Eugene H. Peterson Quotes

When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone’s pain, it become compassion.

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.

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

Pity is the most pleasant feeling in those who have not much pride and have no prospect of great conquests; for them the easy prey - and that is what all who suffer are - is enchanting.

The delicate and infirm go for sympathy, not to the well and buoyant, but to those who have suffered like themselves.

I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.

I think I love most people best when they are in adversity; for pity is one of my prevailing passions.

I cannot worry much about your sins and miseries when I have so many of my own. I can only love you all, poor fellow travellers, fellow sufferers. I do not want to add one least straw to the burden you already carry.

How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others... But even more important is the love that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness.

I learn to pity woes so like my own.

Compassion is the feeling of shared suffering. When you feel someone else's suffering, there is the birth of understanding.

I think if you follow anyone home, whether they live in Houston or London, and you sit at their dinner table and talk to them about their mother who has cancer or their child who is struggling in school, and their fears about watching their lives go by, I think we're all the same.

Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend.

A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain.

Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.

Pity is the deadliest feeling that can be offered to a woman.

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.

I think that no matter how dark a person is, the more you learn about them, the more you understand about their life, the more you can sympathize with them or even root for them.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

Never laugh at those who suffer; suffer sometimes those who laugh.

Human it is to have compassion on the unhappy.

It's difficult to have any animosity towards someone if you recognize that on so many levels they're exactly the same as you.

They are more human and more brotherly towards one another, it seems to me, than we are. But perhaps that is merely because they feel themselves to be more unfortunate than us.

When people ask me really stupid questions or get it really wrong, I feel embarrassed for them. I don't really feel angry at them.

Only the artists interest me whose hearts beat in unison with the poignant misery of the world. If you have not felt that, you have not lived. Pity is essential.