Matthieu Ricard Quotes

A compassionate heart will lift you out of the pain and suffering of your own world because it knows that everyone is doing the best they can, given their state of consciousness and the histories they're dragging behind them.

None knows the weight of another's burden.

We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.

Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.

Love is to understand, at last, the suffering of another.

It is people who go through suffering that have an empathy for the suffering of others.

Other men's pains are easily borne.

Don't judge someone's attitude until you've felt their pain.

Vanity calculates but poorly on the vanity of others; what a virtue we should distil from frailty, what a world of pain we should save our brethren, if we would suffer our own weakness to be the measure of theirs.

Anyone who has gone through great suffering is bound to have a greater sympathy and understanding of the problems of mankind.

To bear other people's afflictions, everyone has courage and enough to spare.

That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be demonstrated by many obvious observations, if it should not be thought sufficiently evident of itself. When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer.

Oh, it is easy for the one who stands outside the prison-wall of pain to exhort and teach the one who suffers.

Kindness is willing to look in the face of the hurting.

People in distress never think that you feel enough.

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.

A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain.

Hush! Check those words. Do not cure ill with ill and make your pain still heavier than it is.

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

When compassion wakes up in us, we find ourselves more willing to become vulnerable, to take the risk of entering the pain of others.

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

I don't think I ever sit there and think to kick a wound harder.

Pity is the most pleasant feeling in those who have not much pride and have no prospect of great conquests; for them the easy prey - and that is what all who suffer are - is enchanting.

Seeing other people in pain causes me pain.

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