Empathy strengthens the material of human experience, imbuing it with understanding, compassion, and care. Without it, our relationships suffer and the bridges between us crumble. Empathy is the power to acknowledge and understand what one other person goes through. It’s a way of claiming, “I see you. I hear you.” Empathy results in compassion, which might be understood as empathy in motion.
In this text, we highlight over 100 empathy quotes to boost understanding and compassion. These nuggets of wisdom are intended to unlock the love that lives inside each of us. Whether your intention is to heal your relationships, open your heart to others, or cultivate a more peaceful world, you’ve landed in the best place. May these quotes on empathy encourage and awaken your loving, beating heart.
100+ Quotes on Empathy, Compassion, and Understanding
- “Empathy is just listening, holding space, withholding judgement, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly healing message of ‘You are not alone.'” – Brené Brown
- “Empathy is seeing with the eyes of one other, listening with the ears of one other, and feeling with the center of one other.” – Alfred Adler
- “The center is sort of a garden. It might grow compassion or fear, resentment or love. What seeds will you plant there?” – Jack Kornfield
- “Have a look at other people and ask yourself in the event you are really seeing them or simply your thoughts about them.” – Jon Kabat-Zinn
- “Empathy is essentially the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and it’s accessible to all of us, but now we have to provide ourselves the chance to discover, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the underside up or through one other’s eyes or heart.” – Sue Monk Kidd
- “The nice gift of human beings is that now we have the facility of empathy.” – Meryl Streep
- “Empathy is about finding echoes of one other person in yourself.” – Mohsin Hamid
- “Empathy begins with understanding life from one other person’s perspective.” – John Maxwell
- “Empathy is the antidote to shame.” – Dr. Brené Brown
- “Empathy is, in truth, a really perfect that has the facility each to rework our own lives and to bring about fundamental social change. Empathy can create a revolution. Not one in all those old-fashioned revolutions based on recent laws, institutions, or governments but something rather more radical: a revolution of human relationships.” – Roman Krznaric
- “The most effective option to end up is to lose yourself within the service of others.” – Mahatma Gandhi
- “It is thru weakness and vulnerability that the majority of us learn empathy and compassion and discover our soul.” – Desmond Tutu
- “Probably the most precious gift we will offer anyone is our attention.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
- “Seek first to grasp, then to be understood.” – Stephen R. Covey
- “Compassion and tolerance should not an indication of weakness, but an indication of strength.” – Dalai Lama
- “Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.” – Mark Twain
- “Once we get too caught up within the busyness of the world, we lose reference to each other – and ourselves.” – Jack Kornfield
- “Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia – em (into) and pathos (feeling) – a penetration, a type of travel. It suggests you enter one other person’s pain as you’d enter one other country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by means of query: What grows where you might be? What are the laws? What animals graze there?” – Leslie Jamison
- “Empathy is a high quality of character that may change the world.” – Barack Obama
- “Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.” – Dalai Lama
- “How can we expand our empathic potential? We may perhaps be wired for empathy, but we still must take into consideration how we’re going to bring our circuits to life.” – Roman Krznaric
- “Empathy is a selection, and it’s a vulnerable one.” – Brené Brown
- “Empathy is the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of one other person, understanding their feelings and perspectives, and using that understanding to guide your actions.” – Barack Obama
- “If you show deep empathy toward others, their defensive energy goes down, and positive energy replaces it. That is when you’ll be able to get more creative in solving problems.” – Stephen Covey
- “Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a selection we make: to listen, to increase ourselves.” – Leslie Jamison
- “Empathy is the universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble.” – Simon Baron-Cohen
- “Empathy is a relentless awareness of the undeniable fact that your concerns should not everyone’s concerns and that your needs should not everyone’s needs.” – Roman Krznaric
- “Empathy is the language of the center.” – Unknown
- “Compassion isn’t a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It is a relationship between equals.” – Pema Chödrön
- “If you talk, you might be only repeating what you already know. But in the event you listen, chances are you’ll learn something recent.” – Dalai Lama
- “Compassion isn’t in any respect weak. It’s the strength that arises out of seeing the true nature of suffering on this planet. Compassion allows us to bear witness to that suffering, whether it’s in ourselves or others, without fear; it allows us to call injustice without hesitation, and to act strongly, with all of the skill at our disposal.” – Sharon Salzberg
- “Kindness and a great heart form the underlying foundation for our success on this life, our progress on the spiritual path, and our success of our ultimate aspiration: the attainment of full enlightenment.” – Dalai Lama
- “A world without empathy is a world that’s dead to others—and if we’re dead to others, we’re dead to ourselves. The sharing of one other’s pain can take us past the narrow canyon of selfish disregard, and even cruelty, and into the larger, more expansive landscape of wisdom and compassion.” – Joan Halifax
- “By peace we mean the capability to rework conflicts with empathy, without violence, and creatively – a never-ending process.” – John Galtung
- “Traits like humility, courage, and empathy are easily ignored – however it’s immensely necessary to search out them in your closest relationships.” – Laura Linney
- “An individual with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, doesn’t feel threatened that others are able and good, based from a correct self-assurance that comes from knowing that she or he belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.” – Desmond Tutu
- “This capability for empathy results in a real encounter – now we have to progress toward this culture of encounter – by which heart speaks to heart.” – Pope Francis
- “The purpose is to attempt to develop the scope of our empathy in such a way that we will extend it to any type of life with the capability to feel pain and experience happiness. It’s a matter of recognizing living organisms as sentient, and subsequently subject to pain and able to happiness.” – Dalai Lama
- “Empathy is the fuel that powers acts of kindness and compassion.” – Karen Armstrong
- “If you happen to end up saying ‘But I’m just being honest’, chances are high you have just been unkind. Honesty doesn’t heal. Empathy does.” – Dan Waldschmidt
- “Could a greater miracle happen than for us to leaf through one another’s eyes for an quick?” – Henry David Thoreau
- “Love isn’t without its flaws. The stronger the love, the more it tests you. Compassion and empathy will make true love persist.” – Khalil Gibran
- “Empathy begins with understanding life from one other person’s perspective. No one has an objective experience of reality. It’s all through our own individual prisms.” – Sterling K. Brown
- “At any time when you might be about to search out fault with someone, ask yourself the next query: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I’m about to criticize?” – Marcus Aurelius
- “I feel all of us have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.” – Maya Angelou
- “Nor can there be authentic dialogue unless we’re able to opening our minds and hearts, in empathy and sincere receptivity, to those with whom we speak.” – Pope Francis
- “Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The chums who hearken to us are those we move toward. Once we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.” – Karl Menninger
- “Compassion becomes real once we recognize our shared humanity.” – Pema Chödrön
- “Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing. We frequently have a powerful urge to provide advice or reassurance and to elucidate our own position or feeling. Empathy, nevertheless, calls upon us to empty our mind and hearken to others with our whole being.” – Marshall B. Rosenberg
- “Empathy represents the muse skill for all of the social competencies necessary for work.” – Daniel Goleman
- “Imagining what it’s wish to be someone apart from yourself is on the core of our humanity. It’s the essence of compassion and the start of morality.” – Ian McEwan
- “Be the rationale someone feels welcome, seen, heard, valued, loved, and supported.” – Unknown
- “Only the event of compassion and understanding for others can bring us the tranquillity and happiness all of us seek.” – Dalai Lama
- “You’ll be able to only understand people in the event you feel them in yourself.” – John Steinbeck
- “Empathy is the compass we want to navigate the turbulent waters of our times.” – Unknown
- “No act of kindness, irrespective of how small, is ever wasted.” – Aesop
- “Empathy is the start line for making a community and taking motion. It is the impetus for creating change.” – Max Carver
- “The word ‘heart’ can seek advice from an emotional bond between people, and in addition to the dear faculty of empathy, an ‘open heart’, which suggests sharing the emotions of one other and includes an outflow of goodwill towards our fellow humans and all life forms. This, after all, is what the Dalai Lama refers to when he says “my religion is kindness”, and is closely related to the power to feel compassion.” – Eckhart Tolle
- “If you begin to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the entire world opens as much as you.” – Susan Sarandon
- “Empathy is the best virtue. From it, all virtues flow.” – Eric Zorn
- “Empathy is about standing in another person’s shoes, feeling along with his or her heart, seeing along with his or her eyes. Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, however it makes the world a greater place.” – Daniel H. Pink
- “Empathy is the drugs the world needs.” – Unknown
- “It’s under the best adversity that there exists the best potential for doing good, each for oneself and others.” – Dalai Lama
- “Sometimes you get what you wish. Other times, you get a lesson in patience, timing, alignment, empathy, compassion, faith, perseverance, resilience, humility, trust, meaning, awareness, resistance, purpose, clarity, grief, beauty, and life. Either way, you win.” – Brianna Wiest
- ”With empathy, I’m fully with them, and never filled with them – that is sympathy.” – Marshall B. Rosenberg
- “The words should not empathy, the connection is empathy.” – Marshall B. Rosenberg
- “People should not as beautiful as they appear and talk. They’re only as beautiful as they love, as they care, as they share.” – Ritu Ghatourey
- “Empathy is the one human superpower-it can shrink distance, cut through social and power hierarchies, transcend differences, and provoke political and social change.” – Elizabeth Thomas
- “Reducing the economic gap could also be not possible without also addressing the gap in empathy.” – Daniel Goleman
- “All parties are equally enriched once we perceive and respond to one another with empathy and compassion.” – Helen Riess
- “A prerequisite to empathy is just being attentive to the person in pain.” – Daniel Goleman
- “Empathy is the power to step outside of your personal bubble and to grasp the realities of another person’s life. It’s the cornerstone of human connection.” – Oprah Winfrey
- “Self-empathy in [Non-Violent Communication] means checking in together with your own feelings and wishes.” – Marshall B. Rosenberg
- ”Empathy lies in our ability to be present without opinion.” – Marshall B. Rosenberg
- “Empathy is selecting to see ourselves in one other despite our differences. It’s recognizing that the identical humanity—the identical desire for meaning, success and security—exists in each of us, even when it’s expressed uniquely.” – Dr. Vivek Murthy
- “Empathy is what creates our desire to construct connection and to resolve and even prevent conflicts from family disagreements to global crises.” – Dr. Vivek Murthy
- “Empathy is a tool for constructing people into groups, for allowing us to operate as greater than self-obsessed individuals.” – Neil Gaiman
- “The struggle of my life created empathy – I could relate to pain, being abandoned, having people not love me.” – Oprah Winfrey
- “I’ve learned that individuals will forget what you said, people will forget what you probably did, but people will always remember the way you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou
- “Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us contained in 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, again and again.” – Neil Gaiman
- “In case your compassion doesn’t include yourself, it’s incomplete.” – Jack Kornfield
- “The very best form of data is… empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in one other’s world.” -Bill Bullard
- “The more we leaf through the eyes of wisdom at ourselves and each other, the more we cultivate a compassionate heart.” – Tara Brach
- “Too often we underestimate the facility of a touch, a smile, a form word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to show a life around.” – Leo Buscaglia
- “Our prime purpose on this life is to assist others. And in the event you can not help them, at the least don’t hurt them.” – Dalai Lama
- “To like and be loved is to feel the sun from each side.” – David Viscott
- “Empathy is the bridge that connects hearts and minds.” – Daniel Goleman
- “Some people think only intellect counts: knowing easy methods to solve problems, knowing easy methods to get by, knowing easy methods to discover a bonus and seize it. However the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy.” – Dean Koontz
- “Tenderness and kindness should not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and determination.” – Kahlil Gibran
- “It isn’t our differences that divide us. It’s our inability to acknowledge, accept, and rejoice those differences.” – Audre Lorde
- “A very powerful thing in communication is hearing what is not said.” – Peter Drucker
- “Be kind, for everybody you meet is fighting a harder battle.” – Plato
- “Probably the most beautiful things on this planet can’t be seen or touched, they’re felt with the center.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- “We will never obtain peace within the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.” – Dalai Lama
- “If you happen to want others to be completely happy, practice compassion. If you must be completely happy, practice compassion.” – Dalai Lama
- “Probably the most beautiful people now we have known are those that have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These individuals have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern.” – Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
- “You never really understand an individual until you concentrate on things from his perspective. Until you climb inside his skin and walk around in it.” – Harper Lee
- “Compassion for others begins with kindness to ourselves.” – Pema Chödrön
- “There is no such thing as a exercise higher for the center than reaching down and lifting people up.” – John Holmes
- “There is no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every compassionate act makes large the world.” – Mary Anne Radmacher
- “Whether one believes in a faith or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there’s not anyone who doesn’t appreciate kindness and compassion.” – Dalai Lama
- “Empathy is de facto the alternative of spiritual meanness. It’s the capability to grasp that each war is each won and lost. And that another person’s pain is as meaningful as your personal.” – Barbara Kingsolver
How Can Letting Go Quotes Help Me in Difficult Times?
If you happen to’re trying to improve your relationships, quotes on empathy can remind you of what your heart already knows: that at the center of it, we’re all the identical. As you deepen your embodied sense of the common humanity all of us share, it becomes easier to relate with compassion. Once we bring more compassion to our relationships, they naturally improve.
You need to use these quotes about empathy in the next ways:
- Morning Reflection: Read through this list after waking up after which reflect on the center qualities you’d wish to cultivate throughout the day.
- Each day Reminder: Select your favorite quote about empathy on any particular morning. Come back to it throughout the day as a reminder to bring care and kindness to your relationships.
- Conversation Starter: Share your favorite quotes with someone you like. Let it’s a place to begin for a heartfelt conversation.
- Journal Prompt: In your journal, write down your favorite quote on empathy. Then journal about what it means to you, what it has to show you, and the way you’ll be able to embody more empathy in your life.
Please note that empathy isn’t a panacea for our relationship challenges, and it doesn’t imply that you need to be endlessly open-hearted without boundaries. It’s crucial to acknowledge that there could also be some relationships and situations where establishing your safety and well-being is paramount. In these situations, empathy and compassion for oneself take priority. If you happen to are experiencing abuse or harm of any kind (in any relationship), seek skilled support.
Summing Up
The world needs more empathy, kindness, and compassion. The excellent news is that we’re all able to growing and opening our hearts. As you proceed your journey, let these empathy quotes serve to bridge gaps between you and others. Return to the empathy quotes list as often as it’s essential. May your path ahead be brimming with empathy and compassion, reaffirming the world our hearts long for.
