Others Suffering Quotes

#1. We are social animals. Others' suffering is ultimately your suffering; their happiness is ultimately your happiness.

Dalai Lama

#2. But loving Tristan often felt like loving something once removed. He could be cold and indifferent to others' suffering, especially if he was causing it.

Tod Wodicka

#3. It is important not to allow ourselves to be put off by the magnitude of others' suffering. The misery of millions is not a cause for pity. Rather it is a cause for compassion.

Dalai Lama

#4. The essence of a mature human being in religious terms is the ability to see, to be aware of others' suffering and to be touched by it.

Megan McKenna

#5. What is a holy person? The one who is aware of others' suffering.

Kabir

#6. Enmeshed in collective hatred and anger, each side proclaims the crimes of the other and its own righteousness, is unable to listen to the others suffering, and cannot look at the deeper roots of the conflict and how we often need our enemies in order to maintain our rigid identities. (p. 53)

Donald Rothberg

#7. We have no means of discriminating between right and wrong if we do not take into account others' feelings, others' suffering.

Dalai Lama XIV

#8. Looking at various means of developing compassion, I think empathy is an important factor: the ability to appreciate others' suffering.

Dalai Lama

#9. I wasn't born a monster, though my choices certainly have made me one. But I can't stop myself. I can't. Causing pain to others when I'm suffering soothes me.

Mia Asher

#10. It is important to reignite our compassion for others because without it we will be lost in the sea of suffering

Radhe Maa

#11. You cannot fully understand a person's need until you have endured the same need. As hard as you may try to predict and comprehend their situation and suffering, I guarantee you'll fall short until you've been there.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#12. One does not remember one's own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us

Anna Funder

#13. Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize.

Susan Sontag

#14. Once we are able to combine a feeling of empathy for others with a profound understanding of the suffering they experience, we become able to generate genuine compassion for them. We must work at this continually.

Dalai Lama XIV

#15. All the suffering in the world comes from seeking pleasure for oneself. All the happiness in the world comes from seeking pleasure for others.

Shantideva

#16. I believe one reason that God allows poverty and suffering is so that His followers may demonstrate Christ's love, mercy, and comfort to [others].

Billy Graham

#17. Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.

Anna Funder

#18. Good and evil exist only in terms of the happiness or suffering they create in ourselves and others

Matthieu Ricard

#19. Suffering is tossed by handfuls over the multitudes, with most of it falling on some people and little or none of it on others.

Jose Luis Peixoto

#20. Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas. It is true that every dogma crumbles sooner or later, because reality will eventually disclose its falseness; however, unless the basic delusion of it is seen for what it is, it will be replaced by others.

Eckhart Tolle

#21. How much pain a person detains may be proportionate to the pain they spare others when they'd rather hurt than hurt another.

Donna Lynn Hope

#22. Through spiritual maturity you will see new ways to avoid unnecessary suffering; wiser ways to endure unavoidable hardships with grace, and opportunities to turn your pain into lessons of service and healing for others.

Bryant McGill

#23. Seeking happiness is not the problem. The problem is that we often do not know where and how to find genuine happiness and so make the mistakes that cause suffering for ourselves & others.

Sharon Salzberg

#24. The girl would grow up marked by tragedy and, when she was twenty, would use her own suffering to help alleviate that of others. She would eventually do work of such vital importance that it would have an impact all over the world.

Paulo Coelho

#25. Perhaps there is no more dangerous place for a Christian to be than in safety and comfort, detached from the suffering of others.

Shane Claiborne

#26. There are periods of despondency and suffering which take possession of me. But I don't want anything but my own way. That is wanting a good deal, of course, when you have to trample upon the lives, the hearts, the prejudices of others-

Kate Chopin

#27. We want to avoid suffering, death, sin, ashes. But we live in a world crushed and broken and torn, a world God Himself visited to redeem. We receive his poured-out life, and being allowed the high privilege of suffering with Him, may then pour ourselves out for others.

Elisabeth Elliot

#28. Do not base your life on the likings and dislikings or whims of others. What you are in life - whether you enjoy or suffer - it is your own responsibility. Be regular in your meditation and do not postpone for a later date your striving for God consciousness.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

#29. True power does not amass through the pain and suffering of others.

Joy Harjo

#30. You would think those who have endured unkindness would be kinder as a result, intent on sparing others the awful suffering they abhorred firsthand.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#31. I consider racism to be a medical problem. Racists need serious medical and psychiatric help, because they are killing themselves and making others suffer along with them.

Ishmael Reed

#32. So if we love someone, we should train in being able to listen. By listening with calm and understanding, we can ease the suffering of another person.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#33. It's a rare and precious thing to be close to suffering because our society - in many ways - tells us that suffering is wrong. If it's our own suffering, we try to hide it or isolate ourselves. If others are suffering, we're taught to put them away somewhere so we don't have to see it.

Sharon Salzberg

#34. Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#35. Alas! we must suffer ourselves before we can feel for others.

Emile Gaboriau

#36. It is the story that we allow a Creator to write in our suffering that gives us the greatest opportunity to know the depths of His love, and in this way share that love with others.

Kayla Aimee

#37. Arriving at the scene of a suicide or domestic dispute made him feel a little less alien, as though seeing others in the throes of suffering dissipated his own distress.

Ania Ahlborn

#38. The essence of compassion is a desire to alleviate the suffering of others and to promote their well-being

Dalai Lama

#39. Loosen the bonds of discursive thought. Extend the circle of caring. Cease armoring against suffering. Wish for others the same happiness you wish for yourself. Be a tender-minded steward of creation.

Marc Ian Barasch

#40. Men are ready to suffer anything from others or from heaven itself, provided that, when it comes to words, they are untouched.

Giacomo Leopardi

#41. He who is indifferent to the suffering of others is a traitor to that which is truly human.

Saadi

#42. I wrote the song "Show Me" as a prayer to God asking simple, honest questions about life and death and why there is so much suffering in the world. As I grew with the song I realized I shouldn't limit these questions solely to God; I should ask those questions of others and of myself.

John Legend

#43. If others are happy, we will be happy. If others suffer, ultimately we all suffer.

Dalai Lama

#44. If we do the work with the intention to grow and be beneficial to others rather than use the work as a means for getting the next buzz in life, we'll live in contentment rather than suffering.

Cameron Alborzian

#45. There is no such thing as good and bad in an absolute sense. There is only the good and bad- the harm in terms of happiness and suffering- that our thoughts and our actions do to ourselves and others.

Matthieu Ricard

#46. The indifference, callousness, and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering towards animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of human spirit.

Ashley Montagu

#47. All beings want to be happy, yet so very few know how. It is out of ignorance that any of us cause suffering, for ourselves or for others

Sharon Salzberg

#48. It is good to be attracted out of ourselves, to be forced to take a near view of the sufferings, the privations, the efforts, the difficulties of others.

Charlotte Bronte

#49. To shut your mind, heart, imagination to the sufferings of others is to begin slowly but inexorably to die. It is to cease by inches from being human, to become in the end capable of nothing, generous or unselfish; or sometimes capable of anything, however terrible.

John Austin Baker

#50. All suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their own happiness or satisfaction

Dalai Lama XIV

#51. I never drink. I cannot do it, on equal terms with others. It costs them only one day; but me three, the first in sinning, the second in suffering, and the third in repenting.

Laurence Sterne

#52. We should try our best to relieve the suffering of others in whatever way we can.

Mata Amritanandamayi

#53. Long-protracted suffering is apt to exhaust not only the invalid, but the compassion of others; violent emotions cannot be prolonged endlessly.

Stefan Zweig

#54. To conquer, you must endure not just your own suffering but the suffering of others. Indifference is the ultimate evolutionary achievement, the highest rung on nature's ladder.

Rick Yancey

#55. Kindnessis giving others happiness.Compassionis removing others' bitterness.Joyis freeing others from suffering.

Gautama Buddha

#56. Our visit to this planet is short, so we should use our time meaningfully, which we can do by helping others wherever possible. And if we cannot help others, at least we should try not to create pain and suffering for them.

Dalai Lama

#57. The problem with loneliness is that, unlike other forms of human suffering, it teaches us nothing, leads us nowhere, and generally devalues us in our own eyes and the eyes of others.

Adam Bagdasarian

#58. Funny how much we all suffer trying to spare others a bit of pain.

Michael LaRocca

#59. Compassion is ethical intelligence: it is the capacity to make connections and the consequent urge to act to relieve the suffering of others.

Will Tuttle

#60. When the heart is touched by direct experience, the mind may be challenged to change. Personal involvement with innocent suffering, with the injustice others suffer, is the catalyst for solidarity which then gives rise to intellectual inquiry and moral reflection.

Peter Hans Kolvenbach

#61. Sympathy is imagining the pain. Empathy is having suffered through it first.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#62. One's own troubles can be borne with fortitude; only a monster of indifference can bear the sufferings of others with fortitude.

Susan Ertz

#63. You who feel no pain at the suffering of others It is not fitting for you to be called human.

Saadi

#64. Every single one of the major traditions - Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as the monotheisms - teaches a spirituality of empathy, by means of which you relate your own suffering to that of others.

Karen Armstrong

#65. Patients weep when they discover they are their own victimizers and not the victim of others. They weep when they discover they are responsible for their own suffering.

Anais Nin

#66. Have compassion for all beings, rich and poor alike; each has their suffering. Some suffer too much, others too little.

Gautama Buddha

#67. May I hold myself in compassion.
May I meet the suffering and ignorance of others with compassion.

Gautama Buddha

#68. The counsel and care of others, while helpful and necessary, is not the ultimate solution. Jesus is the one who gives strength and contentment in the midst of suffering. Cling tightly to Jesus, who already has you in his invincible grip.

Stephen Altrogge

#69. Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way

Barry Unsworth

#70. If you are not in the state of either acceptance, enjoyment, or enthusiasm, look closely and you will find that you are creating suffering for yourself and others.

Eckhart Tolle

#71. Ultimately, we are not seeking others to bow to, but to reinforce our individual natures, to help us suffer our own choices, to guide us on our own particular journeys.

Patti Smith

#72. To identify with others is to see something of yourself in them and to see something of them in yourself
even if the only thing you identify with is the desire to be free from suffering.

Melanie Joy

#73. Your suffering only matters if it connects you to the suffering of others, if it heals them too.

Geoffrey Wood

#74. If you are in the habit of creating suffering for yourself, then you are probably creating suffering for others too

Eckhart Tolle

#75. Even when our intentions are noble and our efforts sincere, even when we dedicate our lives to the service of others, the corrosive pressure of frantic over-activity can nonetheless cause suffering in ourselves and others. A "successful" life can become a violent enterprise.

Wayne Muller

#76. The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak, it means then that if you have a prophetic sensibility, you are committed to loving others and if you love others, you hate injustice.

Cornel West

#77. Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.

Matthieu Ricard

#78. True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one's own the suffering and joys of others.

Andre Gide

#79. We are all walking the same path, though it ain't some road scored in earth or sky or sea. It's the path of easing suffering, both ours and that of others, and we walk it till ever creature stands free of pain and lies, in unity with truth and peace, at last enlightened and made whole.

David Bowles

#80. An empath is capable of taking on the grief of another in order to lessen their suffering. In order to not be consumed with pain, an empath should have an outlet for that pain lest they lose themselves in feeling for others.

Donna Lynn Hope

#81. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#82. On the ward there was hurt and pain so big and so deep that speech could not express it. I had been interested in philosophy, and suddenly philosophy came alive for me, for here the basic questions of human existence were not abstractions: they were embodied in human suffering

Frank X. Barron

#83. You menace others with your deadly fangs. But in tormenting them, you are only tormenting yourselves.

Milarepa

#84. True nobleness in soul is only evinced in never suffering station to tempt us into a forgetfulness of ourselves and of what we owe to others.

John Tyler

#85. We can easily see what actions and speech will lead us and others into hatred, confusion, difficulty, and suffering. And we can see what words and actions will not. ... Is our intention to hoodwink, mislead, inflate, or deceive others ... ?

Steve Hagen

#86. Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#87. When one takes action for others, one's own suffering is transformed into the energy that can keep one moving forward; a light of hope illuminating a new tomorrow for oneself and others is kindled.

Daisaku Ikeda

#88. Since we are [Christ's] body, we too are the bread that is broken for others. Our failures help heal other lives; our very tears help wipe away tears; our being hated helps those we love.

Peter Kreeft

#89. We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others.

W. Somerset Maugham

#90. Exalt yourself by devoting yourself to others, enrich yourself by making everyone's destiny your own, by enduring and understanding every facet of human suffering through your pity.

Stefan Zweig

#91. Enlightenment, the great mysterious state of mind, is contentment, or freedom from suffering. How then do we measure happiness? We measure it in smiles, in the openness of our hearts, in generosity, in gratitude and compassion towards others, and in the steadiness of our contentment.

Andrew Furst

#92. Through service to others, we develop a Christlike love and we experience joy. Service teaches patience and long-suffering as well as gentleness, goodness, and faith.

Merrill J. Bateman

#93. Avoiding pain causes endless suffering for you and others. Avoiding pain is really selfishness.

Bryant McGill

#94. Negative thoughts and emotions are what obstruct our most basic aspiration - to be happy and to avoid suffering. When we act under their influence, we become oblivious to the impact our actions have on others: they are thus the cause of our destructive behavior both toward others and to ourselves.

Dalai Lama XIV

#95. Stand up, be bold, and take the blame on your own shoulders. Do not go about throwing mud at others; for all the faults you suffer from, you are the sole and only cause.

Swami Vivekananda

#96. Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.

Emile M. Cioran

#97. We can bear with great philosophy the sufferings of others, especially if we do not actually see them.

Albion Fellows Bacon

#98. To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [ ... ] Without cruelty there is no festival.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#99. You know that your happiness and suffering depend on the happiness and suffering of others. That insight helps you not to do wrong things that will bring suffering to yourself and to other people.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#100. Walking through suffering is a work that is bound by limitation. Often it isn't that the afflicted are unwilling to let others in. It is just that there comes a certain point in a person's suffering where there is no apparent port of entry.

Russ Ramsey