Empathy is so much more than a word that sounds nice and makes people feel better. It’s used so generically by politicians, businesses, and the media to the point that it has started losing its real significance. Empathy is more than feeling bad for someone else. It’s actually all about understanding.
Understanding people’s situations without judging them or trying to change somebody into something they are not; understanding that even if someone comes from the other side of the world, has a totally different way of thinking, or disagrees with your favorite movie, this doesn’t mean they’re not worth listening to. They still have emotions and points of view that matter just as much as yours do — and those feelings can connect us in ways we didn’t even know were possible.
In our quest to find the greatest empathy quotes, we collected some kind messages from writers, celebrities, psychologists, and activists that had important words of compassion to share with the world.
#1
"You don't teach morals and ethics and empathy and kindness in the schools. You teach that at home, and children learn by example." - Judy Sheindlin
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#2
"Anyone who has experienced a certain amount of loss in their life has empathy for those who have experienced loss." - Anderson Cooper
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#3
"Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals." - Neil Gaiman
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#4
"I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it." - Maya Angelou
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#5
"It's dangerous to think of yourself as a hero and someone else as a villain. It gets in the way of empathy." - Megan Ganz
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#6
"Humans aren't as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy." - Neil deGrasse Tyson
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#7
"Movies that encourage empathy are more effective than those that objectify problems." - Roger Ebert
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#8
"Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn." - Alice Miller
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#9
"When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you." - Susan Sarandon
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#10
"The struggle of my life created empathy - I could relate to pain, being abandoned, having people not love me." - Oprah Winfre
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#11
"Empathy should not be contingent on our proximity to suffering or the likelihood of it happening to us. Rather, it should stem from a disdain that suffering is happening at all." - Clint Smith
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#12
"A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain." - Daniel Goleman
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#13
"We have to teach empathy as we do literacy." - Bill Drayton
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#14
"The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy." - Meryl Streep
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#15
"All those chemicals that create empathy only work when you are in a room together." - Gloria Steinem
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#16
"We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old - and that's the criterion by which I'll be selecting my judges." - Barack Obama
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#17
"Empathy is important, openness, honesty, and an understanding for others." - Niko Kovac
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#18
"Women are, in my view, natural peacemakers. As givers and nurturers of life, through their focus on human relationships and their engagement with the demanding work of raising children and protecting family life, they develop a deep sense of empathy that cuts through to underlying human realities." - Daisaku Ikeda
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#19
"We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior." - Graydon Carter
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#20
"I have a profound empathy for people who are in the public eye, whether they manifest it themselves or whether it happened by accident - it doesn't matter to me. I think there's a great misunderstanding of what it is to be famous." - Alanis Morissette
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