Quotes: Empathy, Sympathy

(a quality that's never wasted except when given to oneself)

empathist (s) (noun), empathists (pl)
1. Anyone who uses intellectual identification with, or the vicarious experiencing of, the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another person: Because Stella had the capacity of understanding other people so well, she was known to be an empathist.
2. Someone who has an imaginative response to an object: An empathist can project his or her own personality into a natural object or a work of art, or who can assign feelings or attitudes in oneself to the objects.
sympathize (verb), sympathizes, sympathized, sympathizing
To share a compassion for another person's thoughts, feelings, and experiences: Sally sympathized with her friend Mary when Mary's boyfriend decided to quit their relationship.
sympathy (s) (noun), sympathies (pl)
1. The emotion of feeling pity for someone; the indication of understanding and caring about another's problems: Jenny showed a lot of sympathy when she found out that her friend's mother died the day before.
2. An influence produced in any organ by disease or disorder in another part: Dr. Thompsom told Jane that there was evidently sympathy between her right eye and her left eye because they showed similar disorders.
3. A relation which exists between the mind and the body that causing the one to be affected by the other: When Jill called up her employer to say that she felt sick, although she really wasn't, she really did feel ill, and found out later that the sympathy between her brain and upset stomach really existed.
Sympathy

1. What a girl offers to another in exchange for details.
2. A quality that’s never wasted except when you give it to yourself.
3. What you give to someone when you don’t want to loan him/her any money.
—Based on quotes by Evan Esar

Quotations

What is empathy? If another fellow strikes it rich and you feel as if it’s money in your pocket, that’s empathy.
Changing Times, The Kiplinger Magazine


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