Francois Fenelon Quotes

Compassion is the wish to see others free from suffering.

Compassion doesn't, of course, mean feeling sorry for people, or pity, which is how the word has become emasculated in a way.

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

The greatest gift given to man by God - is the ability to empathize.

All people are endowed with the faculty of compassion, and for this reason can develop the humanitarian spirit.

Sympathy is the first great lesson which man should learn. It will be ill for him if he proceeds no farther; if his emotions are but excited to roll back on his heart, and to be fostered in luxurious quiet. But unless he learns to feel for things in which he has no personal interest, he can achieve nothing generous or noble.

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

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.

I believe in being compassionate.

Everybody has a heart. Except some people.

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.

Personally, I think humility is a prerequisite to being a truly empathic person.

I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.

Compassion is contempt with a human face.

I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can't be learnt in lecture halls.

To love with the spirit is to pity, and he who pities most loves most.

A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.

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.

Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul.

What we really need is compassion of the mind - compassion for others that is directed intelligently and produces truly compassionate results.

Care and pity are two different things.

When you have learned compassion for yourself, compassion for others is automatic.

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.

Compassion brings us to a stop, and for a moment we rise above ourselves.

Empathy is born out of the old biblical injunction 'Love the neighbor as thyself.'