“We must make people aware of the misfortunes they suffer and of their chances to destroy them. We must awaken sympathy in everybody for the misfortunes of others and a warm desire for the good of all people.”

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

Nous avons tous assez de force pour supporter les maux d'autrui.
Maxim 19.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

tr. Athen. 1912, vol. 2, p. 278 http://books.google.com/books?id=6fxxAAAAIAAJ&amp;q=%22one+must+not+try+to+trick+misfortune,+but+resign+oneself+to+it+with+good+grace%22 <br class="br">tr. O&#x27;Neill 1938, Perseus http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Aristoph.+Thes.+198 <br class="br">Thesmophoriazusae, line 198-199 <br class="br">Thesmophoriazusae (411 BC)

Spoken on his return to India from England as recorded in From Colombo to Almora (1904), Calcutta, p. 221
Context: No one ever landed on English soil with more hatred in his heart for a race than I did for the English, and, on this platform, are present English friends who can bear witness to the fact, but the more I lived among them, saw how the machine is working, the English national life, mixed with them, found where the heart-beat of the nation was, the more I loved them. There is none among you here present, my brothers, who loves the English people more than I do. You have to see what is going on there, and you have to mix with them. As the philosophy, our national philosophy of the Vedanta, has summarised all misfortune, all misery from that one cause, ignorance, herein also we must understand that the difficulties that arise between us and the English people are mostly due to that ignorance; we do not know them, they do not know us.

Speech at the annual dinner of The Royal Society of St. George (6 May 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 4-5.
1924

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), I : The Man of Flesh and Bone
Context: It has often been said that every man who has suffered misfortunes prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather than to be someone else without them. For unfortunate men, when they preserve their normality in their misfortune — that is to say, when they endeavor to persist in their own being — prefer misfortune to non-existence. For myself I can say that when a as a youth, and even as a child, I remained unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness itself. It was a furious hunger of being that possessed me, an appetite for divinity, as one of our ascetics [San Juan de los Angeles] has put it.

Source: Memorandum to Robert T. Hartmann https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/document/0204/1511691.pdf (1976)

<p>C'est par le malentendu universel que tout le monde s'accorde.</p><p>Car si, par malheur, on se comprenait, on ne pourrait jamais s'accorder.</p>
Journaux intimes (1864–1867; published 1887), Mon cœur mis à nu (1864)