John Dryden Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Pity is best taught by fellowship in woe.

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.

None knows the weight of another's burden.

Well, I was a big fan of the book and therein a huge fan of the girl Precious. And so I felt like I knew this girl. I felt like I'd grown up alongside her. I felt like she was in my family. She was my friend and she was like people I didn't want to be friends with.

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

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

We need to suffer, that we may learn to pity.

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

When he is pierced, I bleed.

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

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

She looked down again and I was stymied. I sat. Oh, this was enough to make me love her, because I was right with her, understanding every second and longing to step in. I didn’t even need to know the specific that was troubling her, because to me her halting voice easily stood for the general woe that hangs in the air, even on life’s happiest days.

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

The delicate and infirm go for sympathy, not to the well and buoyant, but to those who have suffered like themselves.

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

But - I cannot make a choice. I have my own sorrow, but I suffer with him, too; I share his pain. I understand all - that is my trouble.

She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too.

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