Paul Bloom Quotes

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

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

True contentment comes with empathy.

I believe compassion to be one of the few things we can practice that will bring immediate and long-term happiness to our lives.

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.

Compassion is our most important practice. Understanding brings compassion. Understanding the suffering that living beings undergo helps liberate the energy of compassion. And with that energy you know what to do.

Compassion takes imagination.

I don't have to be an expert. I just have to care.

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.

To cultivate sympathy you must be among living creatures, and thinking about them; and to cultivate admiration, you must be among beautiful things and looking at them.

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

Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.

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

No one can deal with the hearts of men unless he has the sympathy which is given by love.

I think because I can be sad, and I can be lonely, my gift would be trying to help other people feel less lonely and less sad. Because that's what I understand.

Anyone who has gone through great suffering is bound to have a greater sympathy and understanding of the problems of mankind.

If we take the time to look deeply, we see that understanding and compassion arise from suffering. Understanding is the understanding of suffering, and compassion is the kind of energy that can transform suffering. If suffering is not there, we have no means to cultivate our understanding and our compassion. This is something quite simple to see

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."

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

Empathy is forgetting oneself in the joys and sorrows of another, so much so that you actually feel that the joy or sorrow experienced by another is your own joy and sorrow. Empathy involves complete identification with another.

True sympathy is putting ourselves in another's place; and we are moved in proportion to the reality of our imagination.

I would say I'm humanly engaged.

So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.

Pleasure usually takes the form of me and now; joy is us and always.