Quotes About Compassion

Honey, I don't know what happened in your life, but I am so so sorry," and gives him a lilac-scented embrace. Nothing happened to me, he wants to say to her. Nothing happened to me. I'm just a homosexual at a Broadway show.

He can see the expression on his face, and what is one to do with pity? Is it all just useless Confederate money?

What magnetic force draws us to scenes of pain, and words that wound us? You have seen this, I told myself as I marched along to that apartment. You have seen this already, you've lived through this, spare yourself

You could almost have it both ways—you could forgive this Larry, struggling with his cane and Wanda and harbors and restaurants and shopping, his cancer and gays and Jews and assholes, forgive him and let him die forgiven. And still never forgive the one who left.

But he can no more feel sorry for Swift—

The problem in the world is that we aren't kind to one another. It's kindness and human spirit that drives us. We have one another. That's all we have. We must celebrate them. Remember that. I don't care who you love, but if you love someone…if you love someone, you have to love them every day. You have to choose them every day.

You are seeing suffering, Robert used to say when confronted with a horrible person. You are seeing someone in pain.

Those who believe their suffering has been valuable love more readily than those who see no meaning in their pain. Suffering does not necessarily imply love, but love implies suffering

I told her that what was most important to me was not whether she loved a man or a woman, but that she loved and was loved well—that she experience passion, and the wonderful surprise of finding that someone feels about you as strongly as you do about them, lucky and full-hearted.

I realized that I had demanded that my parents accept me but had resisted accepting them.

Love, no matter what.

So many people have asked me what to do for depressed friends and relatives, and my answer is actually simple: blunt their isolation. Do it with cups of tea or with long talks or by sitting in a room nearby and staying silent or in whatever way suits the circumstances, but do that. And do it willingly.

Mental illness is real illness

I'll tell them all the good things and some difficulties. The parents may never accept what happened to them and yet accept their child. They're two separate things, the parental loss, and the actual person they will almost always end up loving.

This thought runs like a bright golden thread through the dark tapestry of our sorrow. We learn so much from our children—in patience, in humility, in gratitude for other blessings we had accepted before as a matter of course; so much in tolerance; so much in faith—believing and trusting where we cannot see; so much in compassion for our fellow man; and yes, even so much in wisdom about the eternal values in life.

when describing children with Down's Syndrome, he called a child 'heart spontaneous'.

The parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances.

People around depressives expect them to get themselves together: our society has little room in it for moping. Spouses, parents, children, and friends are all subject to being brought down themselves, and they do not want to be close to measureless pain.

I believe that the emergency room policy in which saying "I have had severe psychotic depression exacerbated by extreme pain" is treated much the same as saying "I have to have a woolly teddy bear with me before you can use sutures" is unacceptable.

Most people don't like one another's unhappiness very much. Few can cope with the idea of depression divorced from external reality. Many would prefer to think that if you're suffering, it's with reason and subject to logical resolution. A

I went to Cambodia to be humbled by the pain of others, and I was humbled down to the ground.

No one has ever suggested legal protections for ugly people to make up for the misaligned features that will compromise their personal and professional lives. For people disabled by inherent moral perplexity, we offer not support but imprisonment.

There is a basic emotional spectrum from which we cannot and should not escape, and I believe that depression is in that spectrum, located near not only grief but also love. Indeed I believe that all the strong emotions

All that children can properly require of their parents is that they tolerate their own muddled spectrum - that they neither insist on the lie of perfect happiness nor lapse into the slipshod brutality of giving up.