Daily Inspiration Quote by Meryl Streep

Streep’s line sounds like a warm compliment to the species, but it’s really a job description disguised as a moral claim. An actor sells you on the impossible: that a stranger’s interior life can feel temporarily like your own. When she calls empathy a “power,” she’s not talking about a soft sentiment; she’s talking about a human technology, something we can choose to switch on, aim, and practice until it changes what we’re capable of.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the cultural pose of detachment. Empathy here isn’t a decorative virtue you post about; it’s the difference between witnessing and participating. Streep’s phrasing also carries a sly optimism about agency: gifts can be squandered, but they can also be used. That makes the line less Hallmark than it first appears. It’s an argument that cruelty and indifference are not inevitable “human nature,” but failures of imagination.

The context matters because Streep has often voiced this idea amid public debates about division, immigration, and political cruelty, where empathy is routinely framed as weakness or naivete. Coming from her, it doubles as a defense of art itself. Movies and theater don’t just entertain; they train the muscles of attention. They ask you to inhabit people you might otherwise reduce to categories. In a moment when outrage is easier than understanding, she’s pitching empathy as both ethical and practical: the rare capacity that scales from private relationships to public life, if we have the courage to keep using it.