1,354 Quotes About Empathy

Critics are only concerned with what affects them. And feeling empathy is a gift not many possess.

In quieting our ambition on occasion to concentrate on empathy and friendship we are still investing in ourselves and we diminish the likelihood of minor ailments, increase our lifespan and improve our capacity to fight disease.

Freedom, influence and impact first, expansion second.

Curiosity and imagination are bound together. The age-old human urge to peek behind other people's drawn shutters, the eagerness to compare one's own intimate secrets with the secret intimacy of others, is an urge that may serve as an antidote to the fanatic's lust to murder the difference between himself and others. Or to kill anyone who refuses to change and declines to be exactly like him.

Literature and gossip are closely related. People who are curious and imaginative long to know 'what it's like for other people.' This longing can be satisfied in its basest, most banal form through gossip, just as it can attain a more refined and complex gratification in art. Both gossip and literature, each in its own way, are capable of offering a partial antidote to fanaticism, because they both relish the fascinating differences between people.

Money is not the root of all evil. A lack of empathy is.

Contending with fanaticism does not mean destroying all fanatics, but rather cautiously handling the little fanatic who hides, more or less, inside each of our souls. It also means ridiculing, just a little, our own convictions; being curious; and trying to take a peek, from time to time, not only through our neighbor's window but, more important, at the reality viewed from that window, which will necessarily be different from the one seen through our own.

Every yarn contains someone’s truth. Don’t ever disregard someone else’s perspective.

...I realized imagination is not just the catalyst of art, it's also the catalyst of compassion. Imagination is the shortest distance between two people, two cultures, two ideologies, two experiences.