Quotes About Compassion

When love fills one's heart, there should be no room for pride.

I brought my face inches away from hers and whispered, 'If I were strapped like that, I would hate it, too.' And then I felt foolish, for what was the point of empathizing without taking more positive action? I wanted to touch her again but I left and returned to my room feeling impoverished and weak.

If she had learned anything in the past weeks it was that there was enough to be ashamed of in the course of a messy human life without being ashamed of loving someone.

A piece of advice his father had given him surfaced in Edgar's mind. Sometimes, he had said, it's better just to keep quiet and think with your heart.

My granny Torrelli says when you are angry with someone, so angry you are thinking hateful things, so angry maybe you want to punch them, then you should think of the good things about them, and the nice things they've said, and why you liked them in the first place.

It is a relief to discover that although there might be axe murderers and kidnappers in the world, most people seem a lot like us: sometimes afraid and sometimes brave, sometimes cruel and sometimes kind.

Sometimes there's not much difference between a heartsick soul and a suck ole donkey.

I wish that every baby everywhere could land in a family that wanted that baby as much as we want ours.

The second jealousy is this: I am jealous that my mother had wanted more children. Wasn't I enough? When I walk in her moccasins, though, I say, If I were my mother, I might want more children--not because I don't love my Salamanca, but because I love her so much. I want more of these.

On their way home, John said, "Marta, that's a long way to go so that Jacob can have a friend." "Shh," Marta said. "Ears." "What?" "We all have ears. Everyone in this car can hear, John." "Well, of course we all have ears. Oh.

I hated her that day. I didn't care how upset she was about her mother, I really hated her, and I wanted her to leave. I wondered if this was how my father felt when I threw all those temper tantrums. Maybe he hated me for a while.

She talked to me like I was just like any other student, not a kid in a wheelchair.

The embodiment of kindness is often made difficult by our long ingrained patterns of fear & jealousy.

Once we are honest about our feelings, we can invite ourselves to consider alternative modes of viewing our pain and can see that releasing our grip on anger and resentment can actually be an act of self-compassion.

Once someone appears to us primarily as an object, kindness has no place to root.

We find greater lightness & ease in our lives as we increasingly care for ourselves & other beings.

By practicing meditation we establish love, compassion, sympathetic joy & equanimity as our home.

Buddha first taught metta meditation as an antidote: as a way of surmounting terrible fear when it arises.

As an ability, love is always there as a potential, ready to flourish and help our lives flourish. As we go up and down in life, as we acquire or lose, as we are showered with praise or unfairly blamed, always within there is the ability of love, recognized or not, given life or not.

Sometimes kindness is stepping aside, letting go of our need to be right & just being happy for someone.

over time, offering loving kindness to all beings everywhere, including ourselves, unites us to one another so that we know that we can not go forward forgetting those left behind. Page 62

Like water poured from one vessel to another, metta flows freely, taking the shape of each situation without changing its essence.

Can you revise your perceptions to see the world in terms of suffering and the end of suffering, instead of good and bad? To see the world in terms of suffering and the end of suffering is Buddha-mind, and will lead us away from righteousness and anger. Get in touch with your own Buddha-mind, and you will uncover a healing force of compassion.

If we truly loved ourselves, we'd never harm another. That is a truly revolutionary, celebratory mode of self-care.