Quotes About Compassion

Why would you want to go look for that wicked girl?" she asked. "Because I never thanked her," Lillian said, but she was really hoping for forgiveness.

Good conversation is a courtesy, a kindness, a form of caritas that has as its deepest implicit intention binding one another together in understanding and love.

Curiosity. It was Oliver Sacks who first made me reflect on curiosity as a form of compassion. An ingenious and creative neurologist now well-known for his "clinical tales," he begins his work as diagnostician and healer with the implicit question 'What is it like to be you?

Blum remarks that Kant and Hegel specify that rationality, self-control, strength of will, consistency, adherence to duty and obligation, and acting on 'universal' principles comprise moral behavior; they specifically exclude from the makeup of moral man qualities like sympathy, compassion, kindness, nurturance, and concern for the community, which are associated with women.

When you're taught to love everyone, to love your enemies, what value does that put on love?

The real lover is the man who can thrill you by kissing your forehead or smiling into your eyes or just staring into space.

Dogs never bite me. Just humans.

Rejoice with those who rejoice. I have found that difficult too often. I was much better at weeping with those who weep.

There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding. ... If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace.

There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding.

It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.

I have always liked the phrase 'nursing a grudge' because many people are tender of their resentments as of the thing nearest their hearts.

It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men.

Why do I love the thought of you old? That first twinge of arthiritis in your knee is a thing I imagine with all the tenderness I felt when you showed me your loose tooth. I wish I could help you carry the weight of many years. But the Lord will have that fatherly satisfaction.

You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding.

She thought, If I or my father or any Boughton has ever stirred the Lord's compassion, then Jack will be all right. Because perdition for him would be perdition for every one of us.

To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error.

remembering and forgiving can be contrary things

Harm to you is not harm to me in the strict sense, and that is a great part of the problem. He could knock me down the stairs and I would have worked out the theology for forgiving him before I reached the bottom. But if he harmed you in the slightest way, I'm afraid theology would fail me.

Thinking about hell doesn't help me live the way I should. I believe this is true for most people. And thinking that other people might go to hell just feels evil to me, like a very grave sin. So I don't want to encourage anyone else to think that way either.

You must forgive in order to understand.

That reservoir of goodness beyond and of another kind that we are able to do for each other in the ordinary cause of things.

But when folks are down to the one thing that keeps them alive, that one thing can be meanness. It makes you feel like you're there, you're doing something.

Kindly intentioned, but not considerate.