Otto Weininger Quotes

George Saunders is the funniest. He makes me laugh in the way I want to laugh - with so much empathy and deep understanding of people. He illuminates things and people I've never thought about - and I've dedicated my life to the study of people and their idiosyncrasies. He is light years ahead.

In some mysterious way, once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

I've learned that intelligence alone doesn't mean a damn thing. It only leads to violence and pain.

The man who has not suffered - what does he know anyway?

I pray for all of us, oppressor and friend, that together we succeed in building a better world through human understanding and love, and that in doing so we may reduce the pain and suffering of all sentient beings.

All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.

When you are suffering, you become more understanding about yourself, but also about other people's sufferings too. That's the first step to understand somebody is to understand their sufferings. So then love follows.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

I have a great deal of empathy for anyone who's having a hard time. I believe this ability to see another's viewpoint has served me well as a writer.

Rather than turning away from the staggering scale and depth of misery caused by war, we must strive to develop our capacity to empathize and feel the sufferings of others.

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

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.

I don't think you have to have experienced things to understand them.

To love a person is to know and love the person. But we can pick up an enormous amount about another human being just by exchanging a couple of sentences. It's not yet knowledge; it's an intuition that motivates you to want to find out more.

Art makes us human, music makes us human, and I deeply feel that science makes us human.

She has no imagination and that means no compassion.

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

When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

Those who do not feel pain seldom think that it is felt.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

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

Becoming a reader grows our horizons, our appetite for the good, the true and the beautiful, and our empathy.