Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

Compassion automatically invites you to relate with people because you no longer regard people as a drain on your energy.

At its core Twitter is about sharing, and I think that in life we never feel better or more energized than when we're giving to someone else.

Where there is no human connection, there is no compassion. Without compassion, then community, commitment, loving-kindness, human understanding, and peace all shrivel. Individuals become isolated, the isolated turn cruel, and the tragic hovers in the forms of domestic and civil violence. Art and literature are antidotes to that.

For me, I feel like I relate to a lot of people.

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him.

We're passing on something of ourselves to others. I feel that's what makes our life full of meaning. It's hard to have meaning in a closet, encapsulated by nothing. I think you really have to expand yourself and your life and do what you can for other people.

Empathy, humanity and support for each other is more important than revenue, than growth.

Most people are weak and frightened, and run from anything which could be upsetting. Most people, also, are takers and not givers.

People are happiest when they are giving, they are saddest when they are just taking. And that is the core message of community.

Giving to other people makes me feel alive. Not my car or my house. Not what I look like in the mirror. When I give my time, when I can make someone smile after they were feeling sad.

Your life doesn't belong to you, it belongs to the people that love you

Isn’t it amazing how much good people can do for each other when you give them the opportunity to help?

Trying to find a human side to the character is a way to give them a chance to have people like them.

If we walk down the sidewalk of any street in America a significant number of the people we pass by, if we dug into what they're going through in their lives, they're carrying burdens that they don't talk about but they're extremely heavy and painful. And so, one of the secrets of the human condition is that suffering binds people together. And when you go through something agonizing, others who know what you're feeling because they've been through it will so often reach out to you and connect with you, and give you strength and lift you up.

The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit. All education should be directed toward the refinement of the individual's sensibilities in relation not only to one's fellow humans everywhere, but to all things whatsoever.

The concept that a person who has a lot holds his hand out to someone who has less, or someone who isn't hurting holds his hand out to someone who is, is simply a human trait that has nothing to do with celebrity. I am confounded at the stinginess of some institutions and some people. I'm bewildered by it. You can only put away so much stuff in your closet.

We can all reduce our life to a description that makes people feel sorry for ourselves or we can expand our life to a dimension where we connect and give to others.

Live by looking for things to do for other people.

(People achieve) fullness of being in fellowship, in care for others.

Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power.

If you're in a position where you can help other people, there is nothing better in life than helping other people. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

My father (Danny Thomas) used to tell me there are two kinds of people, the takers and the givers. 'The takers sometimes eat better,' he would say, 'but the givers always sleep better.'

People give themselves to you, in their talking, and in other ways, if you are quiet and patient and let them, and not in such a damned rush to give yourself to them you go bat-blind and deaf.

The well taught philosophic mind To all compassion gives; Casts round the world an equal eye, And feels for all that lives.