John Brown Quotes

We're like everybody else. We hurt like everybody.

We don't let animals suffer, so why humans?

To be a human being is to suffer. But it's the unnecessary suffering, it's the suffering that we visit upon one another, that really should be stopped.

To each his suff'rings: all are men, / Condemn'd alike to groan, / The tender for another's pain; / Th' unfeeling for his own.

O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.

Nothing but the infinite Pity is sufficient for the infinite pathos of human life.

He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.

It's a rare and precious thing to be close to suffering because our society - in many ways - tells us that suffering is wrong. If it's our own suffering, we try to hide it or isolate ourselves. If others are suffering, we're taught to put them away somewhere so we don't have to see it.

People in misery is what most important in art.

I'm very, very sensitive to pain and to people who suffer.

Because there is something helpless and weak and innocent - something like an infant - deep inside us all that really suffers in ways we would never permit an insect to suffer.

The closer you are to people, the more you realise what has happened to them.

Only the artists interest me whose hearts beat in unison with the poignant misery of the world. If you have not felt that, you have not lived. Pity is essential.

Well, we ought to be stirred, even to tears, by society's ills.

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

The only thing that really depresses me is animal cruelty.

Life is hard. It is. And it's like, I don't want anybody feeling any pain.

That's why I'm never happy. Every tragedy, I really feel very painful - especially about a child or old people. This is reality. We try to close eyes and ears, but it's happening every second, and somehow, unfortunately, I feel a connection.

It seemed a marvel to her that any mortal should suffer for lack of love, and yet she had never known a mortal who didn't feel unloved. There was enough love just in this ugly hallway, she thought, that no one should ever feel the lack of it again. She peered at the parents, imagining their hearts like machines, manufacturing surfeit upon surfeit of love for their children, and then wondered how something could be so awesome and so utterly powerless.

It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.

Here let me sit in sorrow for mankind.

Acting is, to me now, artificial. Seeing people suffer is real. It couldn't be more real. Some people don't like to look at it in the face because it's painful. But if nobody does, then nothing gets done.

The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole! We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.

Without your wounds where would your power be? It is your melancholy that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men and women. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In Love’s service, only wounded soldiers can serve. Physician, draw back.

Any man filled with empathy is capable of gaining valuable insights on the human condition through the suffering of others. You do not need to suffer to know suffering, but you need empathy first to identify and feel the suffering of others around you.