Quotes About Compassion

Sometimes, the most compassionate thing we can do is say no. Every once in a while, the best way to help another person is to yell at him. This is called an act of wrathful compassion, and it's why many traditional bodhisattvas are depicted carrying iconographic weaponry in Himalayan art, displaying a force that is not caught up within hatred, but that sets firm boundaries which a confused mind cannot cross.

You must learn day by day, year by year to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about, the more you have left when anything happens.

We learn the inner secret of happiness when we learn to direct our inner drives, our interest and our attention to something besides ourselves.

We learn the inner secret of happiness when we learn to direct our inner drives, our interest and our attention to something outside ourselves.

But you, warm from the hearts of all those sisters and brothers - oh go back to them and be poor and happy and grow up in the healthy atmosphere of 'give and take' instead of our most wretched one of 'keep'.

Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.

Many who are indignant about injustices are only indignant because the injustices are being inflicted on them. Their indignation is skin-deep.

Riassumendo vorrei in realtà dire: la barbarie nazista fa sorgere in noi un'identica barbarie che procederebbe con gli stessi metodi, se noi avessimo la possibilità di agire oggi come vorremmo. Dobbiamo respingere interiormente questa inciviltà, non possiamo coltivare in noi quell'odio perché altrimenti il mondo non uscirà di un solo passo dalla melma.

Se anche non rimanesse che un solo tedesco decente, quest'unico tedesco meriterebbe di essere difeso contro quella banda di barbari, e grazie a lui non si avrebbe il diritto di riversare il proprio odio su un popolo intero. […] L'odio indiscriminato è una malattia dell'anima, odiare non è nel mio carattere.

Ik heb me enige onsterfelijke verdiensten aan de mensheid verworven: ik heb nooit een slecht boek geschreven en ik heb het niet op m'n geweten, dat er een ongelukkige méér op deze aarde rondloopt.

We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.

We tend to forget that not only must we gain inner freedom from one another, but we must also leave the other free and abandon any fixed concept we may have of him in our imagination.

Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: To reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world." -Etty Hillesum Journals, Amsterdam, 1941

What is primitive in me is my warmth; I have a sort of primitive love and primitive sympathy for people, for all people.

Be grateful for luck. Pay the thunder no mind - listen to the birds. And don't hate nobody.

My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight.

We all know that the big explosion is going to happen. Your concern, the two of you, is to make sure that you die intellectually correct. But my problem is more primitive. I only want to make sure that when it comes and my boys are dying that I am there to ease their last pain with morphine.

Don't judge any man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins. - Indian (Native American) Proverb Source: The International thesaurus of quotations, p. 331. (Reference from Mead Public Library.)

Trust, like Christ-like love, is to be extended not because others deserve it but because they need it, because they can become trustworthy (or loving) by being nurtured in a community of trust and love. We need to extend trust, even if doing so makes us vulnerable to pain and great cost, in order to save our own souls.

And so we gain hope—not from the darkness of our suffering, not from pat answers in books, but from the God who sees our suffering and shares our pain.

Go figure out what this Scripture means: 'I'm after mercy, not religion.' I'm here to invite outsiders, not coddle insiders.

Never walk away from someone who deserves help; your hand is God's hand for that person.

Forget about deciding what's right for each other. Here's what you need to be concerned about: that you don't get in the way of someone else, making life more difficult than it already is. I'm convinced—Jesus convinced me!—that everything as it is in itself is holy. We, of course, by the way we treat it or talk about it, can contaminate it.

Eugene H. Peterson