Quotation.Cloud - A repository of notable quotations from across time and space

Understanding that you can't truly take credit for your successes, nor truly blame others for their failures will humble you and make you more compassionate. Empathy is intuitive, but is also something you can work on, intellectually.

 - Tim Minchin

Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant with the weak and wrong. Sometime in your life, you will have been all of these.

 - Gautama Buddha

Pain is a gift. Humanity, without pain, would know neither fear nor pity. Without fear, there could be no humility, and every man would be a monster. The recognition of pain and fear in others give rise in us to pity, and in our pity is our humanity, our redemption.

 - Dean Koontz

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not. And therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revolutionary capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

 - J.K. Rowling

Unlike any other creature on this planet, human beings can learn and understand without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places. Of course, this is a power like my brand of fictional magic that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate or control just as much as to understand or sympathize. And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or peer inside pages. They can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally. They can refuse to know.

 - J.K. Rowling