Understanding Empathy Quotes & Sayings

The more love you put off to the world in all aspects, the more it will return to you. — Brian A. Jackson

Understanding breeds empathy. — Christopher Paolini

The true measure of a best friend is where they are when you "make" the biggest decision of your life, not where they were during the decision process. — Shannon L. Alder

I think that many people do not know what empathy is. They think empathy is understanding their own selves and then connecting with like-minded individuals, who of course will understand them since they all share the same ideas. Empathy has nothing to do with likemindedness; it has to do with being able to feel the things that others feel, even when you do not share the same ideas, life story, or absolutely nothing at all! When I hear someone say, "I don't understand you", that makes me feel sorry for them. I can even understand a rock, and they can't understand me? My pet rocks have more empathy than they do. — C. JoyBell C.

Listen that you may live. — Isaiah

[ ... ] art instills the fundamental moral lesson: That you aren't the center of the universe. That others weren't created for your benefit. That they are just as real as you, with equal claimes to dignity and understanding. — William Deresiewicz

I'm still learning about music. The best way to learn is to listen to the audience. When you listen to the audience, they will tell you what they like. I wish these big corporations, instead of telling the audience what they should have, would listen. — Tony Bennett

It is arrogant to pretend to understand everybody, and doing it in order to live with them, or love them-- well. If it depended on understanding, there would not be any communities, or relationships. Worse, if you spend your life waiting to be understood or, something more horrible, waiting for the others to be like you. Well, it is as useless, as always shouting the same word until it means nothing else. — Edward Wells II

Depression thrives in secrecy but shrinks in empathy. — Seth Adam Smith

Self-awareness - the commendable ability to be yourself without being a nuisance to someone else. — Criss Jami

To erase the possibility of empathy is to erase the possibility of understanding.
To erase the possibility of empathy is also to erase the possibility of art. Theater, fiction, horror stories, love stories. This is what art does. Good or bad, it imagines the insides, the heart of the other, whether that heart is full of light or trapped in darkness. — Amanda Palmer

hurt your feelings, and then observe how they react (this naturally assumes that you yourself are treating them respectfully). If it's a psychopath, don't expect a lot of understanding. At best they may say "that's nothing to get hung up about!", which means that they take no responsibility and don't feel bad about it at all. But they may also get angry and say much worse things to you - but then at least you know what kind of person they are. If they on the other hand apologize, and you feel genuine understanding, love, compassion and empathy, that's a good sign! The most important thing however, is how they act from then on. Are they more considerate? Did they change for the better? Or was it no more than a false excuse to end your "nagging" for the moment? — Jonas Warstad

Empathy requires us to step outside of our own agendas long enough to develop an understanding of the other person's perspective. It can be rightly stated that no relationship will be whole without ongoing displays of empathy. — Les Carter

The empathic understanding of the experience of other human beings is as basic an endowment of man as his vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell — Heinz Kohut

Telling other people our life story changes us in a startling and profound way. The act of telling demands selection, prioritization, evaluation, and synthesis, which intellectual activities increase understanding, make us more sensitive to key distinctions in principles, and expand our empathy for other people. — Kilroy J. Oldster

A respectful understanding of another's experience. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

When a friend speaks to me, whatever he says is interesting. — Jean Renoir

I am not an ornithologist - I am a bird. — Saul Bellow

the whole point of literature, I think, is that it's the best technology we have for communicating what another person's life feels like from the inside. — Garth Greenwell

Change begins with understanding and understanding begins by identifying oneself with another person: in a word, empathy. The arts enable us to put ourselves in the minds, eyes, ears and hearts of other human beings. — Richard Eyre

But wisdom means more than being intelligent, because it encompasses understanding, empathy, experience, inner peace, and intuition, and — Nicholas Sparks

Once we are able to combine a feeling of empathy for others with a profound understanding of the suffering they experience, we become able to generate genuine compassion for them. We must work at this continually. — Dalai Lama XIV

Three-fourths of the miseries and misunderstandings in the world will disappear if we step into the shoes of our adversaries and understand their standpoint. — Mahatma Gandhi

Let's go old school to impress people. Wear a smile, rather than a branded dress. Crease out our differences with understanding. And, use empathy, care, and patience as accessories. Then, let's make a conversation, not talk.
Ah, what a fine world it would be! Fine, pure and minus artifice. — Saru Singhal

In the midst of compassion, we find ourselves. We discover our true purpose. — Jana Elston

What dooms our best efforts to cultivate empathy and compassion is always, of course, other people. — Tim Kreider

In my opinion, being an effective leader requires being an effective listener. The most productive leaders are usually those who are consistently willing to listen and learn. — John Wooden

A person imbued with compassion and self-understanding can readily love oneself and exhibit endless sympathy for all people. A person who is unkind to their self can never transcend their corrupt barriers much less run into the world with open arms enthusiastically embracing humankind and all of nature with uninhibited friendliness and goodwill. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I call him religious who understands the suffering of others. — Mahatma Gandhi

None of us can choose where we shall love... — Susan Kay

What Mr. Obama wants in a nominee isn't really 'empathy' and 'understanding.' He wants a liberal, activist Supreme Court justice. — Karl Rove

People rarely ventured outside the realm of their own hurts. They believed their own suffering was obvious to all, but might as well have been wearing blinders for all that they noticed anyone else's. — Nenia Campbell

Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing. Instead of offering empathy, we often have a strong urge to give advice or reassurance and to explain our own position or feeling. Empathy, however, calls upon us to empty our mind and listen to others with our whole being. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

If our goal is perfection rather than growth, it is unlikely that we are willing to go back, because it requires a level of self-empathy - the ability to look at our own actions with understanding and compassion; to understand our experiences in the context in which they happened and to do all this without judgment. I call this ability to reflect on our own actions with empathy "grounding. — Brene Brown

Judgement is always based on experience and sometimes you will battle a person's history first, before commonsense will ever win the war. — Shannon L. Alder

You can't ever give people what they want. But you can give them something else. You can give them empathy. You can give them understanding. And that's a lot, and enough to give. — Amanda Palmer

The Jackson gaffe, with its Oedipal violence ("I want to cut his nuts out"), is especially poignant because it goes to the heart of a generational conflict in the black community, concerning what we will say in public and what we say in private. For it has been a point of honor, among the civil rights generation, that any criticism or negative analysis of our community, expressed, as they often are by white politicians, without context, without real empathy or understanding, should not be repeated by a black politician when the white community is listening, even if (especially if) the criticism happens to be true (more than half of all black American children live in single-parent households). — Zadie Smith

Empathy is a special way of coming to know another and ourself, a kind of attuning and understanding. When empathy is extended, it satisfies our needs and wish for intimacy, it rescues us from our feelings of aloneness. — Carl Rogers

You can't have understanding without having empathy, and you can't have empathy without losing money. — Erle Stanley Gardner

Understanding is a creative act in a dimension we do not see. — Elizabeth Goudge

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

By understanding and increasing just this one capacity of the human brain, an enormous amount of social change can be fostered. Failure to understand and cultivate empathy, however, could lead to a society in which no one would want to live - a cold, violent, chaotic, and terrifying war of all against all. This destructive type of culture has appeared repeatedly in various times and places in human history and still reigns in some parts of the world. And it's a culture that we could be inadvertently developing throughout America if we do not address current trends in child rearing, education, economic inequality, and our core values. — Bruce D. Perry

One reason we rush so quickly to the vulgar satisfactions of judgment, and love to revel in our righteous outrage, is that it spares us from the impotent pain of empathy, and the harder, messier work of understanding. — Tim Kreider

I will only take something or agree to do something that I feel like I understand, and inherent in understanding is empathy. — Gillian Anderson

Measuring success in cultural diplomacy - the use of education, creative expression in any form, or people-to-people exchange to increase understanding across regions, cultures, or peoples - is challenging. How does one quantify changes in attitude, abandoning stereotypes, or feeling empathy as a result of a performance, a film, a book? — Cynthia P. Schneider

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

I emphasize listening. We strive to hear what other people want us to hear, even though they don't always come out and say it directly. — Bob Galvin

I don't think of compassion as sympathy but rather as empathy. An understanding of how people are feeling, which often translates into action. — Hazel Hawke

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. — Pema Chodron

Being heartbroken doesn't mean you stop feeling. Just the opposite - it means you feel it all more.
With your heart in fragments, every sensation is sharper, every emotion more acute. Your feelings are enhanced, like a blind man with an impeccable sense of smell, or a deaf woman whose eyes can perceive things a normal person would never recognize.
The brokenhearted are the best empaths of all. — Julie Johnson

I think it's easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It's hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you. — Thomas Harris

Empathy isn't about you, understanding another person isn't about you, feeling how another person feels isn't about you ... step outside of your own skin for a change. Respect another person because they are who they are; not because the other person is just like you. Your inability to understand, your inability to empathize, is not a fault on the part of the other person. It is in fact your own disability that you are choosing to live with. — C. JoyBell C.

What we understand and love understands and loves us also. — Robert Walser

The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears. — Erich Fromm

Stairway to Wisdom") David Brooks detailed the needed ingredients to gaining a deep understanding of a social problem, beginning with the data and moving on to first-hand accounts. The highest rung on his stairway, though, went beyond those: "Empathy opens you up to absorb the good and the bad. Love impels you not just to observe but to seek union - to think as another thinks and feel as another feels. — David Brooks

The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another. But the hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty to the ear, or to the mind. — Zhuangzi

Understanding did not provide solace or make the pain go away; in many ways, understanding was just more salt in the emotional wound. Ignorance allowed one to fight back with unfettered cruelty. Understanding inspired empathy, which led to guilt, as well as suffering.
She looked at Gavin, supine, unconcerned, contented, and thought that perhaps there was something to being a sociopath. If you didn't have a heart, it couldn't be broken. — Nenia Campbell

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

Empathy is the door to wisdom. — Suzy Kassem

In all the things that really matter, we are one. Love and faith, trust and empathy, family and friendship, sunsets and songs of awe: in every wish born in our humanity we are one. Our humankind, at this moment in our destiny, is a child blowing on a dandelion, without thought or understanding. But the wonder in the child is the wonder in us, and there's no limit to the good we can do when human hearts connect. It's the truth of us. It's the story of us. It's the meaning of the word God: we are one. We are one. We are one. — Gregory David Roberts

The deepest form of understanding another person is empathy...[which] involves a shift from...observing how you seem on the outside, to...imagining — Indi Young

I've come to the conclusion that liking a person we are required to have dealings with is not of paramount importance. But respect is crucial, on both sides, as is tolerance, and a depth of understanding of those influences that sculpt a character. — Jacqueline Winspear

When we fully understand the brevity of life, its fleeting joys and unavoidable pains; when we accept the facts that all men and women are approaching an inevitable doom: the consciousness of it should make us more kindly and considerate of each other. This feeling should make men and women use their best efforts to help their fellow travelers on the road, to make the path brighter and easier as we journey on. It should bring a closer kinship, a better understanding, and a deeper sympathy for the wayfarers who must live a common life and die a common death. — Clarence Darrow

It takes a great man to make a great listener — Arthur Helps

Listening is understanding. The skill of empathy is a must to be able to listen ... One can listen better if one sees the whole. — Bill Drayton

Fiction has the incredible power to put readers into the lives and minds of characters whose backgrounds and natures are nothing like theirs, and create an empathy and understanding that readers can take into the real world. — Cheryl B. Klein

Reading can almost be viewed as empathy training. Movies have better action scenes, sure. But books are uniquely suited to showing you the inside of another person's head. That is the root of empathy. That's the first step to understanding you're not alone in the world. — Patrick Rothfuss

If the spectrum linking everyday depression to Major Depression sometimes hinders understanding of it, it also offers an opportunity for empathy. Because almost everyone, at some point, experiences feelings of sadness, of hopelessness, of emptiness, not to mention lethargy and irritability. — Gayle Forman

Empathy doesn't necessarily mean being self-sacrificing. Far from it. Understanding how someone else sees things doesn't imply that you'll act in his interest; in some situations - in war, for example - you want to do exactly the opposite. — Paul Graham

Empathy is the accurate understanding of another person'ts internal experience. It has nothing to do with agreeing or disagreeing with that experience. Unlike sympathy, it makes no assumptions about how the other person is feeling. — Madeline Levine

It's frustrating when our best efforts to help people fail. But if we could see life through their weary eyes and experience their trials with the same frayed emotions, we might understand why. — Richelle E. Goodrich

On my recent trip to Israel, I had the opportunity to visit Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust memorial, and reaffirm our collective responsibility to confront anti-Semitism, prejudice, and intolerance across the world. On this Yom Hashoah, we must accept the full responsibility of remembrance, as nations and as individuals-not simply to pledge "never again," but to commit ourselves to the understanding, empathy and compassion that is the foundation of peace and human dignity. — Barack Obama

Everything is going to be alright' doesn't mean stubbing your toe won't hurt anymore, but it reinforces that what takes place today, good or bad, is just a small piece of the larger puzzle — Brian A. Jackson

I will never tell another person, "I don't understand you ... " and why? Because if I say that, it means that I am disabled in a way. The inability to connect to another's perspective is, I believe, a disability. — C. JoyBell C.

Writing is an act of empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own
and work is often the keyhole through which you peer. — Benjamin Percy

I see Lord Buddha in the 21st Century across national borders, across faith systems, across political ideologies, playing the role of a bridge to promote understanding to counsel patience and to enlighten us with tolerance and empathy. — Narendra Modi

If only this great concern we have for our own sensitive feelings expanded to encompass the feelings of our fellow men. — Richelle E. Goodrich

People who stare. I ask for a little empathy. Please don't judge. Be understanding that some places will strongly affect me. My senses are heightened and i experience lights, noise and smells differently that you might. Stimming will help me regulate myself to my environment as well as calming me. — Tina J. Richardson

Treat people with understanding when you can, and fake it when you can't
until you do understand. — Kim Harrison

When you can identify the insecurities inside the person that is hurting you then you can begin to heal. It isn't about you. It is about their past. — Shannon L. Alder

Understanding that you can't truly take credit for your successes, nor truly blame others for their failures will humble you and make you more compassionate.
Empathy is intuitive, but is also something you can work on, intellectually. — Tim Minchin

They ran past him without notice, but I paused and stood over the boy. I wanted to feel something--wanted to find some understanding in his actions; some empathy in his upbringing; at least a fragment of sympathy for the secret he carried. — Christopher Scotton

Try to get inside the world of Homer and see what it would be like to think with his view of reality. Only then can you begin to judge it, because only then do you really understand it. — John Mark Reynolds

Ultimately, knowing God and reading the Word, it helps with patience with people, understanding, empathy and sympathy that they might not have that I have. If God gave it to me, why not exercise it? — Trai Byers

You're going to come across some truly gifted people in your lifetime that seem to know all the answers. However, they lost their personal relationship with God, along the way. Love them anyways, and do everything you can to help them restore that relationship. They are fighting a war that you don't know anything about. — Shannon L. Alder

Every single human civilization has failed over time, and my belief is that it's due to a lack of rational empathy, of understanding that if you don't have equality in your society, the conflicts you breed (whether internally or externally) will eventually cause its collapse. — Chris Kluwe

Anguish is the universal language — Alice Fulton

In the midst of a burning-hot shaming, calling for patience and context and understanding and empathy can really land you in trouble. — Jon Ronson

Understanding begets empathy and compassion even for the meanest beggar - Oromis — Christopher Paolini

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen. — Ernest Hemingway,

The discoveries of how we can grow and the insights we need to have really come from the inside out. To have genuine empathy, not as a make-nice tool but as an understanding, is essential to the next step. — Patricia Sun

The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the developement of humility, objectivity and reason.
I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person's reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears. — Erich Fromm

The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Of all the things we are wrong about, error might well top the list ... We are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honourable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world. — Kathryn Schulz

I also see how essential a comprehensive treatment plan is, a plan that incorporates education, understanding, empathy, structure, coaching, a plan for success and physical exercise as well as medication. I see how important the human connection is every step of the way: connection with parent or spouse; with teacher or supervisor; with friend or colleague; with doctor, with therapist, with coach, with the world "out there." In fact, I see the human connection as the single most powerful therapeutic force in the treatment of ADHD. — Edward M. Hallowell

When we watch stories, we learn empathy, we learn compassion, and hopefully we achieve some sort of understanding. — Gavin Hood

If I'm talking to someone in a crowded room, I try to make this person feel as though we're the only ones present. I shut out everything else. I look directly at the person. Even if a gorilla were to walk into the room, I probably wouldn't notice it. — Mary Kay Ash

That was the thing about her. When you told her about an incident where you so badly screwed up, half expecting her to laugh at you in amusement, half anticipating a smirk of disgust, she would hardly express her pity or maybe she did express what she felt, for she would just nod her head, gesturing you to go on ... As if it's normal ... As if you're normal. — Sanhita Baruah

The best way I can get understanding from another person is to give this person the understanding, too. If I want them to hear my needs and feelings, I first need to empathize. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

If you've been on this side, then you'll have more compassion and understanding for those still on this side when you get to the other side, because you know how it feels like to be on this side. Sometimes though, relief comes too sudden and good that we tend to lose our sense of empathy for those still on this side, and it's amazing how we've forgotten so soon how it felt like to be on this side. How would it have felt if you were treated the same way you treat those who are on this side by those who were on the other side, when you were still on this side, now that you are on the other side? — Ufuoma Apoki