The Power of Empathy: Quotations for Reflection and Discussion
published February 26, 2024
Photo by Alex Green from Pexels
by Catharine Hannay, founder of MindfulTeachers.org
Here are a variety of perspectives on the meaning and importance of empathy and on how to listen empathetically (even if you don’t necessarily agree with everything the person’s saying).
Teachers, I don't necessarily recommend giving this whole long list to your students. I like to provide a lot of options so you can choose what's most appropriate for your particular context.
The Meaning of Empathy
“Emotion researchers generally define empathy as the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling.
[…] ‘Affective empathy’ refers to the sensations and feelings we get in response to others’ emotions; this can include mirroring what that person is feeling, or just feeling stressed when we detect another’s fear or anxiety. ‘Cognitive empathy,’ sometimes called ‘perspective taking,’ refers to our ability to identify and understand other people’s emotions.
[…] Having empathy doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll want to help someone in need, though it’s often a vital first step toward compassionate action.”
“What is Empathy?” from Greater Good Magazine
“When we see that someone's hurt or in pain, it's our instinct as human beings to try to make things better. We want to fix, we want to give advice. But empathy isn't about fixing. It's the brave choice to be with someone in their darkness--not to race to turn on the light so we feel better.”
Brené Brown, Dare to Lead
“Empathy isn’t about agreeing—okay? It’s just about putting on someone else’s shoes and walking a mile in them, and then understanding why they’re mad at us for stealing their shoes.”
Chuck Wendig, Damn Fine Story, p. 160-161
Empathy and Mindfulness/Presence
“To understand other people’s thoughts and feelings, we need to be fully involved in the present moment. Empathic accuracy is based on our moment-to-moment interactions—what is happening right now—as well as on our knowledge of another person’s personality, character, judgments, and opinion.”
Arthur Ciaramicoli and Katherine Ketcham, The Power of Empathy, p. 161
“The presence that empathy requires is not easy to maintain. […] Instead of offering empathy, we tend instead of give advice or reassurance and to explain our own position or feeling. Empathy, on the other hand, requires us to focus full attention on the other person’s message. […] It is often frustrating for someone needing empathy to have us assume that they want reassurance or ‘fix-it’ advice.”
Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication
Empathetic Listening
“For what you can fix, there are a hundred remedies. For what cannot be cured, not even words will do.”
Alice Hoffman, The Rules of Magic, p. 250:
“The prerequisite for empathy is compassion. We can only respond empathetically if we are willing to hear someone’s pain. We sometimes think of compassion as a saintlike virtue. It’s not. […] Compassion is not a virtue—it is a commitment. It’s not something we have or don’t have—it’s something we choose to practice.”
Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me, p. xxv-xxvi
“I started to notice how often I responded to stories of loss and struggle with stories of my own experience. My son would tell me about clashing with a kid in Boy Scouts and I would talk about a girl I fell out with in college. When a coworker got laid off, I told her about how much I struggled to find a job after I had been laid off years earlier.
When I began to pay a little more attention to how people responded to my attempts to empathize, I realized the effect of sharing my experiences was never as I intended. What all of these people needed was for me to hear them and acknowledge what they were going through. Instead, I forced them to listen to me and acknowledge me.”
Celeste Headlee, We Need to Talk
In the book You Learn by Living, Eleanor Roosevelt tells the story of one of her aunts, Mrs. Cowles, who was
“[…] almost completely deaf. The mechanical hearing aids of today were unknown. She had a crude sort of box placed on a table before her into which one shouted in order to be heard.
There was not a young member of the family who would not have traveled any distance to be with her. Into that box on the table were shouted their confidences, their problems, their doubts and anxieties….
[…] She was genuinely interested; she had a keen desire to know about them, to understand their difficulties, to help them find a way of coping with their dilemmas. She had a broad understanding and a wisdom that was both sympathetic and kindly. And she had a rarer quality—she could listen.”
“Holley Humphrey identified some common behaviors that prevent us from being sufficiently present to connect empathetically with others. The following are examples:
Advising: ‘I think you should...’ ‘How come you didn’t...?’
One-upping: ‘That’s nothing; wait’ll you hear what happened to me.’ […]
Story-telling: ‘That reminds me of the time...’
Shutting down: ‘Cheer up. Don’t feel so bad.’
Sympathizing: ‘Oh, you poor thing…’
[…] In his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Harold Kushner describes how painful it was for him, when his son was dying, to hear the words people offered that were intended to make him feel better. Even more painful was his recognition that for twenty years he had been saying the same things to other people in similar situations!”
Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication, p. 92-93
The Right Words but the Wrong Feeling
“The problem with saying ‘I understand how you feel’ is that some children just don’t believe you. They’ll answer, ‘No, you don’t.’ But if you take the trouble to be specific (‘The first day of school can be scary—so many new things to get used to’), then the child knows you really do understand. […] A teenager in one of our workshops told us that she came home one afternoon in a rage because her best friend had betrayed a very personal secret. She told her mother what had happened, and very matter-of-factly her mother commented, ‘You’re angry.’ The girl said she couldn’t help snapping back with a sarcastic, ‘No kidding.’”
Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, How to Talk So Kids will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk, p. 29; p. 35
Leslie Jamison describes her experiences as a ‘medical actor’ pretending to be a patient in order to evaluate medical students:
“Checklist item 31 is generally acknowledged as the most important category: ‘Voiced empathy for my situation/problem.’ […] It’s not enough for someone to have a sympathetic manner or use a caring tone. The students have to say the right words to get credit for compassion.
[…] [Some of the medical students] “are all business. They rattle through the clinical checklist for depression like a list of things they need to get at the grocery store: sleep disturbances, changes in appetite, decreased concentration. Some of them get irritated when I obey my script and refuse to make eye contact. [...] These irritated students take my averted eyes as a challenge. They never stop seeking my gaze.
[…] I grow accustomed to comments that feel aggressive in their formulaic insistence: ‘That must be really hard’ to have a dying baby. ‘That must be really hard’ to be afraid you’ll have another seizure in the grocery store.” […] ‘I am sorry that you are experiencing an excruciating pain in your abdomen,’ one of them says. “It must be uncomfortable.’”
The Empathy Exams, p. 3-4; p. 12
Empathizing While Disagreeing
“What if we were willing to understand this person’s perspective, no matter what it was? What if we approached the conversation as an opportunity to see how someone else sees things rather than as an opportunity to change their mind or to defend our position? What would happen if we listened even though we also disagreed? What would we lose? […] Empathy requires only that we understand, not agree with, someone else. […] The question is no longer, ‘Do I agree with this person or not?’ but ‘What makes this person tick?’”
Ash Beckham, Step Up: How to Live with Courage and Become an Everyday Leader, p. 12; p. 15; p. 29
“A group of British antinuclear activists had been demonstrating, some quite angrily for months, against the deployment of more missiles. […] Finally, after long negotiations, the leaders of the group were invited to meet with the senior NATO general under whose command the nuclear missiles were being kept.
The night before their meeting, the woman who led their delegation realized that if they began by confronting the general for this destructive and homicidal policy, the meeting would escalate, polarize their positions, and lead nowhere. She had a revelation: the general must feel that he, too, was protecting millions of people.
The next morning, when they opened the meeting, she began, ‘It must be difficult to feel responsible to protect so many millions of lives.’ ‘It is,’ he replied. And this was the start of a very productive dialogue in which the general himself shared thoughts on how to reduce the number of missiles.”
Jack Kornfield, No Time Like the Present
Empathy, Compassion, and Service
“Imagine that in the dead of night you heard your worst enemy cry out with his whole being ‘Help!’ or ‘Fire!’ Even though this man were your enemy would you not be moved into compassion by the agony of that cry and rush to help him?”
The Cloud of Unknowing (from chapter 14)
“Once, when I was working with twenty-three mental health professionals, I asked them to write, word for word, how they would respond to a client who says, ‘I’m feeling very depressed. I just don’t see any reason to go on.’ [...]
Questions such as ‘When did this begin?’ constituted the most frequent response; they give the appearance that the professional is obtaining the information necessary to diagnose and then treat the problem. In fact, such intellectual understanding of a problem blocks the kind of presence that empathy requires.”
Nonviolent Communication, Marshall Rosenberg, p. 93
“Normally, when we go on a retreat we go to a place in the country, far away from the problems of life that we’re trying to deal with. […] We felt that if we did a retreat in which we became street people, there would be a good chance that we would learn something that would help us work with the problems of street people.
[…] People seemed afraid of us. The didn’t like the sight or us, or the smell of us. As soon as they saw us, they would turn and look away. […] Our retreat ended, and we served a small feast.
[…] It was strange, in a way, to be standing suddenly on the other side of the line, the tables turned, serving instead of being served, but I think we could do it a little better […] because we had stood in line in the rain ourselves, even if only for a few days.”
Bernie Glassman, Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Living a Life That Matters
Questions for Reflection and Discussion
(If you choose to use these questions in a class or group: As with any other lesson that might bring up painful or embarrassing experiences, please respect your students' wishes about how much they choose to share.)
Have you ever been in a similar situation to one of these quotations? What happened?
Do you disagree with any of these quotations? If so, why do you disagree?
Have you ever been in a situation where someone unexpectedly showed, or didn’t show, empathy? What happened? How did you feel?
When do you find it the most challenging to be empathetic?
Have you ever developed more empathy for an individual or group with a very different background or point of view? How and why did your perspective change?
Related Posts
There are many more quotations and other resources for teaching empathy and compassion here at MindfulTeachers.org, including the following posts: