Quotes About Compassion

Remember on this one thing, said Badger. The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other's memories. This is how people care for themselves.

No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one's own culture but within oneself.

Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?

One time you told me that the opposite of love isn't hate. And I didn't understand that, but I think I do know. Because if you hate someone, you most still care, right? You have to care a little bit; otherwise you would just ignore them and forget they even live. Or lived.

We humans have the capacity to wreak horrors on each other. But we also have the capacity to survive those horrors.

Special kinda warm,

It just means that if someone hates you, they still have feelings for you. If they really didn't care about you, they'd just forget about you. They wouldn't even waste the time hating you.

He easily gathered her in his arms; Gramma was made up of skin and bones and hate and crazy - and hate and crazy don't weigh anything.

Dr. Kennedy talked me out of killing myself--for now--without saying a single words or even knowing what was going on. Which, I've decided, is the mark of a totally kick-ass therapist.

I can't stop you from killing yourself. If that's what you truly want, no one can stop you. I can't be around twenty-four hours a day, looking after you. But if that's what you want, don't you think you owe it to your mother to talk to her first?

Mom's already dead!" I yelled at him. "Who the hell do you think you're saving?" And he just gave me his Sad, Tired look. It's one of the three he's got, the other two being Pissed Off and Blised Out on ESPN.

Why couldn't we be one of those families? Why do we have to be us? "I just want something normal," I tell him. "I just want to feel normal." [...] "I can't stop you from killing yourself. If that's what you truly want, no one can stop you. I can't be around twenty-four hours a day, looking after you. But if that's what you want, don't you think you owe it to your mother to talk to her first?

when you see your friend—or someone you think and hope might someday be more—abused, you do what you can to stop it. Who doesn't do that? What kind of person doesn't do that?

No one else needs to feel bad about what happened. Only one person.

No one else needs to feel bad about what happened. Only one person. I wish there were a way to assuage him, a way to tell him, "It's all right. You don't have to step around the rusty nails and broken glass of my past. Don't beat yourself up." But the only way to do that would be to acknowledge it in the first place, to say it happened, and I can't do that. When I try to talk about it, everything goes haywire.

if I say nothing, she gets angry, and I don't like to make her angry. Not because of anything she does or says when she's angry, but just because making her angry makes me sad. She doesn't deserve it.

She listened to me and didn't try to fix things. She was open and kind, and when she raised her eyebrows, I thought my heart would stop beating in my chest....I treated her like a remedy, not a person.

Don't judge people before you know them. Their story might surprise you!

Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way

Sometimes in storm weather the shore had fluttered with disabled swallows. They crouched lower for his approach, without strength to escape. In his hands they pulsed with that same pulse. He had taken a bird and warmed it between his hands or inside his jacket, brought the life back until it was able to fly. Sometimes, released from his hands, they circled once around him before flying away; in gratitude, or so the child had believed--and the belief had survived all the man's science.

I glimpsed the man's face with the shine of death on it. They laid him down there in the open. They had brought him there to be close to his death, I understood this also at the same moment. For who would wish to see a companion gasp his last on a jolting cart? We desire to keep the dying and the newly dead close before our eyes so as to give them full meed of pity. Our Lord was brought down to be pitied, on the Cross He was too far away.

A little bit of kindness goes a long way with women.

No latitude makes any difference to what men will do to other men, whether for gain or in the name of justice.

You shall not hate your brother in your heart. You shall surely rebuke your neighbor but bear no sin because of him. You