John Woolman Quotes

Why does God endow us with compassion?

You can't look in the face of adoration and be cruel.

Man may dismiss compassion from his heart, but God never will.

We are not by nature cruel.

It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men.

...the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn’t cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.

To be able to laugh and to be merciful are the only things that make man better than the beast

I feel it's in people's nature to want to stop evil and embrace the good.

Human it is to have compassion on the unhappy.

It would be nice to feel that we are a better world, a world of more compassion and a world of more humanity, and to believe in the basic goodness of man.

To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.

Human morality is unthinkable without empathy.

I know for certain of only one commandment, one obligation, that God imposes upon us, and that is to be compassionate toward other human beings.

There are very few misanthropes, thank goodness!

I believe people are wonderful. The vast majority of people have never hurt anybody in their lives.

The act of feeling what you believe other people feel is morally corosive.... If we want to be good and caring people, if we want to make the world a better place, then we are better off withouit empathy.

The truth is that goodness is hardwired in humanity.

I believe there's good in everybody.

Not to sound too Pollyanna-ish, but I think most people are decent, caring human beings. You don't necessarily see that reflected in fiction maybe, because possibly it's perceived as not having much dramatic potential.

We do not live by justice, but by grace.

There may not be a hell, but those who judge may create one. I think people are over-taught. They are over-taught everything. You have to find out by what happens to you, how you will react. I'll have to use a strange term here... "good." I don't know where it comes from, but I feel that there's an ultimate strain of goodness born in each of us. I don't believe in God, but I believe in this "goodness" like a tube running through our bodies. It can be nurtured. It's always magic, when on a freeway packed with traffic, a stranger makes room for you to change lanes... it gives you hope.

What is more harmful than any vice? Practical sympathy and pity for all the failures and all the weak : Christianity.

If it wasn't for good," my mother says, "we human beings would have been wiped out a long time ago. Either the monsters would have gotten us or we would have killed each other off with greed and jealousy and anger. So we have to believe in good. We have to look for the good in ourselves.

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

Good people are good people; religion has nothing to do with it.