“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

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Milan Kundera 198
Czech author of Czech and French literature 1929–2023

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