Mallory Ortberg Quotes

Ever since I was a child, I would start crying seeing anyone in pain.

You don't want to diminish anybody's pain and suffering.

Rather than turning away from the staggering scale and depth of misery caused by war, we must strive to develop our capacity to empathize and feel the sufferings of others.

People aren't very good at other people's pain.

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.

People who have suffered know more about compassion.

I know what it's like to feel distraught as I am an incredibly sensitive guy and feel for anything and everyone in pain, particularly my own sister.

When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone’s pain, it become compassion.

When one is innocent of pain, of the havoc it can wreak, one is never cruel. Cruelty is born of pain, of a need to hurt in turn.

Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person.

Said one oyster to a neighboring oyster, "I have a very great pain within me. It is heavy and round and I am in distress." And the other oyster replied with haughty complacence, "Praise be to the heavens and to the sea, I have no pain within me. I am well and whole both within and without." At that moment a crab was passing by and heard the two oysters, and he said to the one who was well and whole both within and without, "Yes, you are well and whole; but the pain that your neighbor bears is a pearl of exceeding beauty."

Those who have suffered make the best comforters.

Oh, it is easy for the one who stands outside the prison-wall of pain to exhort and teach the one who suffers.

Don't make light of any man's pain.

To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.

You men have none of you any hearts.' 'If we have not hearts, we have eyes; and they give us torment enough.

Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.

When you are suffering, you become more understanding about yourself, but also about other people's sufferings too. That's the first step to understand somebody is to understand their sufferings. So then love follows.

I've been ripped for being too sensitive, but I do think people need to walk in another person's shoes before they accuse them of being too sensitive.

A compassionate heart will lift you out of the pain and suffering of your own world because it knows that everyone is doing the best they can, given their state of consciousness and the histories they're dragging behind them.

None knows the weight of another's burden.

A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain.

I'm very, very sensitive to pain and to people who suffer.

Only when the sense of the pain of others begins does man begin.

I got a lot of empathy from my mother growing up, and I think it prevented me from ever really just writing people off.