However much we may feel for the misery of someone close to us, we always act with some artificiality in their presence. We hold back from telling them everything we think, often because we do not genuinely mean what we say; or because we take a pleasure in their plight, thankful that we are not affected.
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After having lost their lives on this land they [enemy soldiers] have become our sons as well.
Mankind is a single body and each nation a part of that body. We must never say "What does it matter to me if some part of the world is ailing?" If there is such an illness, we must concern ourselves with it as though we were having that illness.
When our hearts are authentically open to universal communion, this sense of fraternity excludes nothing and no one. It follows that our indifference or cruelty towards fellow creatures of this world sooner or later affects the treatment we mete out to other human beings.
Never underestimate the power of kindness, empathy, and compassion in your interactions with others.
Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by. They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. [...] A human being may well ask an animal: 'Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?' The animal would like to answer, and say, 'The reason is I always forget what I was going to say' - but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent.
If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.
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