David Foster Wallace Quotes

Nothing helps us build our perspective more than developing compassion for others. Compassion is a sympathetic feeling. It involves the willingness to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to take the focus off yourself and to imagine what it's like to be in someone else's predicament, and simultaneously, to feel love for that person. It's the recognition that other people's problems, their pain and frustrations, are every bit as real as our own-often far worse. In recognizing this fact and trying to offer some assistance, we open our own hearts and greatly enhance our sense of gratitude.

Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and it's accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through another's eyes or heart.

You shall find out how salt is the taste of another man's bread, and how hard is the way up and down another man's stairs.

I would like to think that as a result of not just my own experiences, but at least being empathetic and compassionate about other people's experiences and plights and tragedies, that I am affected by it and learn from it.

Walk a mile in my shoes is good advice. Our children will learn to respect others if they are used to imagining themselves in another's place.

When you're not involved, other people's unhappiness seems to be about the funniest damn thing on earth because you think you can solve it, that you are God, that you are above this, and that their unhappiness is just such useless toil and agony. If it's you, it ceases to be a comedy.

The super power that I would choose would be compassion. Because that's what I think it takes to make it through life-an understanding, a give and take. It saves an awful lot of resentment.

Tragedies make you realize how selfish you are.

I consider all drama to be the opportunity to see the world from another person's point of view. That seems to be the point of drama, really. And thereby to encourage understanding and even love.

When you see yourself as the center of things, it deprives you of a certain level of empathy.

How can you build something for someone else if you don't have enough familiarity with them to imagine the world through their eyes?

It's hard to put yourself in someone else's head.

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

When you're frustrated with people, when they've made you angry, it just may be because you haven't given them enough time.

The reminder that there are people who have worse troubles than you is not an effective pain-killer.

Our prayers may be an index of how small and self-centered our world is.

One way to overcome our natural self-centeredness is to try to see things from other people's perspectives.

I try to consider people's perspectives and not just my own.

I certainly know I have been blessed with much more empathy than I ever knew I would feel for other people.

Said one oyster to a neighboring oyster, "I have a very great pain within me. It is heavy and round and I am in distress." And the other oyster replied with haughty complacence, "Praise be to the heavens and to the sea, I have no pain within me. I am well and whole both within and without." At that moment a crab was passing by and heard the two oysters, and he said to the one who was well and whole both within and without, "Yes, you are well and whole; but the pain that your neighbor bears is a pearl of exceeding beauty."

The ability to understand the cause of your own suffering gives you the ability to understand ours.

We can all reduce our life to a description that makes people feel sorry for ourselves or we can expand our life to a dimension where we connect and give to others.

If we know how to listen to our own heart, we can listen to the hearts of others.

To our own sorrows serious heed we give, But for another?s we soon cease to grieve.

I don't hate people - not remotely other than they make you crazy in traffic, but as I get older I kind of see more and more why people do what they do.