Compassion

RIC_2422-1, a photo by rchoephoto on Flickr.

How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that it moves me to action? … my own true inner being actually exists in every living creature … [and] is the ground of that compassion upon which all true, that is to say, unselfish, virtue rests and whose expression is in every good deed.

Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Foundations of Morality,” Sämtliche Werke

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