Edmund Burke Quotes

It is important that friends should understand each other in their difficult hours.

No human heart is denied empathy. No religion can demolish that by indoctrination. No culture, no nation and nationalism - nothing can touch it because it is empathy.

Everybody has a heart. Except some people.

In a thousand pounds of law there is not an ounce of love.

Men are not tied together by papers and seals. They are led to associate by resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies.

In effect, to follow, not to force, the public inclination,—to give a direction, a form, a technical dress, and a specific sanction, to the general sense of the community, is the true end of legislation.

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.

We are oblig'd therefore, by promises proceeding from fear, except the Civill Law forbid them, by vertue whereof, that which is promised becomes unlawfull.

Conflict with our allies in a war is terrible. But the only thing worse is fighting a war without allies.

Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.

… good habits are here more effectual than good laws elsewhere

As manners make laws, so manners likewise repeal them.

In the view of this Government there cannot be any common ground upon which it can stand with a Power whose conceptions of international relations are so entirely alien to its own, so utterly repugnant to its moral sense. There can be no mutual confidence or trust, no respect even, if pledges are to be given and agreements made with a cynical repudiation of their obligations already in the mind of one of the parties. We cannot recognize, hold relations with, or give friendly receptions to the agents of a Government which is determined and bound to conspire against our institutions, whose diplomats will be the agitators of dangerous revolt, whose spokesmen say that they sign agreements with no intention of keeping them.

I think that sometimes we open our hearts a little more easily to animals than we do to each other.

However deep our devotion may be to parents or to children, it is our contemporaries alone with whom understanding is instinctive and entire.

He who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men.

Just as I need other human beings in order to learn from them, so I also need their trust. If we aren't aware of that, if we fail to take it to heart and instead betray other people's trust, things will go badly with us.

Surely, surely the only one true knowledge of our fellow man is that which enables us to feel with him--which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion.

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

But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people--first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy.

The human heart finds nowhere shelter but in human kind.

I am young in my energy because I really still believe that we can share who we are, and we can wipe off on each other. I see this huge tapestry when we're born, and this red blob that's your soul or your heart.

Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn’t, let ourselves become. Sooner or later we meet the drunkard, the waster, the betrayer, the ruthless mind, and the hate-filled heart. But fate loads the dice, of course, because we usually find ourselves loving or pitying almost all of those people. And it’s impossible to despise someone you honestly pity, and to shun someone you truly love.

You have to work hard at staying in contact with your friends so that the relationships will continue and live on... Friendships, along with love, make life worth living.

All of us are better when we're loved.