Empathy & Sympathy Quotes

In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.

A little anger is a good thing if it isn't on your own behalf, if it's for others deserving of your anger, your empathy.

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.

Poetry is partly sympathy, don't you think? If it's any good, it gets people to think about others' points of view.

Empathy is the starting point for creating a community and taking action. It's the impetus for creating change.

Sympathy is the first condition of criticism.

Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.

Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.

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.'

I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others.

A crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.

A sympathetic friend can be quite as dear as a brother.

The opposite of anger is not calmness, its empathy.

What is it that distinguishes you and me from the lower animals - from the beasts? More, I say, than anything else, human sympathy - human sympathy.

Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul.

Sympathy is charming, but it does not make up for pain.

Children, even infants, are capable of sympathy. But only after adolescence are we capable of compassion.

The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. He has it within his means to nourish the former and outgrow the latter.

Deliberately seek opportunities for kindness, sympathy, and patience.

Movies that encourage empathy are more effective than those that objectify problems.

Sympathy relies on a common experience. If you're clumsy, you might have sympathy for others who tend to bump into things. Empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to understand another person's feelings even if you've never experienced them yourself.

Empathy is much bigger than sympathy. When the character is empathised with, that means you have succeeded as an actor. So even if it's a villain, the audiences don't hate you... they understand why you have turned into a villain.

Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.

Abstract sympathy with the working class as an economic entity is easy, but the feeling can vanish on contact with actual members of the group, who often arrive with disturbing beliefs and powerful resentments - who might not sound or look like people urban progressives want to know.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.

Traits like humility, courage, and empathy are easily overlooked - but it's immensely important to find them in your closest relationships.

Sympathy with nature is part of a good person's religion.

It's through the small things that we develop our moral imagination, so that we can understand the sufferings of others.

Love and death are the two great hinges on which all human sympathies turn.

Compassion has enemies, and those enemies are things like pity, moral outrage, fear.

Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.

Motherhood is at its best when the tender chords of sympathy have been touched.

If you aren't humble, whatever empathy you claim is false and probably results from some arrogance or the desire to control. But true empathy is rooted in humility and the understanding that there are many people with as much to contribute in life as you.

Positive social emotions like compassion and empathy are generally good for us, and we want to encourage them. But do we know how to most reliably raise children to care about the suffering of other people? I'm not sure we do.

Motherhood is at its best when the tender chords of sympathy have been touched.

No human heart is denied empathy. No religion can demolish that by indoctrination. No culture, no nation and nationalism - nothing can touch it because it is empathy.

Sympathy is one of the principles most widely rooted in our nature: we rejoice to see ourselves reflected in another; and, perversely enough, we sometimes have a secret pleasure in seeing the sin which dwells in ourselves existing under a deformed and monstrous aspect in another.

Sympathy is two hearts tugging at one load.

I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.

Empathy begins with understanding life from another person's perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It's all through our own individual prisms.

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.