Quotes About Compassion

Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All of these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill… I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together

I'm going to be meeting with people today who talk too much – people who are selfish, egotistical, ungrateful. But I won't be surprised or disturbed, for I can't imagine a world without such people.

Blame no one. Set people straight, if you can. If not, just repair the damage. And suppose you can't do that either. Then where does blaming people get you?

When a guide meets up with someone who is lost, ordinarily his reaction is to direct him on the right path, not mock or malign him, then turn on his heel and walk away. As for you, lead someone to the truth and you will find that he can follow.

The best way of avenging yourself is not to become like the wrongdoer.

When another blames you or hates you, or when men say anything injurious about you, approach their poor souls, penetrate within, and see what kind of men they are. You will discover that there is no reason to be concerned that these men have this or that opinion about you.

My thoughts always go back to the parents – here's their kid who wouldn't be coming back. I got this feeling all the way through. It didn't matter if I saw a dead American or German, I always figured he belonged to somebody. You knew somebody was going to miss him. - Forrest Guth

This thinking is well-intended but overly simplistic, reminiscent perhaps of the four-year-old who proudly presents his mother with a red truck for her birthday because that is the present he wants. So the best managers reject the Golden Rule. Instead, they say, treat each person as he would like to be treated, bearing in mind who he is.

Putting these conclusions together, this controlling insight can serve as the One Thing you need to know about happy marriage: Find the most generous explanation for each other's behavior and believe it.

The book of Proverbs makes the same point: Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker, but those who are kind to the needy honor him. (14.31)

For Jesus, compassion was more than a quality of God and an individual virtue: it was a social paradigm, the core value for life in community. To put it boldly: compassion for Jesus was political.

The first phrase affirms "God so loved the world"—not Christians in particular, or the elect, or the church, but the world. God's passion is the world. Christians have often been fearful of loving the world, for they have sometimes confused it with "worldliness." But loving the world doesn't mean getting lost in the world. It means loving the world—the creation—as God loves the world.

The focus of a politics of compassion is the alleviation of suffering caused by social structures.

Thus growth in love, growth in compassion, is the primary quality of life in the Spirit. It is also the primary criterion for distinguishing a genuine born-again experience from one that only appears to be one. It is the pragmatic test suggested by William James, quoting Jesus: "By their fruits you shall know them." The fruit is love. Indeed, such fruit is the purpose of the Christian life.

Jesus was offering forgiveness to all and sundry, out there on the street, without requiring that they go through the normal channels. That was his real offense.

Jesus was deeply affected and concerned about the sufferings and inequities of his day. So much so that he dedicated his entire life to the welfare of others.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that fear is a more powerful political motive in our society than compassion.

To put that threefold summary into three phases, there was to Jesus, first, a Spirit dimension, second, a wisdom dimension, and, third, a justice dimension.

Thus, in a narrower sense, the dream of God is a social and political vision of a world of justice and peace in which human beings do not hurt or destroy, oppress or exploit one another.

I need both of these words, "compassion" and "justice," for compassion without justice easily gets individualized or sentimentalized, and justice without compassion easily sounds like politics.

The core value of Jesus' ethic was compassion

William Sloane Coffin said when his son Alex died in a car wreck at the age of twenty-four. Ten days later, Coffin delivered Alex's eulogy at Riverside Church in New York City, where he was senior minister. Among many other things, he said this:

This claim is also the central theme of Abraham Heschel's The Prophets. Heschel

Cumulatively, taking the pre-Easter Jesus seriously as an epiphany of God suggests a massive subversion of the monarchical model of God and the way of life (individually and socially) to which it leads. God is not a distant being but is near at hand. God is not primarily a lawgiver and judge but the compassionate one. The religious life is not about requirements but about relationship.