Quotes About Compassion

Looking at people and communicating that they can be loved, and that they can love in return, is giving them a tremendous gift. It is also a gift to ourselves. We see that we are one with the fabric of life. This is the power of metta: to teach ourselves and our world this inherent loveliness.

Mindfulness helps us see the addictive aspect of self-criticism— a repetitive cycle of flaying ourselves again and again, feeling the pain anew.

Learning to treat ourselves lovingly may at first feel like a dangerous experiment.

Seeking happiness is not the problem. The problem is that we often do not know where and how to find genuine happiness and so make the mistakes that cause suffering for ourselves & others.

Hatred does not help us alleviate our pain even in the slightest.

Loving ourselves calls us to give up the illusion that we can control everything and focuses us on building our inner resource of resilience.

Ask yourself, 'who is the one suffering from this anger? The person who has harmed me has gone on to live their life (or perhaps has died), while I am the one sitting here feeling the persecution, burning and constriction of anger. Out of compassion for myself, to ease my own heart, may I let go.

Can you imagine a mind state in which there is no bitter, condemning judgement of oneself or of others? This mind does not see the world in terms of good and bad,might and wrong, good and evil; it sees only 'suffering and the end of suffering.

In Buddhism there is one word for mind & heart: chitta. Chitta refers not just to thoughts and emotions in the narrow sense of arising from the brain, but also to the whole range of consciousness, vast & unimpeded.

Causing harm is never just a one-way street.

Our can-do culture has made many of us believe that we should always be self-sufficient. Somewhere along the way, we also got the message that asking for help is a sign of weakness. We often forget that we're interdependent creatures whose very existence depends on the kindness of others, including—with a bow to Tennessee Williams—strangers.

Taking responsibility for oneself is by definition an act of kindness.

May my practice be dedicated to your well-being.

The heart is a generous muscle.

Compassion is born out of lovingkindness. It is born of knowing our oneness, not just thinking about it or wishing it were so. It is born out of the wisdom of seeing things exactly as they are.

You could search the whole world over and never find anyone as deserving of your love as yourself.

By experimenting with sympathetic joy, we break from the constricted world of individual struggle and see that joy exists in more places than we have yet imagined.

Great fullness of being, which we experience as happiness, can also be described as love. To be undivided and unfragmented, to be completely present, is to love. To pay attention is to

The simple act of being completely present to another person is truly an act of love—no drama is required.

There may be people who absolutely defy our ability (or willingness) to think of even one good thing about them. In that case, focus on the universal wish to be happy, which this difficult person also shares. All beings want to be happy, yet so very few know how. It is out of ignorance that any of us cause suffering, for ourselves or for others.

Real forgiveness in close relationships is never easy. It can't be rushed or engineered.

Forgiveness is the way we break the grip that long-held resentments have on our hearts.

To forgive, we may need to open our minds to a fuller exploration of the context in which the events occurred, and feel compassion for the circumstances and everyone involved, starting with ourselves.

We're in charge of our own forgiveness, and the process takes time, patience, and intention.