Both words share the root pathos, which originally meant a quality that evokes pity or suffering.
This is the key difference:
Sympathy means to feel pity or suffering with someone.
Empathy means to be inside someone else’s pity or suffering.
You may also like
In the latest part of her ‘empathy museum’, Clare Patey invites audiences to put on a stranger’s footwear and take a walk while listening to the shoe-owner’s personal story on headphones In 2013, Barack Obama gave a speech …
Misunderstandings and hurt feelings happen all the time, even more often online when you can’t see or hear each other, but Facebook wants things to go smoothly on its social network. So they are tapping some of the top minds at Yale and U.C. Berkeley t…
As a mother, my capacity for empathy does not stop at only those who physically resemble my children. Sadly, the president, who touts empathy as one of the most important qualifications for a Supreme Court justice, signals that his capacity for empathy…
Hillary Clinton says she understands Bernie Sanders’s decision not to drop out of the Democratic race for the presidency despite his long odds of winning the party’s nomination. “I have a lot of empathy about this. I ran to the very end in 2…