Matthieu Ricard Quotes

Above all, I try to create an emotion to which others can respond.

When compassion wakes up in us, we find ourselves more willing to become vulnerable, to take the risk of entering the pain of others.

It's easy when you have suffered to feel the link with what others have gone through.

We can empathize as deeply as we can empathize.

None knows the weight of another's burden.

A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain.

You have a little bit of feeling for everyone you play.

Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand.

There's no hierarchy in suffering. I think songs that are transcendent are the ones where everyone can feel something from it, you know?

I felt along with her - not the physical pain, of course, but all her mental anguish. You can't be detached. She needed to have someone who understood what was happening in her mind.

Anyone who has experienced a certain amount of loss in their life has empathy for those who have experienced loss.

People aren't very good at other people's pain.

I love everybody. When someone hurts, I hurt.

If you can understand, you can feel compassion.

I always want people to experience the feelings I am experiencing. Anything I can do to get you to feel, that's an honor and a duty that I take very seriously.

When I see people sad, I'm sad.

Pity is the most pleasant feeling in those who have not much pride and have no prospect of great conquests; for them the easy prey - and that is what all who suffer are - is enchanting.

Love is to understand, at last, the suffering of another.

What is of most moment of compassion is not feelings of pity but feelings of togetherness.

When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone’s pain, it become compassion.

Only one mountain can know the core of another mountain.

Without an awareness of our feelings we cannot experience compassion. How can we share the sufferings and the joys of others if we cannot experience our own?

That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be demonstrated by many obvious observations, if it should not be thought sufficiently evident of itself. When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer.

I learn to pity woes so like my own.

Compassion is the feeling of shared suffering. When you feel someone else's suffering, there is the birth of understanding.