Dada Vaswani Quotes

True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one's own the suffering and joys of others.

The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognize the physical, material, and psychological suffering of others, to put ourselves "inside the skin" of the other. We "go inside" their body, feelings, and mental formations, and witness for ourselves their suffering. Shallow observation as an outsider is not enough to see their suffering. We must become one with the subject of our observation. When we are in contact with another's suffering, a feeling of compassion is born in us. Compassion means, literally, "to suffer with."

It is people who go through suffering that have an empathy for the suffering of others.

Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn't rescue the suffering.

The ability to understand the cause of your own suffering gives you the ability to understand ours.

Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain.

I call him religious who understands the suffering of others.

I do not know of a better cure for sorrow than to pity somebody else.

I don't think I should accept other people's suffering because I suffered. Just the opposite, because I suffered I don't want others to suffer.

Sympathy is the first great lesson which man should learn. It will be ill for him if he proceeds no farther; if his emotions are but excited to roll back on his heart, and to be fostered in luxurious quiet. But unless he learns to feel for things in which he has no personal interest, he can achieve nothing generous or noble.

Some people think that without that spark of empathy we would do nothing, but that's just flat-out wrong. You could feel compassion for somebody without the spark of empathy.

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the other.... The whole purpose of life is to live by love.

Only the development of compassion and understanding for others can bring us the tranquility and happiness we all seek.

To see with the eyes of another, to hear with the ears of another, to feel with the heart of another. For the time being, this seems to me an admissible definition of what we call social feeling.

Nothing helps us build our perspective more than developing compassion for others. Compassion is a sympathetic feeling. It involves the willingness to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to take the focus off yourself and to imagine what it's like to be in someone else's predicament, and simultaneously, to feel love for that person. It's the recognition that other people's problems, their pain and frustrations, are every bit as real as our own-often far worse. In recognizing this fact and trying to offer some assistance, we open our own hearts and greatly enhance our sense of gratitude.

Go beyond yourself and reach out to other people with a sincere love, respect, caring, and understanding of their needs.

Because Jesus Christ suffered greatly, He understands our suffering. He understands our grief. We experience hard things so that we too may have increased compassion and understanding for others.

Whatever you wish to experience in your own lifetime, cause another to experience in theirs. What you bring to another, you bring to the Self, for there is no other in ultimate reality.

Compassion automatically invites you to relate with people because you no longer regard people as a drain on your energy.

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.

Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.

Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.

However, without considering this connection, there is no doubt but that more good than evil, more delight than sorrow, arises from compassion itself; there being so many things which balance the sorrow of it.

Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.