Quotes About Altruism

The heart and benevolent and kind the most resembles God.

I would help others, out of a fellow-feeling.

People cannot stay motivated if their material needs go unmet. If they feel exploited in any way, their natural selfishness will come to the surface and they will begin to peel off from the group.

Trying to deny our self-absorbed nature, trying to pretend we are somehow more altruistic than others, make it impossible for us to transform ourselves.

Lo que se hace por amor se hace siempre más allá del bien y del mal. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Más allá del bien y del mal

People who claimed they were collecting money to help others often had a way of letting a good bit stick in their own pockets, or else they liked the power that spreading it about gave them, liked it far too much.

A pure mathematician must leave to happier colleagues the great task of alleviating the sufferings of humanity.

call the game the "Wall Street Game," and people become less cooperative. Calling it the "Community Game" does the opposite. Similarly

How's this for a display of human kin selection: Subjects were given a scenario of a bus hurtling toward a human and a nondescript dog, and they could only save one. Whom would they pick? It depended on degree of relatedness, as one progressed from sibling (1 percent chose the dog over the sibling) to grandparent (2 percent) to distant cousin (16 percent) to foreigner (26 percent).55

Expose subjects to evidence of someone else in pain. If their heart rate increases a lot (a peripheral indicator of anxious, amygdaloid arousal), they are unlikely to act prosocially in the situation. The prosocial ones are those whose heart rates decrease; they can hear the sound of someone else's need instead of the distressed pounding in their own chests.

If their heart rate increases a lot (a peripheral indicator of anxious, amygdaloid arousal), they are unlikely to act prosocially in the situation. The prosocial ones are those whose heart rates decrease; they can hear the sound of someone else's need instead of the distressed pounding in their own chests.fn9,48

Here are some words of central importance to this book: aggression, violence, compassion, empathy, sympathy, competition, cooperation, altruism, envy, schadenfreude, spite, forgiveness, reconciliation, revenge, reciprocity, and (why not?) love. Flinging us into definitional quagmires.

Unser Leben] ist unüberwindlich verworren nur dann, wen man an sich denkt; aber in dem Augenblick, wo man nicht an sich denkt, sondern sich fragt, wie man einem anderen helfen könne, ist es sehr einfach.

El dolor experimentado en mi vida me había hecho extremadamente sensible al sufrimiento de los demás, y hacía que me sintiese plenamente motivado a aliviarlo.

God does not need to receive, but humans need to give.

she] had a great reputation for unselfishness because she was always giving up a lot of things she didn't want.

I CAN help people—I've learned that money isn't the only power for helping people. Anyone who has sympathy and understanding to give has a treasure that is without money and without price.

Mr. Leonard thought rightly that the highest work to which any man could be called was a life of service to his fellows; but he made the mistake of supposing the field of service much narrower than it is—of failing to see that a man may minister to the needs of humanity in many different but equally effective ways.

There are things far more valuable than private comfort or public admiration.

It doesn't do to sacrifice for people unless they want you to.

Sometimes not giving is the gift. —KATE FAL

A victim soul is a pious individual chosen to absorb the pain and suffering of others.

You really do want everyone around you to be happy, don't you?" "Yeah, doesn't everyone want that for their friends?" He smiled then, and shook his head. "No, Anita. No, they don't." "If you really care for people, you want them to be happy, Damian; otherwise you don't actually care for them." "You don't think like any other woman I've ever met.

Come si può amare qualcuno e non desiderarne la felicità?»