Quotes About Compassion

by your example you have taught me kindness, and shown me that it expands to include all people, not only the true believers but the unbelievers and other-believers also, not only the virtuous but also those who know not virtue

Anyone in the vicinity of a dying man was utterly at his mercy. Punches delivered from a deathbed left bruises that never faded.

He was a heartless monster, she told him; did he not understand—O abominable one!—that human life was short and that each day of love stolen from it was a crime against life itself?

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. I told you that.

Güzellik de bir tür kaderdir, güzellik güzellikle konuÅŸur, fark?na var?r ve onaylar, her konuda mazur görülebileceÄŸine inan?r...

Another lesson to be learned: never underestimate your fellow man. One man's ceiling is another man's floor.

Proximity to calamity released the human capacity for love.

If he believed in souls he would have said she had a good one.

When we are born, we are not automatically human beings. We have to learn how to be human beings. And some of us get there and some of us don't.

If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or He does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil.

The fact that millions of people use the term morality as a synonym for religious dogmatism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.

We might also wonder, in passing, which is more moral: helping people purely out of concern for their suffering, or helping them because you think the creator of the universe will reward you for it?

Every person you have ever met, every person you will pass in the street today, is going to die. Living long enough, each will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?

One of the most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not--that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation. Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral--that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings.

it seems to me that, on balance, soul/body dualism has been the enemy of compassion. For instance, the moral stigma that still surrounds disorders of mood and cognition seems largely the result of viewing the mind as distinct from the brain. When the pancreas fails to produce insulin, there is no shame in taking synthetic insulin to compensate for its lost function.

Tres millones de almas podrán morir de hambre o ser asesinadas en el Congo sin apenas reacción por parte de nuestros medios de comunicación. Pero si una princesa muere en un accidente de coche, la cuarta parte de la población de la Tierra cae postrada de dolor. Quizá seamos incapaces de sentir lo que deberíamos sentir para cambiar nuestro mundo.

Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they do confirm some well-established truths about the human mind: Our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world.

Speaking from personal experience, I think that losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics—by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck. Is

The moment one begins thinking about morality in terms of well-being, it becomes remarkably easy to discern a moral hierarchy across human societies.

Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: "Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.

Our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world.

there seems to be no doubt that love and compassion are good, in that they connect us more deeply to others.30 Given this situation, we can see that one could desire to become more loving and compassionate for purely selfish reasons.

Any culture that raises men and boys to kill unlucky girls, rather than comfort them, is a culture that has managed to retard the growth of love. Such

When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives—about