Quotes About Compassion

That night when I went to bed, I laid there in the dark and pictured a clothesline full of somebody else's troubles. I knew for sure there were a lot of them I'd rather pluck off of that line than mine. I imagined what the other troubles might be. There would probably be toothaches and failed math tests. Lost cats and ugly hair. Cheating boyfriends and broken-down cars. But none of those could hold a candle to my troubles, weighing down that clothesline like a sack full of bricks.

Barbara O'Connor

It's hard to be nasty to people who have been nice to you.

Sometimes a little pat is all a friend can do.

Disliking humanity in general, she was one of those excessively tender-hearted people who are greatly moved by the troubles of complete strangers, in which she sometimes imagined herself playing a noble part.

One wouldn't believe there could be so many people, and one must love them all.

Prudence thanked him, experiencing that feeling of contrition which comes to all of us when we have made up our minds to dislike people for no apparent reason and they then perform some kind action.

As for his sudden change of heart, he had suddenly remembered the end of Mansfield Park, and how Edmund fell out of love with Mary Crawford and came to care for Fanny. Dulcie must surely know the novel well, and would understand how such things can happen.

Jane wanted to agree and to offer him the broken dwarf, perhaps for Constance's grave, as a kind of comment on the futility of earthly love, but instead she said gently, 'You must make Jessie happy. That will be the right thing for you now.

Do you cook for yourself then?' 'I live alone, you know. Since my wife died…' 'Yes, of course, Miss Morrow told me.' 'Really? What did she say?' 'Oh, how sad it was and all that sort of thing,' said Jane rapidly with her eyes on the ground.

I wasn't really making fun of you,' said Jane as they settled themselves in the carriage. 'I was seeing you as a human being for the first time.

But as far as I'm concerned, Mary is always going to look a lot like Imogene Herdman--sort of nervous and bewildered, but ready to clobber anyone who laid a hand on her baby.

She was a great cultivator of friends, a person who brought others together. Once you were in her life, she never let you drift out of it completely. (Hidden Beneath)

How could you carry the inside of a person with you and not call them a friend, no matter what the rules said?

Each time you judge yourself, you break your heart.

Now we have a humanist's despair before the News,

There is a Jewish joke concerning the man who says of an enemy: Why does he hate me so? I never did him any good.

Lean on me," someone says in Jane Austen to a woman he scarcely knows, and there's no question but that she will, that she takes it for granted.

T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.

The love of humanity does not prevent us from being good journalists.

It is a peculiar habit of Christianity to conceive the most compassionate and forgiving divinities and use them to sponsor atrocity.

reproaches himself for recoiling from the stench of the poor and the sick,

nuns of the Hôtel Dieu or municipal hospital, "having no fear of death, tended the sick with all sweetness and humility.

It would be nice to feel that we are a better world, a world of more compassion and a world of more humanity, and to believe in the basic goodness of man.