Quotes About Compassion

When bad things happen or you don't get your own way, if you can open your heart to compassion instead of shunting it down in anger, you're going to create more light.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light; I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

mono no aware, the sadness of being human

If you live only for yourself, dying is an especially scary proposition.

The way she had offered to try to help Harry, who had been not just an asset of mine, but a rare friend, an offer that had been as sincere as it was ultimately useless.

After all, to worry, at a minimum you have to care.

no patience for anyone who enjoys meat but moans about slaughterhouses, who wears cheap clothes but deplores sweatshops, who weeps about climate change from behind the wheel of an SUV or from the window seat of an airplane.

She pulled into the parking lot in front of the senior-care facility where her father stayed and tried to shake off the feeling. She knew there were stories out there ten times worse than hers, a hundred times worse. But still, sometimes it all just seemed so hard. So . . . perilous.

All we have is compassion and stories.

In its secular rendering the unicorn was a creature of nobility and awesome though benign power. It was a creature of compassion, though solitary, and indomitably fierce

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but in oneself? There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans…

We must invent overnight, figuratively speaking, another kind of civilization, one more cognizant of limits, less greedy, more compassionate, less bigoted, more inclusive, less exploitive.

The horrors—ethnic cleansing, industrial rapine, political corruption, racist lynching, extrajudicial execution—once identified and then denounced, always return, wearing different clothes but with the same obsessive face of indifference. We denounce those who order it, we condemn the people who carry out the policies, calling them inhumane. But the behavior is fully human. We are the darkness, as we are, too, the light.

Most of us think about empathy as a "feeling" or an "emotion." It is. To be empathetic is to be able to feel what the other person is feeling. But empathy is more than just a feeling. In order to be able to feel what another person is feeling, you need to be able to see the world as that other person sees it. This ability to take the perspective of another demands perception and imagination. Empathy thus reflects the integration of thinking and feeling.

We desire to keep the dying and the newly dead close before our eyes so as to give them full need of pity. Our Lord was brought down to be pitied, on the Cross He was too far away.

the truth that people should prefer to suffer injustice than commit it, that they should actually be good instead of simply seeming to be.

good and loving God who is in control

If you can't love anybody today, at least try not to hurt anybody.

Misery suffered did not justify misery to come.

Sometimes death is natural, a mercy that puts an end to suffering. But all too often it comes as an assassin, full of senseless cruelty and lacking any vestige of compassion.

It was the look of some woman in a third world country, watching as her village burned.

It took me twenty years of living with my father to accept the idea that being good could be good enough.

To fully understand about hugging, maybe you had to have missed a lot of it.