Quotes About Compassion

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 a posture of grace.

There are many ways to live a good life

remembering and forgiving can be contrary things. No doubt they usually are.

In the old days I could walk down every single street, past every house, in about an hour. I'd try to remember the people who lived in each one, and whatever I knew about them, which was often quite a lot, since many of the ones who weren't mine were Boughton's. And I'd pray for them. And I'd imagine peace they didn't expect and couldn't account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams.

The minute that you start thinking about someone in the whole circumstance of his life to the extent that you can, he becomes mysterious, immediately.

So many of earth's grievances could be soothed by a little consideration.

When you're scalded, touch hurts, it makes no difference if it's kindly meant. Now

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. So they get themselves drawn into situations that are harmful to them. I have seen this happen many, many times. I have always had trouble finding a way to caution against it. Since it is, in a word, Christlike

I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.

And grace is the great gift. So to be forgiven is only half the gift. The other half is that we also can forgive, restore, and liberate, and therefore we can feel the will of God enacted through us, which is the great restoration of ourselves to ourselves.

You are not good for your own sake. That probably isn't even possible. You are good as a courtesy to everyone around you. Keeping a promise or breaking it, telling the truth or lying, matters to those around you. So there is good you can do and always do again. You do not have to believe you are good in order to act well in any specific case. You never lose that option.

Perhaps, pious as they were, these ladies did not wish to see me pass into that sad and outcast state of revelation where one begins to feel superior to one's neighbors.

It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity.

When Jesus describes Judgment, the famous separation of the sheep from the goats, he does not mention religious affiliation or sexual orientation or family values. He says, I was hungry, and ye fed me not (Matthew 25:42).

It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor

I thought he made one interesting point in here somewhere, though. He said the seriousness of American Christianity was called into question by our treatment of the Negro. It seems to me there is something to be said for that idea.

We human beings do real harm. History could make a stone weep.

It is the sad privilege of blood relations to love him despite all.

How we think about ourselves has everything to do with how we act toward one another.

The provisions for the poor which structure both land ownership and the sacred calendar in ancient Israel, the rights of gleaners and of those widows, orphans, and strangers who pass through the fields, and the cycles of freedom from debt and restoration of alienated persons and property, all work against the emergence of the poor as a class, as people marked by deprivation and hopelessness.

No one can read the books of Moses with any care without understanding that law can be a means of grace. Certainly this law is of one spirit with the Son of Man who says, I was hungry and you fed me. I was naked and you clothed me. This kind of worldliness entails the conferring of material benefit over and above mere equity. It means a recognition of and respect for both the intimacy of God's compassion and the very tangible forms in which it finds expression.

We would not now have a sizable part of our own population prepared to engage in homicidal violence if they truly believed that that young man in the hoodie was an image of God.

We are part of this ultimate reality and by nature we participate in eternal things--justice, truth, compassion, love. We have a vision of these things we have not arrived at by reason, have rarely learned from experience, and have not found in history. We feel the lack. Hope leads us toward them.

might be about the difference between love and loneliness, and how people on either side can't understand people on the other.