The Quotes canon
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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Adam Smith2 quotes
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, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. — Adam Smith · 1759Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations... His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. — Adam Smith · 1759William Blake2 quotes
Can I see another's woe,
And not be in sorrows too?
Can I see another's grief,
And not seek for kind relief? — William Blake · 1789Little Fly,
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance
And drink and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing. — William Blake · 1794Alexander Pope1 quote
Teach me to feel another's wo,
To hide the fault I see:
That mercy I to others show,
That mercy show to me. — Alexander Pope · 1738Andre Gide1 quote
True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one's own the sufferings and joys of others. — Andre Gide · 1959Atticus Finch1 quote
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. — Atticus Finch · 1962Bill Clinton1 quote
I feel your pain. — Bill Clinton · 1992Carl Sagan1 quote
Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love... If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. — Carl Sagan · 1980Desmond Tutu1 quote
It is through weakness and vulnerability that most of us learn empathy and compassion and discover our soul. — Desmond Tutu · 2004Edie Doyle1 quote
Shouldn't everybody care about everybody else? — Edie Doyle · 1954Graham Greene1 quote
No human being can really understand another and no one can arrange another's happiness. — Graham Greene · 1948Harper Lee1 quote
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it. — Harper Lee · 1960Henry Wadsworth Longfellow1 quote
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · 1857Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1 quote
There are few things of greater advantage than learning to appreciate the strong points of your opponents. — Johann Wolfgang von GoetheLearned Hand1 quote
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest. — Learned Hand · 1944Madame de Stael1 quote
To be totally understanding makes one very indulgent. — Madame de Stael · 1807Marcel Proust1 quote
The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is. — Marcel Proust · 1922Milan Kundera1 quote
For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes. — Milan Kundera · 1984Oliver Sacks1 quote
Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes. — Oliver Sacks · 2010Oscar Wilde1 quote
Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature...to sympathise with a friend's success. — Oscar Wilde · 1891Thomas Fuller (physician)1 quote
He that plants trees loves others beside himself. — Thomas Fuller (physician) · 1732