“Can you imagine a higher moral calling than to destroy someone’s dreams with one bullet…?”
ANSWER Me!
“Can you imagine a higher moral calling than to destroy someone’s dreams with one bullet…?”
ANSWER Me!
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
"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Anagogic Phase: Symbol as Monad
Assorted Themes, On Form, Essence & Matter
“The month of Ramadan carries enduring moral values: humanity, compassion, mercy.”
Kassym-Jomart Tokayev (2022) cited in: " President Tokayev Congratulates People on Beginning of Ramadan https://astanatimes.com/2022/04/president-tokayev-congratulates-people-on-beginning-of-ramadan/" in The Astana Times, 2 April 2022.
“You're a girl. Someday you'll want to be a prisoner to someone other than yourself.”
Source: Tiger Lily
During his speech at the Valdai forum in 2013
2011 - 2015
“Compassion is the essence of the wholeness of life.”
Vol. I, p. 113 <!-- 90? intellectual cleverness that remains merely cynical and confined to the personal or partisan contrasted with wise compassionate awareness which transcends such bounds and abides with the eternal and universal qualities and vital resolutions beyond all mortal aims. -->
1980s, Letters to the Schools (1981, 1985)
Context: The very nature of intelligence is sensitivity, and this sensitivity is love. Without this intelligence there can be no compassion. Compassion is not the doing of charitable acts or social reform; it is free from sentiment, romanticism and emotional enthusiasm. It is as strong as death. It is like a great rock, immovable in the midst of confusion, misery and anxiety. Without this compassion no new culture or society can come into being. Compassion and intelligence walk together; they are not separate. Compassion acts through intelligence. It can never act through the intellect. Compassion is the essence of the wholeness of life.