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

—  Stephen Levine

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone’s pain, it become compassion." by Stephen Levine?
Stephen Levine photo
Stephen Levine 8
American poet and author 1937–2016

Related quotes

David Levithan photo

“It's as if when you love someone, they become your reason.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

“I want to know if you've touched the center of your own sorrow, if you've been opened by life's betrayals, or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain.”

Oriah Mountain Dreamer (1954) Canadian author

“This is what it means to be loved… when someone wants to touch you, to be tender…”

Banana Yoshimoto book The Lake

Source: The Lake

Ann Brashares photo

“When you feel someone else's pain and joy as powerfully as if it were your own, then you know you really loved them.”

Ann Brashares book Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

Variant: Live, laugh, love.

When you can feel someone else's pain and joy as if it's your own, thats when you know you really love them - Tina Lowell
Source: Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood

Rumi photo

“Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life's search for love and wisdom.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet
Edith Wharton photo

“As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.”

Edith Wharton book The House of Mirth

Source: The House of Mirth

Salma Hayek photo

“It's very easy to feel someone's pain when you love them.”

Salma Hayek (1966) Mexican-American actress and producer

"Conversation with Salma Hayek" (2002)

Milan Kundera photo

“For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight
Variant: For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
Source: Identity

George William Russell photo

“Ah, sigh for us whose hearts unseeing
Point all their passionate love in vain,
And blinded in the joy of being,
Meet only when pain touches pain.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

By Still Waters (1906)

Related topics