Jackson Browne Quotes

Peace of heart that is won by refusing to bear the common yoke of human sympathy is a peace unworthy of a Christian. To seek tranquility by stopping our ears to the cries of human pain is to make ourselves not Christian but a kind of degenerate stoic having no relation either to stoicism or Christianity.

I'm a much nicer person since my wife died. I found out what pain is, so on that level I'm much nicer.

You never really feel somebody's suffering. You only feel their death.

Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.

How easy it is to deny the pain of someone else's suffering.

Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels-the biggest sin is to be blind to others problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.

The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he’s dying don’t give him pity for others.

I'm sensitive to the things I see.

We assume that we've come so far as compassionate citizens of the world if we do choose to read the news, yet the attitude towards life can be one where we put blinders on and forget that there are civil wars going on. It's easy to forget that there are so many people starving to death every single day.

It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.

People aren't very good at other people's pain.

When anyone dies, it's sad.

They learned no compassion from their own anguish. thus their suffering was wasted.

If there is one person on the planet who still is suffering from loneliness and from pain or despair, and we don't know about it, or we don't want to know about it, then something is wrong with the world.

The recognition of pain and fear in others give rise in us to pity, and in our pity is our humanity, our redemption.

We feel and weigh soon enough what we suffer from others: but how much others suffer from us, of this we take no heed.

Human kindness has no reward. You should give to others in every way you see. expect absolutely nothing from anyone. It should be your goal to love every human you encounter. All human suffering that you're aware of and continues without your effort to stop it becomes your crime.

When one is innocent of pain, of the havoc it can wreak, one is never cruel. Cruelty is born of pain, of a need to hurt in turn.

The quiet conscience is the invention of the devil. No one of us may permit any preventable pain to be inflicted even though the responsibility for that pain is not ours. No one may shut his eyes and think that the pain which is therefore not visible, is non-existent.

Vanity calculates but poorly on the vanity of others; what a virtue we should distil from frailty, what a world of pain we should save our brethren, if we would suffer our own weakness to be the measure of theirs.

Much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people.

What's wrong with death sir? What are we so mortally afraid of? Why can't we treat death with a certain amount of humanity and dignity, and decency, and God forbid, maybe even humor. Death is not the enemy gentlemen. If we're going to fight a disease, let's fight one of the most terrible diseases of all, indifference.

It's very humbling to imagine somebody else's really life and their pain ... It's my drug.

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

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 to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. The wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.