A Quote by George Meredith

Much benevolence of the passive order may be traced to a disinclination to inflict pain upon oneself.

George Meredith

Quote Topics

Benevolence Inflict May Much Oneself Order Pain Passive T Pain

Quote Author

George Meredith
English - Novelist
February 12, 1828 - May 18, 1909

Lack of understanding of the true nature of happiness, it seems to me, is the principal reason why people inflict sufferings on others. They think either that the other's pain may somehow be a cause of happiness for themselves or that their own happiness is more important, regardless of what pain it may cause. But this is shortsighted. No one truly benefits from causing harm to another sentient being. . . . . In the long run causing others misery and infringing their rights to peace and happiness result in anxiety, fear, and suspicion within oneself.

Dalai Lama

To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.

Simone de Beauvoir

We want to go in for suffering, and there may be torture. If we put the women in front the Government may hesitate to inflict on us all the penalty that they might otherwise inflict.

Mahatma Gandhi

Once the pain-body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn't really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others. If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.

Eckhart Tolle

Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power.

Aldous Huxley

Talking much about oneself may be a way of hiding oneself.

Friedrich Nietzsche

No matter how much bullying they inflict on my body, as long as I have this hope, I can endure any pain.

Ruth Ozeki

In order to 'hold fast' to something, one must allow oneself to be held to something. That commitment may be one of the hardest things to practice in a world of so much choice.

Sheena Iyengar

There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specifications, becomes, inevitably, just pain.

China Mieville

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.

Karen Armstrong

Leaders don't inflict pain - they share pain.

Max de Pree

Under the present dispensation, the great majority of factories are little despotisms, benevolent in some cases, malevolent in others. Even where benevolence prevails, passive obedience is demanded by the workers, who are ruled by overseers, not of their own election, but appointed from above. In theory they may be the subjects of a democratic state; but in practice they spend the whole of their working lives as the subjects of a petty tyrant.

Aldous Huxley

Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bittersweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt and take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.