Herman Melville Quotes

A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world.

Acting is, to me now, artificial. Seeing people suffer is real. It couldn't be more real. Some people don't like to look at it in the face because it's painful. But if nobody does, then nothing gets done.

How horrible it is to have so many people killed! And what a blessing that one cares for none of them!

The culture of comfort, which makes us think only of ourselves, makes us insensitive to the cries of other people.

A Jew must be sensitive to the pain of all human beings. A Jew cannot remain indifferent to human suffering... The mission of the Jewish people has never been to make the world more Jewish, but to make it more human.

I think we are living in selfish times. I'm the first one to say that I'm the most selfish. We live in the so-called 'first world,' and we may be first in a lot of things like technology, but we are behind in empathy.

In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.

The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

I don't care about people's feelings, and I'm triggering people worldwide.

People know your tragedies and they treat you like you’re not human. Like you’re a three-headed goat. A monster from some other planet. They keep reminding you of your pain. You see how they look at me? They’re stuck on that person I used to be. They can’t see that old life as just a moment in time that I’ve moved on from. It was a horrible life.

We live in a culture where people are self-centered and careerist and everybody seems to think they have too much on their plate or they just don't have time for other people's pain.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another's heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.

No man sympathizes with the sorrows of vanity.

Many people come into company full of what they intend to say in it themselves, without the least regard to others; and thus charged up to the muzzle are resolved to let it off at any rate.

We cannot close ourselves off to information and ignore the fact that millions of people are out there suffering.

What makes people hard-hearted is this, that each man has, or fancies he has, as much as he can bear in his own troubles.

A materialistic person is ruthless with other people but kind to himself. A spiritual person is ruthless with himself but kind to everybody else.

The quiet conscience is the invention of the devil. No one of us may permit any preventable pain to be inflicted even though the responsibility for that pain is not ours. No one may shut his eyes and think that the pain which is therefore not visible, is non-existent.

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

I understand people's suffering, people's pain, more than you will every know yourself.

I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.

If the objects who serve us feel ecstacy, they are much more often concerned with themselves than with us, and our own enjoyment is consequently impaired. The idea of seeing another person experience the same pleasure reduces one to a kind of equality which spoils the unutterable charms that come from despotism.

Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels-the biggest sin is to be blind to others problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.

Someday, somehow, I am going to do something useful, something for people. They are, most of them, so helpless, so hurt and so unhappy.