Jean de La Fontaine Quotes

My heart bled for the inhabitants.

I feel like if you're in a bad situation, and then you see somebody that's even in a worse situation, you feel for that person.

I don't think we can be entirely happy seeing such misery around us.

It is an easy thing for one whose foot is on the outside of calamity to give advice and to rebuke the sufferer.

I hate to see anybody sink. I hate to see anybody lose their dream, lose their home, something like that.

I learned compassion from being discriminated against. Everything bad that's ever happened to me has taught me compassion.

We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of others.

Nobody's life is a bed of roses. We all have crosses to bear, and we all just do our best. I would never claim to have the worst situation. There are many widows, and many people dying of AIDS, many people killed in Lebanon, people starving all over the planet. So we have to count our lucky stars.

Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.

For in all adversity of fortune the worst sort of misery is to have been happy.

No matter how bad you think you have it, there's always - always somebody who's got it way, way worse.

Only the artists interest me whose hearts beat in unison with the poignant misery of the world. If you have not felt that, you have not lived. Pity is essential.

Myself acquainted with misfortune, I learn to help the unfortunate.

It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.

Pity addresses the perceived suffering, not the whole individual.

The unhappy derive comfort from the misfortunes of others.

Those who do not feel pain seldom think that it is felt.

We are truly to be pitied.

We are all strong enough to bear other men's misfortunes.

There are a lot of ups and downs. But there are always people who have it worse.

Misery is, by her own nature, a passing phase of sorrow, one that does not linger uninvited. Her sojourns seem to be part of life's required curriculum, perhaps because Misery endows us with compassion and empathy.

The wretched hasten to hear of their own miseries.

Beggars remind us that not all miseries arise from our ideas.

The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole! We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.

Trials make more room for consolation. There is nothing that makes a man have a big heart like a great trial. I always find that little, miserable people, whose hearts are about the size of a grain of mustard seed, never have had much to try them. I have found that those people who have no sympathy for their fellows — who never weep for the sorrows of others — very seldom have had any woes of their own. Great hearts can only be made by great troubles.