Quotes About Compassion

The right mixture of caring and not caring - I suppose that's what love is.

If you forgive people enough, you belong to them, and they to you, whether either person likes it or not - squatter's rights of the heart

The "gift" of tragedy is not destruction, but humility

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." - Maya Angelou

So does being cool mean you get to go around calling other people names?

You don't have to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend to know love. Just open up your heart and let the world in. Your heart is bigger than you can imagine, and so is the world, and so, granddaughter, are you. —Addie's grandmother

Kids who get called the worst names oftentimes find each other. That's how it was with us. Skeezie Tookis and Addie Carle and Joe Bunch and me. We call ourselves the Gang of Five, but there are only four of us. We do it to keep people on their toes. Make 'em wonder. Or maybe we do it because we figure that there's one more kid out there who's going to need a gang to be part of. A misfit,like us.

Because when you get down to it, thinking of somebody as 100% human seriously gets in the way of hating them.

What a sight the poor make in the moonlight!

But now was not the time for second-guessing, nor was it the time for compassion. Now was the time for death, quick and brutal and terrible.

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.

Empathy is about seeing the world through someone else's eyes. It's about an implicit sense of what an experience is like, what people value, and what emotions are involved

In the car going home, I said, "We should have stayed." Bogie said, "No, we shouldn't. You must always remember we have a life of our own that has nothing to do with Frank. He chose to live the way he's living—alone. It's too bad if he's lonely, but that's his choice. We have our own road to travel, never forget that—we can't live his life.

Little world, full of scars and gashes, ripened with another's pain, Your flowers feed on carrion--so do your birds; Men feed on each other because you taught them life was cheap, Flowing from your endless womb without pain or understanding. No midwife caresses your flesh or bathes clean your progeny, Life spurts from you, little world, and you regard it with disdain. Only bruised men sense your cruelty, men whose life has lost its meaning.

What is life if not laughter and love, caring and compassion, fresh bread and crisp radishes?

A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.

Being Mistreated is the most important condition of mortality, for eternity itself depends on how we view those who mistreat us.

Anything that makes me feel better (or worse) than another is darkness; anything that makes me feel one with others is divine. So the natural instinct to try to lift others by helping them to feel good about themselves relative to others is exactly the wrong way to help. True happiness is found not in a belief that I am better but in the obliteration of any need to be.

When we preach on hell, we might at least do it with tears in our eyes.

I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it's no one's fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child's courage.

She had enormous gray eyes and knees that made you cry they were so sorry looking and knobby. If there is some part of every loved one that will make you cry to contemplate it, such for Joe were these poor, sad, bony knees of Sally Buck.

What few people realized was that, beneath her tough exterior, Zoë was all about love. It was love that made her fight. Love that made her fierce.

You saved whomever you could, whenever you could, regardless of their character or their relationship to you. You used heroic measures even for the least heroic individuals.

Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.