Quotes About Compassion

The most powerful moments of our lives happen when we string together the small flickers of light created by courage, compassion, and connection and see them shine in the darkness of our struggles.

Empathy is not relating to an experience, it's connecting to what someone is feeling about an experience.

To practice courage, compassion, and connection is to look at life and the people around us, and say, "I'm all in.

So often, when someone is in pain, we're afraid to say, "Yes, this hurts. Yes, this is a big deal. Yes, this sucks." We think our job is to make things better, so we minimize the pain.

All I know is that my life is better when I assume that people are doing their best. It keeps me out of judgment and lets me focus on what is, and not what should or could be.

The refugee in Syria doesn't benefit more if you conserve your kindness only for her and withhold it from your neighbor who's going through a divorce.

If we choose not to get involved or pretend it's not happening, we're going against the very sense of connection that makes us human.

Cruelty is cheap, easy, and chickenshit." That's also a touchstone of my spiritual beliefs.

People, people, people are just people, people, people.

Spiritual connection and engagement is not built on compliance, it's the product of love, belonging, and vulnerability.

Each person's grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. That doesn't mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining." Professor Neimeyer's

Taking pleasure in someone else's failings, even if that person is someone we really dislike, can violate our values and lead to feelings of guilt and shame. But, make no mistake, it's seductive, especially when we're sucked into groupthink.

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity."3

In order for forgiveness to happen, something has to die. If you make a choice to forgive, you have to face into the pain. You simply have to hurt.

Folks write down the name of someone who fills them with frustration, disappointment, and/or resentment, and then I propose that their person is doing the best he or she can. The responses have been wide-ranging...One woman said, "If this was true and my mother was doing the best she can, I would be grief-stricken. I'd rather be angry than sad, so it's easier to believe she's letting me down on purpose than grieve the fact that my mother is never going to be who I need her to be.

When you judge yourself for needing help, you judge those you are helping. When you attach value to giving help, you attach value to needing help. The danger of tying your self-worth to being a helper is feeling shame when you have to ask for help. Offering help is courageous and compassionate, but so is asking for help.

When we hear people referred to as animals or aliens, we should immediately wonder, "Is this an attempt to reduce someone's humanity so we can get away with hurting them or denying them basic human rights?

It was divine intervention—the act of starting to turn on the lights to alleviate my discomfort made me think of my favorite quote about darkness and compassion from Pema Chödrön, who writes: "Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.

One of the greatest barriers to going back is related to empathy. If our goal is perfection rather than growth, it is unlikely that we are willing to go back, because it requires a level of self-empathy—the ability to look at our own actions with understanding and compassion; to understand our experiences in the context in which they happened and to do all this without judgment.

If our goal is perfection rather than growth, it is unlikely that we are willing to go back, because it requires a level of self-empathy—the ability to look at our own actions with understanding and compassion; to understand our experiences in the context in which they happened and to do all this without judgment. I call this ability to reflect on our own actions with empathy "grounding.

Everyone has a story or a struggle that will break your heart. And, if we're really paying attention, most people have a story that will bring us to our knees.

And if we all have shame, the good news is that we're all capable of developing shame resilience. Shame resilience is the ability to recognize shame, to move through it constructively while maintaining worthiness and authenticity, and to ultimately develop more courage, compassion, and connection as a result of our experience.

But then, if it's the case that we can care about citizens and the police, shouldn't the rallying cry just be All Lives Matter? No. Because the humanity wasn't stripped from all lives the way it was stripped from the lives of black citizens. In order for slavery to work, in order for us to buy, sell, beat, and trade people like animals, Americans had to completely dehumanize slaves. And whether we directly participated in that or were

The goal is to learn to recognize when we are experiencing shame quickly enough to prevent ourselves from lashing out at those around us.