Quotes About Compassion

Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy.

Maybe the word forgive points in the wrong direction, since it's something you mostly give yourself, not anyone else: you put down the ugly weight of old suffering, untie yourself from the awful, and walk away from it.

We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.

We are all the heroes of our own stories, and on of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another's story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather that be told by them.

To feel for someone enlarges the self and then the self shares risks and pains.

It's tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after.

To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.

Who drinks your tears, who has your wings, who hears your story?

Not to know yourself is dangerous, to that self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and from their own emotion, and their internal landscape fills with partitions, caves, and minefields, blank spots, pit traps, and more, a landscape turned against itself, a landscape that does not know itself, a landscape through which they may not travel.

The unexamined life is not worth living, as the aphorism goes, but perhaps an honorable and informed life requires examining others' lives, not just one's own. Perhaps we do not know ourselves unless we know others. And if we do, we know that nobody is nobody.

Horrible in itself, disaster is sometimes a door back into paradise, the paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sister's and brother's keeper.

To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put ourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.

Stories like yours and worse than yours are all around, and your suffering won't mark you out as special, though your response to it might.

The two most basic goals of social utopias are to eliminate deprivation—hunger, ignorance, homelessness—and to forge a society in which no one is an outsider, no one is alienated.

Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destruction of other species and remote places, impinges on the imagination and perhaps prompts you to act.

Opportunistic theft and burglary are, historically, rare in American disasters, rare enough that many disaster scholars consider it one of the "myths" of disaster. Some such opportunism happened in Katrina. The first thing worth saying about such theft is who cares if electronics are moving around without benefit of purchase when children's corpses are floating in filthy water and stranded grandmothers are dying of heat and dehydration?

Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.

There's so much other work love has to do in the world.

Even if we can't completely comprehend, we might care.

One of the reasons people lock onto motherhood as a key to feminine identity is the belief that children are the way to fulfill your capacity to love. But there are so many things to love besides one's own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.

Naïve cynicism loves itself more than the world; it defends itself in lieu of defending the world. I'm interested in the people who love the world more, and in what they have to tell us.

When you don't hear others, you don't imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters.

James's investigation concluded that human beings respond with initiative, orderliness, and helpfulness; they remain calm; and suffering and loss are transformed when they are shared experiences.

Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis, in fairy tales and sometimes in actuality.