Quotes About Compassion

One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to the hidden silences. Often secrets are not revealed in words, they lie concealed in the silence between the words or in the depth of what is unsayable between two people.

During tragedy, the same is true. When we get diagnosed with a difficult disease, when we lose a dear friend, when things fall apart in our lives, we seldom long for someone to come in and fix it with words. No words will ever take away our pain. No, we long for someone to have the courage to be with us, sit there with us, cry with us. In other words, we want someone to be fully present with us.

As frustrating as people can be, it's hard to find a good substitute.

No matter how little money we have, no matter what rung we occupy on anybody's corporate ladder of success, in the end what everybody discovers is that what matters is other people. Human beings who give themselves to relational greatness—who have friends they laugh with, cry with, learn with, fight with, dance with, live and love and grow old and die with—these are the human beings who lead magnificent lives.

But to grow spiritually means to live increasingly as Jesus would in our unique place—to perceive what Jesus would perceive if he looked through our eyes, to think what he would think, to feel what he would feel, and therefore to do what he would do.

Anyone who's never watched somebody die is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity. For twelve months, I watched my father dying - when I was ten years old.

Would a soul continually eye His everlasting tenderness and compassion...[then] it could not bear an hour's absence from Him; whereas now, perhaps, it cannot watch with him one hour.

In Washington's view, we must transcend our tribalism to survive.

Our work calls on us to confront, with our patients and within ourselves, extraordinary human experiences. This confrontation is profoundly humbling in that at all times these experiences challenge the limits of our humanity and our view of the world...

I love my mother. My mother loves my dad. Those two facts are undeniable. I want my father to live. I want him to fight to live as long as he can. My mother wants to let him pass. She does not want him suffering anymore. She says that I am not there in the middle of the night at home, when he begs her to let him die. I say that he should not be taking the medicine that the doctor is prescribing, that it made Mike Tyson want to eat his opponents young.

I am noticing a big difference in the way the hospital workers are looking at me as I approach Jess's room. The look of sincere sympathy that used to be on their faces when they made eye contact with me is gone. It has been replaced by shear helplessness as they quickly walk past me with their heads tilted down and to the right. I feel like Bud Fox walking into his office with the Securities and Exchange Commission awaiting him.

Be grateful. Not Hateful.

The key to this world is to be loved by your fellow man and to be liked by yourself.

To speak well and to listen carefully is no easy task at times of high emotions and deep conflict. People's very identity is under threat.

Conflict in itself is not sin. But sin may enter into the situation, depending on how we approach conflict, how we deal with it, and especially how we treat each other. Sin is a feature of the quality of our relationships.

Be careful about what you hate. You may find that like a blindfold it removes your ability to see. Look first for what you see of yourself in others. Love the sinners, and see yourself in them. There you will find God.

To reconcile requires a commitment to see the face of God in the other, to feel the world from their perspective, and to place ourselves not in control of but alongside the human experience and condition.

We commit ourselves to the journey toward reconciliation because we believe it is right-even when we are not sure, as John Paul says, how it will progress or end. We believe that walking down the path to peace offers a way better than violence and an instrument more powerful than force to conduct the affairs of humankind. We pray that others will join us. -Harold

We tend to view compassion as something we project outward—that is, as a presence or gift we offer to another person or on behalf of a suffering world. This keeps compassion as an act of superiority, something the healthy offer the sick. We rarely offer the gift of compassionate presence to our own person.

Jesus' ministry had roots in grace expressed primarily through the quality of presence: the way he chose to be present, in relationship and in the company of others, even with those who wished him harm.

Reconciliation is understood as both a place we are trying to reach and the journey that we take up with each other.

I've never met anyone who wanted to be a terrorist. They are desperate people.

This is so much better than the 60's. So much less self indulgent and desperate. What you have here is a large group of people trying to practice unconditional love for strangers, and for the most part, succeeding.

O that we would so love the gospel and have so much compassion for lost people that tribulation and distress and persecution and famine and nakedness and danger and sword and gun and terrorist would turn us not into fearful complainers, but bold heralds of good news.