Too often it is fear that guides our actions when compassion would better serve.

Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy.

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.

I grow more and more intrigued by this as I write: how words, even the most carefully chosen, can mean such different things from one person to another, so that others might think about what I write in ways I did not intend at all.

I believe, my lady, that life is the phantom, and love still more fleeting and elusive - here one minute like a sweet scent you can't quite recognize and gone the next. Best enjoy both while you can.

The only time you look in your neighbor's bowl is to make sure that they have enough. You don't look in your neighbor's bowl to see if you have as much as them.