Jim Butcher Quotes

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

Put this restriction on your pleasures, be cautious that they injure no being that lives.

Circumstances cause us to act the way we do. We should always bear this in mind before judging the actions of others. I realized this from the start during World War II.

Human morality is unthinkable without empathy.

What a man knows is everywhere at war with what he wants.

The more power that we have, the less human we are.

Integrity in the Moment of Choice: Quality of life depends on what happens in the space between stimulus and response.

Are you one who looks on? or lends a hand? - or who looks away, sidles off?...Third question for the conscience.

I wonder why it is the man who pleads for mercy never gives it.

It is more easy to forgive the weak who have injured us than the powerful whom we have injured.

There's right and there's wrong. You got to do one or the other. You do the one and you're living. You do the other and you may be walking around, but you're dead as a beaver hat.

Men do monstrous things but if you call a man a monster you have absolved yourself of blame. You don't have to think that you might ever do these things. I don't think that's true

He can kill anything for need but he could not even hurt a feeling for pleasure.

Tsze-Kung asked, “Is there one word with which to act in accordance throughout a lifetime?” The Master said, “Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.

I hope that's what I've taught my girls - to be fair, to recognize their own position and their own good fortune, to use their voices to make things better. Beyond that, I'd tell them just to be kind.

Philosophers conceive of the passions which harass us as vices into which men fall by their own fault, and, therefore, generally deride, bewail, or blame them, or execrate them, if they wish to seem unusually pious.

It is not human to be without shame and without desire.

The lesson I was learning involved the idea that I could feel compassion for people without acting on it.

You do not like to suffer yourself. How can you inflict suffering on others?

He who has it in his power to commit sin, is less inclined to do so. The very idea of being able, weakens the desire.

When men are inhuman, take care not to feel towards them as they do towards other humans.

YOU MUST LEARN THE COMPASSION PROPER TO YOUR TRADE" "And what's that?" "A SHARP EDGE.

I don't want to be mean. I try not to be.

Every leaf that grows will tell you: what you sow will bear fruit, so if you have any sense my friend, don't plant anything but Love.

Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.