understanding others' pain Quotes

I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.

Character is revealed in the power to discern the suffering of other people when we ourselves are suffering; in the ability to detect the hunger of others when we are hungry; and in the power to reach out and extend compassion for the spiritual agony of others when we are in the midst of our own spiritual distress.

Maybe if everyone walked around being in touch with each other's hidden pain it could work out and even be beautiful, but it doesn't feel safe to be the only compassionate person on the planet.

You are still young, so you think only of your own self. You do not notice the tribulations that occur all around you, to other people. Do not protest; it is true. I am not condemning you. I was as selfish as you, when I was your age. It is the custom of the young to be selfish... But someday you will understand that nobody passes through this world without suffering-no matter what you think of them and their supposed good fortune.

Through compassion it is possible to recognize that the craving for love that people feel resides also in our own hearts, that the cruelty the world knows all too well is also rooted in our own impulses. Through compassion we also sense our hope for forgiveness in our friends' eyes and our hatred in their bitter mouths. When they kill, we know that we could have done it; when they give life, we know that we can do the same. For a compassionate person nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying.

Unless a man has pity he is not truly a man. If a man has not wept at the worlds pain he is only half a man, and there will always be pain in the world, knowing this does not mean that a man shall dispair. A good man will seek to take pain out of things. A foolish man will not even notice it, except in himself, and the poor unfortunate evil man will drive pain deeper into things and spread it about wherever he goes.

How easy it is to deny the pain of someone else's suffering.

Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

Unless you are oblivious to your own suffering, you have no right to be oblivious to other people's suffering.

They tell us that "Pity is akin to Love;" if so, Pity must be a poor relation.

Benevolence does not consist in those who are prosperous pitying and helping those who are not. It consists in fellow feeling that puts you upon actually the same level with the fellow who suffers.