George Eliot Quotes

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

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

A feeling heart is a blessing that no one, who has it, would be without; and it is a moral security of innocence; since the heart that is able to partake of the distress of another, cannot wilfully give it.

Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn't rescue the suffering.

Compassion is the wish to see others free from suffering.

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

Looking at various means of developing compassion, I think empathy is an important factor: the ability to appreciate others' suffering.

Positive social emotions like compassion and empathy are generally good for us, and we want to encourage them. But do we know how to most reliably raise children to care about the suffering of other people? I'm not sure we do.

We may thank God that we can feel pain and know sadness, for these are the human sentiments that constitute our glory as well as our grief.

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

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

However, without considering this connection, there is no doubt but that more good than evil, more delight than sorrow, arises from compassion itself; there being so many things which balance the sorrow of it.

Scarcely one person in a thousand is capable of tasting the happiness of others.

We have to teach empathy as we do literacy.

I have empathy; I am humane. I understand human misery.

What I remember as a child is that other kids didn't care about suffering. I always did.

Some public officials are blessed - you can't acquire this, but you are blessed with the gift of empathy, being able to empathize with those who are suffering.

I will try and become a very empathetic person because I do think that's a nice trait.

They learned no compassion from their own anguish. thus their suffering was wasted.

Good people are happy when something good happens to someone else.

Character is revealed in the power to discern the suffering of other people when we ourselves are suffering; in the ability to detect the hunger of others when we are hungry; and in the power to reach out and extend compassion for the spiritual agony of others when we are in the midst of our own spiritual distress.

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.

Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain.

Understanding of our fellow human beings...becomes fruitful only when it is sustained by sympathetic feelings in joy and sorrow.

It is my observations, though, that happiness limits the amount of suffering one is willing to inflict upon others