Quotes About Compassion

For those of us who are not members of a biker gang or the Marine Corps, solidarity means little more than the compassionate impulse that leads us to comfort a bereft friend; for Beezer and his merry band, solidarity is the assurance that someone's always got your back.

Creo que una verdadera amistad siempre nos hace sentir este dulce sentimiento, ya que el mundo casi siempre parece un árido desierto y las flores que en él crecen parecen hacerlo en contra de todas esas circunstancias desfavorables

God loved rocks, houseflies, weeds, and poor people above all the rest of His creations, and that's why He made so many of them.

That John Coffey whose eyes were always streaming tears, like blood from a wound that can never heal.

Pity arises from meeting pain with fear. Compassion comes when you meet it with love.

When being loving becomes even more important than being loved, true devotion is experienced. A loving that does not depend on getting what we want but on offering what the world and our hearts cry out for.

Healing is to reoccupy those parts of ourselves abandoned to pain; to enter with mercy and awareness those areas withdrawn from in fear.

Each day become more fully alive. Practice noting gently and nonjudgmentally throughout the day. Add mindfulness practice to soft-belly opening work: fifteen minutes soft-belly and twenty minutes watching the breath, noting the activities of the mind. Approach illness as an experiment in staying present, in opening your heart in hell. Discuss how we fear our hidden pain even more than death, and how noting and mindfulness brings that pain to the surface where it can be healed.

You could look the whole world over and never find anyone more deserving of love than yourself.

Making room in our heart for our own pain, we make room in our heart for theirs.

love is the only gift worth giving.

So we forgive. We send away the wrongs done to us. We let people out of the little cages we keep them in while we enjoy our feelings of moral superiority. We hand the feelings of wrong to God and refuse to ever take them back. Then we shut up and never mention the matter again. When the time comes, we put our arm around the offender and we ask him how he is.

God will not free us until we free others.

When I look at those I want to forgive, I strive to not see them in evil terms, but to find the compassionate narrative behind their hurtful actions against me.

It may even be that you can find absolutely nothing redeeming about the people who have wronged you. Perhaps the only hook of compassion you can find is to pity them in their sinful state. Whatever the case, if you can find even the smallest opening of compassion for their lives, that charizomai spirit of mercy and grace can flow in. Forgiveness can reign and you will be free.

Far better to know people for the cruel creatures that they are, and to love them despite their flaws, than to love them as we wish them to be and constantly be disappointed and hurt.

Here is the lesson: Great men and women of God are not exempt from hurt and offense. Instead, enduring the wounds of fellow Christians with mercy and grace seems to be the call of every true saint, and we should not expect it to be any different in our own lives.

Soen-sa said, The universe is infinite; all people are infinite. So the Bodhisattva's attachment is infinite. A Bodhisattva attachment is no attachment. No attachment is a Bodhisattva attachment.

One evening, after a Dharma talk at the Cambridge Zen Center, a student asked Seung Sahn Soen-sa, "What is love?" Soen-sa said, "I ask you: what is love?" The student was silent. Soen-sa said, "This is love." The student was still silent. Soen-sa said, "You ask me: I ask you. This is love.

Both tolerance and respect are empty virtues until we actually understand whatever it is we are supposed to be tolerating or respecting.

What the world's religions share is not so much a finish line as a starting point. And where they begin is with this simple observation: something is wrong with the world.

As you care less about what people think of you, you will care more about what others think of themselves.

How you treat the one reveals how you regard the many, because everyone is ultimately a one.

Proactive people make love a verb. Love is something you do: the sacrifices you make, the giving of self, like a mother bringing a newborn into the world... Love is a value that is actualized through loving actions. Proactive people subordinate feeling to values. Love, the feeling, can be recaptured.