Martin Buber

To help one another is not considered a task, but the self-evident reality on which companionship is based. To help is not a virtue, but a pulse of existence. He who helps another should not think of the others who could help with him, of God or of man, nor should he consider that he has merely to contribute; but each man should stand, answerable and responsible, in integrity.

Help, not out of pity–that is, from a sharp, quick pain which one wishes to expel–but out of love, which means to live with others. He who only pities receives from the mere outward manifestation of the sorrow of others a sharp, quick pain, totally unlike the real sorrow of the sufferer.

He who helps must live with others, and it is only the help which springs from living with others that subsists in the sight of God. He lets himself be absorbed in the life and needs of the other with deep, peaceful, devoted love, till he feels within himself the others life and needs as though they were his own–and only then does he truly begin to help. He who in this way lives with others, in his own action realizes the truth that all souls are one, for each is a spark of the primordial soul, and the whole of the primordial soul is in them.

Source: “A Year of Grace” by Martin Buber.