Joseph Addison Quotes

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

Compassion is not defined in one form. There's no Indian compassion. There's no American compassion. It transcends nation, the gender, the age. Why? Because it is there in everybody. It's experienced by people occasionally.

However, without considering this connection, there is no doubt but that more good than evil, more delight than sorrow, arises from compassion itself; there being so many things which balance the sorrow of it.

Pain and sorrow and misery have a right to our assistance: compassion puts us in mind of the debt, and that we owe it to ourselves as well as to the distressed.

Compassion and mercy are important, period. It doesn't matter who's at our receiving end, but we need to be flexing those muscles. It's not mutually exclusive: If you have compassion for children starving in Africa, it doesn't mean you can't have compassion for adults in Africa or animals that are being tortured and abused.

I have empathy; I am humane. I understand human misery.

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

They charge me with fanaticism. If to be feelingly alive to the suffering of my fellow creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large.

In democratic ages men rarely sacrifice themselves for another, but they show a general compassion for all the human race. One never sees them inflict pointless suffering, and they are glad to relieve the sorrows of others when they can do so without much trouble to themselves. They are not disinterested, but they are gentle.

I don't think I should accept other people's suffering because I suffered. Just the opposite, because I suffered I don't want others to suffer.

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

Love of our neighbour, then, has just the same respect to, is no more distant from, self-love, than hatred of our neighbour, or than love or hatred of anything else.

Compassion is contempt with a human face.

I love mankind; it's people I can't stand.

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

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

Everyone responds to kindness.

A love for humanity came over me, and watered and fertilised the fields of my inner world which had been lying fallow, and this love of humanity vented itself in a vast compassion.

Compassion is so pure, I don't think there is any way to taint it.

It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one's own suffering.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

Kindness is a sort of love without being love.

Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.

If you haven't got any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.

The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.