Quotes About Compassion

She touched her fingertip to his wet face and brought away a tear. Amazed, he did the same. He tasted this river his own eyes had rained. "It tastes of salt!" he exclaimed. "It tastes like the sea!" "Mine too!" she laughed through her own tears, and he touched and tasted hers as well. "It's as if humans kept a sign of the mother sea in ourselves, a secret token of grief or gladness.

Hate generalises, love specifies

True acceptance of an individual as he is, without trying to change him through encouragement or manipulation or coercion, is a very high form of love, and very difficult for most of us to practice.

Women from dysfunctional homes (and especially, I have observed, from alcoholic homes) are overrepresented in the helping professions, working as nurses, counselors, therapists, and social workers. We are drawn to those who are needy, compassionately identifying with their pain and seeking to relieve it in order to ameliorate our own.

it is this very practice of acceptance that allows another to change if he chooses to do so.

Condemnation feels good and it is now a staple of religion, politics, and the media (both left and right), but it changes nothing. Compassion, on the other hand, changes everything. (p. 121)

Faith is always supposed to make it harder, not easier, to ignore the plight of our sisters and brothers. (p. 165)

you cannot set the captive free if you are not willing to confront those who hold the keys. Without confrontation compassion becomes merely commiseration, fruitless and sentimental.

The good life is thereby widely confused with unrestrained indulgence made possible by nonempathetic self-absorption.

Don't compare your life to others'. You have no idea what their journey is all about. That's why I always give people the benefit of the doubt; it's one of my rules to live by.

I bet if we all threw our problems in a huge pile and saw everyone else's, we'd grab ours back. Don't compare your life to others'. You have no idea what their journey is about. That's why I always give people the benefit of the doubt; it's one of my rules to live by. There may be a reason why someone is having a bad day, there's often something that we can't see. She is not necessarily a bad person, just someone facing a bad situation.

The wisdom teachings that permeate this book revolve around the truth that radically honest, compassionate self-exploration leads to self-awareness, and that true self-awareness is always healing. It opens us to the naturalness of love, peace, joy, and our own boundless creativity. Love, and especially self-love and acceptance, is the greatest healing force that I have gleaned thus far.

it is only when you have mastered the art of loving yourself that you can truly love others. it's only when you have opened your own heart that you can touch the hearts of others. when you feel centered and alive, you are in much better position to be a better person.

Life hands us lessons, and my lesson was to face this awful situation and grow from it, Blossom. I thought love had been taken away from me, but it hadn't been. I was still the same person who had loved Mr. Feingold and my old aunts and my cousins and my friends. I still ahd love inside of me, and I still had it to give.

Weep! Weep!" calls a toad from the water's edge. And I do. If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.

caring is not abstract. The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack.

There are some aches witch hazel can't assuage. For those, we need each other.

Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion---until we teach them not to.

For what good is knowing, unless it is coupled with caring? Science can give us knowing, but caring comes from someplace else.

If grief can be a door way to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again

But when the food does not come from a flock in the sky, when you don't feel the warm feathers cool in your hand and know that a life has been given for yours, when there is no gratitude in return—that food may not satisfy. It may leave the spirit hungry while the belly is full. Something is broken when the food comes on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in slippery plastic, a carcass of a being whose only chance at life was a cramped cage. That is not a gift of life; it is a theft.

use your gifts and dreams for good

Being a good mother means teaching your children to care for the world

toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion—until we teach them not to.