Quotes About Compassion

As Cicero said about the merits of friendship—but he could just as well have been talking about close relationships in general—it "improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief." I would prefer that those who care about me greet my panic with calm and my gloom with good cheer.

Being a good person likely is more related to distanced feelings of compassion and kindness, along with intelligence, self-control, and a sense of justice. Being a bad person has more to do with a lack of regard for others and an inability to control one's appetites.

The idea I'll explore is that the act of feeling what you think others are feeling—whatever one chooses to call this—is different from being compassionate, from being kind, and most of all, from being good. From a moral standpoint, we're better off without it.

It's not that empathy itself automatically leads to kindness. Rather, empathy has to connect to kindness that already exists.

How much money and time—and attention and emotional energy—should we spend on ourselves, on those close to us, and on strangers?

I am particularly impressed by the research of Tania Singer, a cognitive neuroscientist, and Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk—two scholars working together to explore the distinction between empathy and compassion.

Empathy is the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does.

In contrast to empathy, compassion does not mean sharing the suffering of the other: rather, it is characterized by feelings of warmth, concern and care for the other, as well as a strong motivation to improve the other's well-being. Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other

If you can imagine an alternative world, then you can see things through someone else's eyes, even if their sense of reality doesn't match your own. This makes possible perspective-taking, empathy, and much else.

Less empathy, more kindness.

The problems we face as a society and as individuals are rarely due to lack of empathy. Actually, they are often due to too much of it.

Stories can elicit compassion on a case-by-case basis, but they can also lead us to question our moral principles and our habits of behavior. As the psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, "Exposure to worlds that can be seen only through the eyes of a foreigner, an explorer, or a historian can turn an unquestioned norm ('That's the way it's done') into an explicit observation ('That's what our tribe happens to do now').

Or consider child beggars in the developing world. The sight of an emaciated child is shocking to a well-fed Westerner, and it's hard for a good person to resist helping out. And yet the act of doing so ends up supporting criminal organizations that enslave and often maim tens of thousands of children. By giving, you make the world worse. Actions that appear to help individuals in the short term can have terrible consequences for many more.

Making children suffer temporarily for their own good is made possible by love, intelligence, and compassion, but yet again, it can be impeded by empathy.

This perverse moral mathematics is part of the reason why governments and individuals care more about a little girl stuck in a well than about events that will affect millions or billions. It is why outrage at the suffering of a few individuals can lead to actions, such as going to war, that have terrible consequences for many more.

If you absorb the suffering of others, then you're less able to help them in the long run because achieving long-term goals often requires inflicting short-term pain.

Perhaps more important, religion provides our species' longest and deepest struggle to make sense of suffering, including suffering that is unchosen.

It isn't good if it doesn't hurt, so when we do good, we are willing—in fact, eager—to experience pain.

Once again, none of this is to deny the importance of traits such as compassion and kindness. We want to nurture these traits in our children and work to establish a culture that prizes and rewards them. But they are not enough. To make the world a better place, we would also want to bless people with more smarts and more self-control. These are central to leading a successful and happy life—and a good and moral one.

Seeing the world through the eyes of others is essential to many acts of kindness. For me to respond to your worries and alleviate your fears, I need to understand your thoughts, even if I don't share them. (I might soothe a child who is terrified of a small dog, even if I'm not frightened in the slightest.)

For better or worse, then, my attack on empathy is nonpartisan. Or to put it more positively, individuals of all political orientations—liberal, conservative, libertarian, hard right, hard left, all of us—can join hands and work together in the fight against empathy.

So if the world were a simple place, where the only dilemmas one had to deal with involved a single person in some sort of immediate distress, and where helping that person had positive effects, the case for empathy would be solid.

If our concern is driven by thoughts of the suffering of specific individuals, then it sets up a perverse situation in which the suffering of one can matter more than the suffering of a thousand.

Our selectivity in who to care about makes a difference. About twenty years ago, Walter Isaacson expressed his frustration over the American public's focus on the crisis in Somalia and relative disregard of the (objectively greater) tragedy in the Sudan, when he plaintively asked: "Will the world end up rescuing Somalia while ignoring the Sudan mainly because the former proves more photogenic?" Before