Quotes About Compassion

As the Beloved ones, our greatest fulfilment lies in becoming bread for the world. That is the most intimate expression of our deepest desire to give ourselves to each other

God loves us before any human person can show love to us. He loves us with a "first" love, an unlimited, unconditional love, wants us to be his beloved children, and tells us to become as loving as himself.

Thus the authority of compassion is the possibility for each of us to forgive our brothers and sisters, because forgiveness is only real for those who have discovered the weakness of their friends and the sin of their enemies in their own hearts, and are willing to call each human being their sister and brother.

We resist getting near the suffering of another partly out of our unwillingness to suffer ourselves.

By offering premature advice on how to cope, by rushing to reassure, by prodding with advice, we say much about our own need for easy closure. When we barge in with such consolation, we make hurting souls into objects or projects.

Every time I take a step in the direction of generosity, I know that I am moving from fear to love.

If you believe that you are the beloved, you can offer forgiveness, even when it cannot be received.

When our love grows from God's love we no longer divide people into those who deserve it and those who don't. It is this love that allows us to see the enemy as someone loved with the same love with which we are loved.

To be chosen as the Beloved of God is something radically different. Instead of excluding others, it includes others. Instead of rejecting others as less valuable, it accepts others in their own uniqueness. It is not a competitive, but a compassionate choice.

Jesus reaches out to the suffering world from the silent center where he stands in full attentiveness to his Father.

The great mystery is not the cures, but the infinite compassion which is their source.

detach ourselves from making our individual experience the criterion for our approach to others

We wonder if we serve better than someone else. We import a drive to achieve into our works of mercy.

our brokenness has no other beauty but the beauty that comes from the compassion that surrounds it.

God is there. God's light is there. God's forgiveness is there. God's boundless love is there.

Dorotheus writes: "Don't look for the affection of your neighbor. He who looks for it is troubled when he does not get it. You yourself, however, have to give witness to the love for your neighbor and to offer him rest, and thus you will bring your neighbor to love.

The few times, however, that we do obey our severe masters and listen carefully to our restless hearts, we may start to sense that in the midst of our sadness there is joy, that in the midst of our fears there is peace, that in the midst of our greediness there is the possibility of compassion and that indeed in the midst of our irking loneliness we can find the beginnings of a quiet solitude.

A friend once wrote: "Learning to weep, learning to keep vigil, learning to wait for the dawn. Perhaps this is what it means to be human.

It is folly for a man who has a dead person in his house to leave him there and go to weep over his neighbor's dead."6

And still, I knew that I would never be able to live the great commandment to love without allowing myself to be loved without conditions or prerequisites. The journey from teaching about love to allowing myself to be loved proved much longer than I realized.

There is great pain and suffering in the world. But the pain hardest to bear is your own.

In the context of a compassionate embrace, our brokenness may appear beautiful, but our brokenness has no other beauty but the beauty that comes from the compassion that surrounds it.

Rembrandt's painting of the father, I can see three ways to a truly compassionate fatherhood: grief, forgiveness, and generosity.

When you speak to others about your pain without fully owning it, you expect something from them that they cannot give.