When we acknowledge someone else’s sorrow, we indirectly help make this world a better place to live.

Here are the best inspirational quotes and sayings for 2023 about empathy that will inspire compassion, love, sympathy, and kindness.

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What Is Empathy Sayings

1. “Empathy is connecting with the emotion that someone is experiencing, not the event or the circumstance” – Brené Brown; Daring Greatly

2. “Empathy is simply listening, holding space, withholding judgment, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly healing message of you’re not alone” – Brene Brown

3. “Empathy is the ability to step outside of your own bubble and into the bubbles of other people” – C. Joybell

4. “Empathy is understanding the sorrow or loss of another person. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes and imagine how you would feel” – Byron Pulsifer

5. “Empathy means both understanding others on their own terms and bringing them within the orbit of one’s own experience” – Jacob A. Belzen

6. “Empathy is the love fire of sweet remembrance and shared understanding” – John Eaton

7. “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

8. “Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another and feeling with the heart of another” – Alfred Adler

what is empathy sayings


Short Quotes On Empathy

9. “The highest form of knowledge is empathy” – Bill Bullard

10. “Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing” – Leslie Jamison

11. “Empathy is a special way of coming to know another and ourself” – Carl R. Rogers

12. “Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself” – Mohsin Hamid

13. “Empathy is the gateway; compassion is the way” – Scott Perry

14. “Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing” – Marshall B. Rosenberg

15. “The opposite of anger is not calmness, its empathy” – Mehmet Oz

16. “Empathy is like giving someone a psychological hug” – Lawrence J

empathy quotes short


Practice Empathy Quotes

17. “A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain” – Daniel Goleman

18. “Empathy is a skill like any other human skill. If you get a chance to practice, you can get better at it” – Simon Baron Cohen

19. “Real empathy is sometimes not insisting that it will be okay, but acknowledging that it is not” – Sheryl Sandberg

20. “Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide” – Jonathan Haidt

21. “Empathy depends not only on one’s ability to identify someone else’s emotions but also on one’s capacity to put oneself in the other person’s place and to experience an appropriate emotional response” – Charles G. Morris

22. “Empathy is the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person” – Heinz Kohut

23. “Part of the beauty of empathy is allowing yourself to feel a range and depth of emotion by embracing it rather than avoiding it” – Christine Rose Elle

24. “When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you” – Susan Sarandon


Sayings About Power Of Empathy

25. “The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy” – Meryl Streep

26. “There’s a power in empathy” – Tarana Burke

27. “Empathy is connection; it’s a ladder out of the shame hole” – Brené Brown

28. “Empathy leads to compassion and compassion to forgiveness and connection” – Judith Hanson Lasater

29. “There’s nothing that inspires that deep sense of belonging like shared empathy” – Brene Brown

30. ” Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world” – Barack Obama

31. “Empathy represents the foundation skill for all the social competencies important for work” – Daniel

32. “Empathy is the greatest virtue. From it, all virtues flow. Without it, all virtues are an act” – Eric Zorn


Quotes On Empathy And Compassion

33. “Empathy is a muscle, so it needs to be exercised” – Satya Nadella

34. “Empathy helps people see the world as it really is, not how it looks on a map” – Dev Patnaik

35. “Empathy is not sympathy or compassion; it’s something else — it’s about standing in somebody else’s shoes” – Brené Brown

36. “Empathy can pull you away from your center, and it takes more of a mindful awareness to get back into that space” – Jean Lush

37. “Empathy is an antidote to shame; it’s a way of getting closer to people and the world around you by seeing how other people feel” – Brené Brown

38. “Empathy is a choice that we can make to step out of our own egos and into the shoes of another person” – Ronald Rolheiser

39. “Empathy is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals” – Paolo Freire

40. “Empathy is a foundation for building trust, rapport and intimacy” – Brené Brown


Quotes On Sympathy And Empathy

41. “Empathy is the ability to recognize emotions that are being experienced by another sentient or fictional being” – Peter Salovey

42. “Empathy allows us to treat others as we would like to be treated” – Stephen Covey

43. “Empathy is about caring enough about somebody else’s situation to try and understand what they’re feeling” – Jonathan Sacks

44. “Empathy is like a bridge that connects one mind to another” – Kevin Breel

45. “Empathy allows you to meet cruelty with compassion” – Toni Morrison

46. “Empathy and compassion aren’t just interpersonal vices… they can often be the way we save each other” – Dave Eggers

47. “Empathy is full presence to what’s alive in the other person at this moment” – John Cunningham

48. “Empathy is the only human superpower – it can shrink distance, cut through social and power hierarchies, transcend differences, and provoke political and social change” – Elizabeth Thomas

sympathy and empathy quotes


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