Richard Adams Quotes

I think I love most people best when they are in adversity; for pity is one of my prevailing passions.

To see those babies with no food for three of four days, old people sitting in the hot sun, when you see these poor people, you cannot help but being compassionate or affected.

Love is the biggest thing. I feel that if we all were truly loving to each other, I think life would be better. Even to like, a stranger. They could be going through something crazy in their day and just to show love towards that person.

There is hunger for ordinary bread, and there is hunger for love, for kindness, for thoughtfulness, and this is the great poverty that makes people suffer so much.

No man truly has joy unless he lives in love.

mercy, I think, doesn't the human race know anything about mercy?

If only political leaders would allow themselves to feel, as well as to think, the world might be a happier place.

The more I think about the human suffering in our world and my desire to offer a healing response, the more I realize how crucial it is not to allow myself to become paralyzed by feelings of helplessness and guilt. More important than ever is to be very faithful to my vocation to do well the few things I am called to do and hold on to the joy and peace they bring me. I must resist the temptation to let the forces of darkness pull me into despair and make me one more of their many victims.

All living beings have experience of pleasure and pain, and we are among them. What makes human beings different is that we have a powerful intelligence and a much greater ability to achieve happiness and avoid suffering. Real happiness and friendship come not from money or even knowledge, but from warm-heartednes s. Once we recognize this we will be more inclined to cultivate it.

Years ago I used to commiserate with all people who suffered. Now I commiserate only with those who suffer in ignorance, who do not understand the purpose and ultimate utility of pain

We are, all of us, poor wretches, and those who prefer not to understand this are even worse off than the rest of us.

I think sometimes the very reason we go through something is so that we can be empathetic with another person later on.

I don't think human affection and compassion are just religious concerns; they're indispensable factors in our day-to-day lives.

I think we learn some of the greatest lessons in life from animals, whether it's love, suffering, or the value of silence.

Toto did not really care whether he was in Kansas or the Land of Oz so long as Dorothy was with him; but he knew the little girl was unhappy, and that made him unhappy too.

Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. The wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

people are not good to each other. perhaps if they were our deaths would not be so sad.

A true friend of mankind whose heart has but once quivered in compassion over the sufferings of the people, will understand and forgive all the impassable alluvial filth in which they are submerged, and will be able to discover the diamonds in the filth.

It is only out of ignorance that people are cruel, because they really don't think it will come back.

If we stop thinking of ourselves and only of helping others, you will start to see a dramatic improvement in the suffering we are all going through.

Like all sick children,' he answered dispassionately, 'you say you don't want pity, but your very existence depends upon it.

The more we think of others, the happier we are. The more we think of ourselves, the more suffering we feel.

My ultimare goal is, without illusion and without sentimentality, merely by telling the truth as I see it, to break your heart. If I can break your heart and cause your awareness to expand to include another person's experience, even a fictional person's experience, and to inhabit for a moment their sorrow and suffering, then I think it expands us as people.

Lack of understanding of the true nature of happiness, it seems to me, is the principal reason why people inflict sufferings on others. They think either that the other's pain may somehow be a cause of happiness for themselves or that their own happiness is more important, regardless of what pain it may cause. But this is shortsighted. No one truly benefits from causing harm to another sentient being. . . . . In the long run causing others misery and infringing their rights to peace and happiness result in anxiety, fear, and suspicion within oneself.

It is good to be attracted out of ourselves, to be forced to take a near view of the sufferings, the privations, the efforts, the difficulties of others.