40 empathy quotes to help you connect with others

Empathy is the capacity to understand and share what another person feels. The empathy quotes below come from writers, psychologists, and leaders who spent their lives thinking about it, grouped into six themes so you can jump to the ones you need: understanding another person's perspective, listening and being present, what empathy actually is, empathy at work, kindness in action, and connection.

Understanding another person's perspective

These lines are about the imaginative leap at the core of empathy: trying to see a situation the way someone else sees it.

1. "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

   — Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

2. "Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?"

   — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

3. "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."

   — George Eliot, Middlemarch

4. "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

   — George Eliot, Middlemarch

5. "By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations."

   — Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

6. "I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person."

   — Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

7. "The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day."

   — David Foster Wallace, This Is Water

8. "The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete."

   — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, "The Danger of a Single Story"

Listening and being present

Empathy shows up first as attention. These are quotes about listening — the kind closer to active listening than to waiting for your turn to speak.

1. "Accustom thyself to attend carefully to what is said by another, and as much as it is possible, be in the speaker's mind."

   — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

2. "It means entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it."

   — Carl Rogers, A Way of Being

3. "We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know."

   — Carl Rogers, A Way of Being

4. "Listening is where love begins: listening to ourselves and then to our neighbors."

   — Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers

5. "In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers."

   — Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers

6. "Deep listening has only one purpose: to help others suffer less."

   — Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Communicating

7. "The intention of deep listening and loving speech is to restore communication, because once communication is restored, everything is possible."

   — Thich Nhat Hanh, Fear

8. "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."

   — Simone Weil

9. "Empathy lies in our ability to be present without opinion."

   — Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication

10. "With empathy we don't direct, we follow. Don't just do something, be there."

    — Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication

What empathy actually is

Definitions from people who study and teach empathy for a living.

1. "Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing."

   — Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication

2. "Often, instead of offering empathy, we have a strong urge to give advice or reassurance and to explain our own position or feeling."

   — Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication

3. "We need to receive empathy to give empathy."

   — Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication

4. "Empathy is not connecting to an experience. Empathy is connecting to the emotions that underpin an experience."

   — Brené Brown, Dare to Lead

5. "Empathy is something like a muscle: left unused, it atrophies; put to work, it grows."

   — Jamil Zaki, The War for Kindness

6. "Empathic concern — feeling for someone — is distinct from emotional empathy — feeling as someone else does."

   — Jamil Zaki

Empathy in leadership and at work

Empathy isn't only personal; these quotes come from leaders who treat it as part of the job.

1. "Empathy means thoughtfully considering employees' feelings—along with other factors—in the process of making intelligent decisions."

   — Daniel Goleman, "What Makes a Leader?", Harvard Business Review

2. "We needed to build deeper empathy for our customers and their unarticulated and unmet needs."

   — Satya Nadella, Hit Refresh

3. "I learned that only through living life's ups and downs can you develop empathy; that in order not to suffer, or at least not to suffer so much, one must become comfortable with impermanence."

   — Satya Nadella, Hit Refresh

4. "There's a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit — the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes."

   — Barack Obama, Xavier University commencement, 2006

5. "After all, there are some things in life that make the world feel small and connected, let kindness be one of them."

   — Jacinda Ardern, Harvard University commencement, 2022

6. "You can't understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close."

   — Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

7. "Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done."

   — Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

Kindness and compassion in action

Empathy becomes visible when it moves into action.

1. "Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle."

   — Ian Maclaren, 1897

2. "Ye cannot live for yourselves; a thousand fibres connect you with your fellow-men, and along those fibres, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions as causes, and return to you as effects."

   — Henry Melvill, 1855

3. "Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then or bear with them."

   — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

4. "When we feel love and kindness towards others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace."

   — The 14th Dalai Lama, Nobel Peace Prize lecture, 1989

Empathy, connection, and belonging

Empathy widens outward — from one person to the sense that our lives are bound together.

1. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."

   — Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

2. "I note the obvious differences between each sort and type, but we are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike."

   — Maya Angelou, "Human Family"

3. "We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."

   — Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, 1993

4. "Empathy is at the heart of the actor's art."

   — Meryl Streep, Barnard College commencement, 2010

5. "Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now."

   — Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers

A few more to keep

If these landed, we've gathered more communication quotes in the same spirit, and on the practical side, the best books for communication skills if you want to go deeper than a single line.