Quotes About Compassion

Every single zom, every man, woman and child, no matter how decayed or how frightening they are, no matter how dangerous they are—they were all once real people. They had names, and lives, and personalities, and families. They had dreams and goals. They had pasts and they thought they had futures, but something came and took that away from them.

Rape is, to me, no different than murder. It kills a part of the victim's soul.

Humanity comes first. Always. Politics and religion, valuable as they are, are always of second importance. If we do not work together to preserve life, to treasure it and keep it safe, then nothing we fight for is worth having.

This wasn't about who liked who; this was a human being who did not deserve what happened to him.

No lloré por eso. Cada año mueren millones de personas. Puedo sentir compasión, pero ninguna pena personal. Como ocurre en el seno de una comunidad cuando un niño se cae en un pozo. Dos meses más tarde nadie se acuerda del nombre del niño. Tu vida no gira en torno a ese momento. No puede, porque si convertimos la muerte de cada persona en algo personal nos mataría a todos. Pero esto… esto es un momento que te cambia la vida de verdad. Igual que a ti.

Save words like 'sorry.' Save for the dead. Living don't need them.

Some things touch every open heart and wound every soul.

The line between immediate need and breaking the law is blurry at the best of times. And I'm not talking about the laws of states or nations. I'm talking about the laws of basic humanity.

What I can tell you is what I learned from Jeff, and that is this: If you watch the strange, the other, the bizarre long enough, if you really see these people, you will find familiar pieces of yourself in their experiences. Empathy may be our only hope. I found in Jeff not just something familiar but also a better way to live.

We are all only temporarily able bodies and minds. Statistically, what have been labeled mental and physical "abnormalities" or disabilities are essential to the human condition, are in fact the human condition.

They was just starving people is all. I fed them. Talked to them. Listened. That ain't hoodoo. Just plain sense. The magic weren't in the food. It was in the seeing.

Calming ain't curing, is it, girl?

It's only when you don't want nothing from a body that you can see who they are," Polly had said. "It's strange, but when you don't want nothing, seems like you can give everything you got.

The curve seems to be imprinted on us as a way to repurpose us for a changing role in society as we age, a role that is less about ambition and competition, and more about connection and compassion.

social connectedness can go a long way toward alleviating the misery caused by a financial crisis.

The greater threat lies in our letting down our guard against ourselves: in high-mindedly embracing authoritarianism in the name of fairness and compassion, as the Marxists did. Having been at last rousted out of politics and economics by the disaster of communism, the authoritarian Rasputin has now come calling on liberal science, and he already has his foot in the door.

As I mentioned, Ardelt and others of her school of thought regard wisdom as combining competence in three areas. One domain is cognitive (relating to knowledge and intellect), the second is affective (relating to compassion and emotion), and the third is reflective—but reflective means something more than mere contemplation.

away from ambition and toward connection.

Daily we should take account and ask: What have I done today to alleviate the anguish, to mitigate the evil, to prevent humiliation."15 Tellingly,

That's grace, man - what you're given, not what you deserve

grace, man—what you're given, not what you deserve.

We need to rediscover the idea of the common good and work together to build a home.

We believe that what we possess we don't ultimately own. God is merely entrusting it to us. And one of the conditions of that trust is that we share what we have with those who have less. So, if you don't give to people in need, you can hardly call yourself a Jew. Even the most unbelieving Jew knows that.

Our inclination to act well towards others, whatever its source, tends to be confined to those with whom we share a common identity. The Greeks, the world's first philosophers and scientists, regarded anyone who was not Greek as a barbarian – a word derived from the sound of a sheep bleating. Our radius of moral concern has limits. The group may be small or large, but in practice as opposed to theory, we tend to see those not like us as less than fully human.