Edmund Burke Quotes

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

When I see people sad, I'm sad.

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

It is only possible through the fact that sympathy for the general life and suffering of mankind is very weakly developed in the individual.

Compassion does not only refine and civilize human nature, but has something in it more pleasing and agreeable, than what can be met with in such an indolent happiness, such an indifference to mankind, as that in which the stoics placed their wisdom. As love is the most delightful passion, pity is nothing else but love softened by a degree of sorrow: In short, it is a kind of pleasing anguish, anguish as well as generous sympathy, that knits mankind together, and blends them in the same common lot.

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

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.

Compassion begins with the acknowledgment of the single inescapable truth that is the foundation for the possibility of love between human beings - an awareness of the tragic sense of life.

Nobody understands another's sorrow, and nobody another's joy.

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.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

Only when the sense of the pain of others begins does man begin.

To keep the Golden Rule we must put ourselves in other people's places, but to do that consists in and depends upon picturing ourselves in their places.

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

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

What are gold and jewels and precious utensils? Mere dross and dirt. The human face and the human heart, reciprocations of kindness and love, and all the nameless sympathies of our nature - these are the only objects worth being attached to.

Our emotions resonate with each other - for better and for worse.

Empathy is what obsesses me. And watching empathy recede in the world is terrifying.

I wanted to get people to feel where I'm coming from and connect with people who are feeling the same way that I am.

What separates humans from other animals is our empathy. With the possible exception of bonobos, we are the most empathetic animal on the planet.

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.

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 you feel someone else's pain and joy as powerfully as if it were your own, then you know you really loved them.

Now that I'm suffering, I feel closer to people who suffer more than I ever did before. The other night, on TV, I saw people in Bosnia running across the street, getting fired upon, killed, innocent victims....and I just started to cry. I feel their anguish as if it were my own. I don't know any of these people. But - how can I put this? I'm almost......drawn to them.