Frederick Buechner Quotes

We all have other halves, and when they're feeling bad, we get a little piece of the pain

Compassion is the feeling of shared suffering. When you feel someone else's suffering, there is the birth of understanding.

Can I see another's woe, And not be in sorrow too? Can I see another's grief, And not seek for kind relief? Can I see a falling tear, And not feel my sorrow's share? Can a father see his child Weep, nor be with sorrow filled? Can a mother sit and hear An infant groan, an infant fear? No, no! never can it be! Never, never can it be!

By compassion we make others' misery our own, and so, by relieving them, we relieve ourselves also.

Another person's illness is often harder to bear than one's own.

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.

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

Now that I'm suffering, I feel closer to people who suffer more than I ever did before. The other night, on TV, I saw people in Bosnia running across the street, getting fired upon, killed, innocent victims....and I just started to cry. I feel their anguish as if it were my own. I don't know any of these people. But - how can I put this? I'm almost......drawn to them.

Compassion is a mixed passion, composed of love and sorrow.

People, although having their own cross to carry, can minister to others through their own pain.

We must never minimize the suffering of another. Scripture's mandate to us is, "Weep with them that weep." (Romans 12:15, KJV)

All around you are people whose lives are filled with trouble and sorrow, and they need your compassion and encouragement.

To love is to take delight in happiness of another, or, what amounts to the same thing, it is to account another's happiness as one's own.

...those who love suffer when who they love suffers.

We rejoice in the joys of our friends as much as we do our own, and we are equally grieved at their sorrows. Wherefore the wise people will feel toward their friends as they do toward themselves, and whatever labor they would encounter with a view to their own pleasure, they will encounter also for the sake of their friends.

Because of our kinship in suffering, our channels of contact have always been charged with the language of the heart.

One pain is lessened by another's anguish.

I think I love most people best when they are in adversity; for pity is one of my prevailing passions.

Compassion is the fellow-feeling of the unsound.

There is desire in those who love to hear about their loved ones' pains.

Shame on those breasts of stone that cannot melt in soft adoption of another's sorrow.

Toto did not really care whether he was in Kansas or the Land of Oz so long as Dorothy was with him; but he knew the little girl was unhappy, and that made him unhappy too.

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.

There is always a comforting thought in time of trouble when it is not our trouble.