PHRASES ABOUT EMPATHY, THE ABILITY TO EXPERIENCE THE EMOTIONS OF OTHERS

Empathy is that ability to feel what the other is feeling. It is not a matter of understanding only the emotions of others, but of experiencing them directly on your own skin. Unlike those who know how to grasp what a person perceives through body language, empaths create a mental connection with those around them, coming directly in contact with the thoughts and feelings of others This ability could not go unnoticed by the great authors, from the past to today.

There are those who focused on what empathy is and who, in their own sentence, wanted to summarize how it is demonstrated. Here, then, are the best quotes on this extraordinary ability and on being empathetic.

Phrases and aphorisms about what empathy is

Being an abstract concept, it is not always easy to explain what empathy is. Understanding it as the ability to put oneself in another person's shoes seems too simplistic, since it mainly involves emotions and feelings that are thus shared between different individuals.

The oldest feeling of the human soul is not fear but empathy. I feel pain for your pain. It is a blessing and a curse at the same time.
Luca D'Andrea

Empathy is putting yourself in others' shoes so that you can feel what they are feeling. If you make someone suffer, empathy is suffering with them.
Malcolm

Empathy means understanding identifying oneself with the other and dedicating oneself to him with warmth.
Anselm Grün

Empathy is upsetting or it is not empathy. For this we need the word mercy.
Elias Canetti

Empathy for the smallest of animals is one of the noblest virtues a man can receive as a gift.
Charles Darwin

Empathy between people is like water in the desert: it is rarely encountered, but when you happen to find it, it calms you and regenerates you.
Emanuela Breda

The most beautiful phrases and quotes on how empathy is demonstrated

There are various ways to show your closeness to someone: a look, a kind gesture, a sentence. Those who are able to empathize with another person reveal it, essentially, making them feel understanding and affection, nullifying that sense of loneliness that we sometimes experience in difficult times.

I don't ask the wounded man how he feels, I become the wounded man.
Walt Whitman

When you are in misfortune and you seek compassion from others, you offer them a part of your heart. He will thank you, if he has a good heart; if he has a hard heart, he will despise you.
Kahlil Gibran

Understanding others is the hardest thing. You have to try to put your eye and your ears and your fingers in that mysterious space between a person's skin and their heart.
Fabrizio Caramagna

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in the life of each one such sorrow and suffering as to disarm all our hostility.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another and hearing with the heart of another.
Alfred Adler

Do not mock, do not pity, do not despise, but understand human actions.
Baruch Spinoza

All I wanted was to reach out and touch another human being, not just with my hands, but with my heart.
Tahereh Mafi

It is necessary to listen in silence, in order to understand those who are silent.
Ernst Stankvoski

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
Dalai Lama

Every person you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be gentle. All time.
Plato

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
Leo Buscaglia

If you are in conflict with another person, the first thing you should do is try to understand them thoroughly. Looking deeply will make you see her suffering and then you will no longer want to hurt her, punish her or make her suffer, but you will accept it as it is and try to help it. This is how understanding helps to make love possible. In turn, love helps understanding to deepen: when you feel sympathy or affection for someone, you are in a position to understand or understand them. If, on the other hand, you do not have any empathy for that person, if you do not accept them, you will have no chance of understanding them.
Thich Nhat Hanh

What unites people's hearts is not only the harmony of feelings.People's hearts are united even more intimately by wounds. Suffering with suffering. Fragility with fragility.
Haruki Murakami

I'm talking to you as if I've known you for centuries. This always happens when two understand each other.
Ernest Hemingway

Before criticizing someone, walk a mile in their shoes.
Native American Indian proverb

The aphorisms about empathy that unites everyone

There are those who believe that not all people are empathic: only those who have certain characteristics and predispositions of mind would be able to create this connection of thought and emotions with others. Instead, for some empathy would be a fil rouge which unites all men indiscriminately and it would be precisely this ability to make us human.

For every man who dies in the world, something dies in us too. For every person who suffers, a certain suffering arises in us. For every child that is born, new potential abilities arise in us. We are all equal to each other, unconditionally.
Leo Buscaglia

It is not passion that is needed, but compassion, that is, the ability to extract from the other the root before his pain and to make it his own without hesitation.
Fyodor Dostoevsky

We humans are not as good as we should be in our ability to empathize with the feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So perhaps part of our formal education should educate us in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, there were: reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.
Neil deGrasse Tyson

The great gift of us human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all perceive a mysterious bond that unites us.
Meryl Streep

The ability to recognize oneself in the other and the other in oneself is one of the experiences that most promote democracy. Empathy is the soul of democracy, it is the recognition that every life is unique, inalienable and deserving of equal consideration in the public arena.
Jeremy Rifkin

It is not so much the journey that is important; it is how we treat those we meet and those around us, along the way.
Jeremy Aldana

An effective way to combat anxiety is to worry less about oneself and more about others. When we truly understand the difficulties of others, our own lose their importance.
Dalai Lama

If what I say resonates with you, it is simply because we are both branches of the same tree.
William Butler Yeats

Empathy told through the phrases and aphorisms of psychologists

Empathy is studied above all in psychology and sociology. For this reason we have collected a few sentences and quotes from various scholars who over the years have given authentic and innovative visions to being empathetic, always fascinating.

In empathic listening, we need to be able to loosen our defenses and give up some of our certainties. On the one hand, it is necessary to support the emotions of others and, on the other, to avoid projecting our feelings, fears or desires on the other.
Carla Curina Cucchi and Maurizio Grassi

Empathy would have developed because putting oneself in the other's shoes to know what he thinks and how he would react is an important survival factor in a world where man is in constant competition with other men.
Geoffrey Miller

This is one of the greatest supports of human existence: finding emotional resonance in other men to whom one is fond and whose presence arouses a warm feeling of belonging. This mutual confirmation through feelings, the emotional resonance between two or more people, plays a central role in giving a meaning and a sense of fulfillment to existence.
Norbert Elias

Empathic consciousness is founded on the awareness that others, like us, are unique and mortal beings. If we empathize with another it is because we recognize his fragile and finite nature, his vulnerability and his one and only life.
Jeremy Rifkin

Cognitive and emotional empathy allow us to understand what other people are feeling and to get in tune with their moods, but this does not necessarily lead us to feel a sense of solidarity towards them or to worry about theirs. Welfare. The third variety of empathy, empathic concern, goes further, leading us to take an interest in others, to mobilize to help them if they need it.
Daniel Goleman

My total self, my entire individuality, my entity, which is as unique as my fingerprints are, can never be fully understood, not even empathically, because no two human beings are identical.
Erich Fromm

There is nothing more important than the very essence of empathy; and this, in the final analysis, is nothing other than the capacity to love.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson