Milan Kundera Quotes

None knows the weight of another's burden.

I cannot worry much about your sins and miseries when I have so many of my own. I can only love you all, poor fellow travellers, fellow sufferers. I do not want to add one least straw to the burden you already carry.

You don't want to diminish anybody's pain and suffering.

Can I see another's woe, and not be in sorrow too? Can I see another's grief, and not seek for kind relief?

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.

My heart goes out to anyone who suffers, and of course, to their families.

But - I cannot make a choice. I have my own sorrow, but I suffer with him, too; I share his pain. I understand all - that is my trouble.

He gave to misery (all he had) a tear.

Friendship is but another name for an alliance with the follies and the misfortunes of others. Our own share of miseries is sufficient: why enter then as volunteers into those of another?

Don't tell your problems to people: eighty percent don't care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.

No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim.

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.

With all the things I've been through, the No. 1 thing that I've learned is that we're supposed to help people through this world.

You can relate to somebody's pain and you have compassion, which can lead to intimacy.

Compassion is a call, a demand of nature, to relieve the unhappy as hunger is a natural call for food.

The more sympathy you give, the less you need.

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.

Sympathy is charming, but it does not make up for pain.

All you'd have to do is get a sad look, and he'd try to do something for you.

The dew of compassion is a tear.

True compassion means not only feeling another's pain but also being moved to help relieve it.

What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.

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

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.

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