Quotes About Compassion

If your first concern is to look after yourself, you'll never find yourself.

There is nothing more common than for people who want to talk about God to lose interest in the people they are talking to.

Thomas Merton wrote, "it is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not 'what he ought to be.' If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we will do away with him altogether."50

So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It's your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.

They'll all get to know me firsthand, the little and the big, the small and the great. They'll get to know me by being kindly forgiven, with the slate of their sins forever wiped clean.

Treating souls for whom Christ died as numbers or projects or resources seemed to me something like a sin against the Holy Spirit.

Living together means seeing the oil flow over the head, down the face, through the beard, onto the shoulders of the other—and when I see that I know that my brother, my sister, is my priest.

Welcome with open arms fellow believers who don't see things the way you do. And don't jump all over them every time they do or say something you don't agree with—even when it seems that they are strong on opinions but weak in the faith department. Remember, they have their own history to deal with. Treat them gently.

21-23 Oh! Can you believe it? The chaste city has become a whore! She was once all justice, everyone living as good neighbors, And now they're all at one another's throats. Your coins are all counterfeits. Your wine is watered down. Your leaders are turncoats who keep company with crooks. They sell themselves to the highest bidder and grab anything not nailed down. They never stand up for the homeless, never stick up for the defenseless.

I tell you, love your enemies. Help and give without expecting a return. You'll never — I promise — regret it. Live out this God-created identity the way our Father lives toward us, generously and graciously, even when we're at our worst. Our Father is kind; you be kind.

Into the dark streets where the homeless groan, God speaks: "I've had enough; I'm on my way

To experience presence is to enter that far larger world of reality that our sensory experiences point to but cannot describe—the realities of love and compassion, justice and faithfulness, sin and evil . . . and God. Mostly God. The realities that are Word-evoked are where most of the world's action takes place. There are no "mere words.

When a foreigner lives with you in your land, don't take advantage of him. Treat the foreigner the same as a native. Love him like one of your own. Remember that you were once foreigners

Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples — when they see the love you have for each other.

God comes alongside us when we go through hard times, and before you know it, he brings us alongside someone else who is going through hard times so that we can be there for that person just as God was there for us.-2 Corinthians 1:4

Those who parade the rhetoric of liberation but scorn the wisdom of service do not lead people into the glorious liberty of the children of God but into a cramped and covetous squalor.

The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His."5 The second important

Mercy to the needy is a loan to Got), and Got) pays back those loans in full.

Every time you criticize someone, you condemn yourself. It takes one to know one. Judgmental criticism of others is a well-known way of escaping detection in your own crimes and misdemeanors.

The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His."5

My job is not to solve people's problems or make them happy, but to help them see the grace operating in their lives.

Mercy is a source of life because we breathe our own spirits through it into the lives of others.

re: Matthew 4) " 'Give in for now': what a strange thing for Jesus to say to a steadfast and protesting prophet; and yet what a comforting thing for those of us who cannot live in fiercely absolute ways. ... Jesus the Lord enters our life as it is and calls us not away but more deeply into it.

The most devastating thing about suffering is that it is relative. There is always someone who hurts more, someone who hurts less.