Elbert Hubbard Quotes

Children, even infants, are capable of sympathy. But only after adolescence are we capable of compassion.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Walk a mile in my shoes is good advice. Our children will learn to respect others if they are used to imagining themselves in another's place.

The true humanist maintains a just balance between sympathy and selection.

Children have but little charity for one another's defects.

Pity is an emotion that can get you killed. The only thing more dangerous is blind hate, and maybe love.

It's good to have to put yourself in someone else's skin. It's all-consuming.

Love and compassion don't at all have to make us weak, or lead us to losing discernment and vision. We just have to learn how to find them. And see, in truth, what they bring us.

Compassion doesn't, of course, mean feeling sorry for people, or pity, which is how the word has become emasculated in a way.

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.

I don't think you have to have experienced things to understand them.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

I've never understood pity and self-pity as an emotion.

We need to suffer, that we may learn to pity.

What I remember as a child is that other kids didn't care about suffering. I always did.

A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all-knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.

I used to believe that hurting would make you more alive to the hurting of others. I used to believe in feeling bad because somebody else did. Now I'm not so sure of either.

Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.

It's not a very nice thing to not have empathy. I would like to have empathy. In the past I haven't been very empathetic with other people.

I think his deepest quality is empathy.

Sometimes, in difficult circumstances, one can confuse compassion with love.

Sympathy is the child of imagination

Pity is like a knife, sometimes, and it may pierce one who employs it more shrewdly than the victim it would save.