Quotes About Compassion

Yes, we are all different. Different customs, different foods, different mannerisms, different languages, but not so different that we cannot get along with one another. If we will disagree without being disagreeable.

Being a giver is not about saying yes to all of the people all of the time to all of the requests.

We think of our prison inmates as the dregs of society, and we scorn them and push them off to the side and forget about them. We have to remember that they are humans, and they have rights, and yes, they did wrong, but we all have one shot at doing wrong, you know?

We desperately need comprehensive immigration reform in this nation, and yes, comprehensive immigration reform proposals are nuanced and complicated, but you know what shouldn't be? Our capacity to see each other's humanity.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

I believe that people are fundamentally are decent. And, yes, you will have people that sometimes will misbehave.

Will we make all poverty history? No. But can we solve some of these extreme and egregious forms of poverty? I think yes, and we should.

I always emphasize that in the long run one can't satisfactorily say no to war, violence and injustice unless one is simultaneously saying yes to life and love and laughter.

Yes, I have four children. Four children with whom I spend a good part of every day: bathing them, combing their hair, sitting with them while they do their homework, holding them while they weep their tragic tears. But I'm not in love with any of them. I am in love with my husband.

In 1978, when I was a non-Congress chief minister, we distributed surplus wheat among labourers. Later, when we visited a village, I asked a labourer whether he knew who sent the wheat. 'Yes, Indiraji - only Indiraji helps the poor.' Indiraji was a symbol for the weaker sections.

I've often had people ask me, would you allow a homosexual to be your friend. Yes, I will. And the reason I will is because I know that that person has problems, and if I can minister to those problems, I will.

Saints are ordinary people who do what they do for the love of Jesus, say what they must say without fear, love their neighbor even when they are cursed by him, and live without regret over yesterday or fear of tomorrow.

Diamond Dallas saved my life. He didn't have to, but that's the kind of guy he is. He's helped so many people with his DDP Yoga. It's just incredible with the lives he's changing, the lives he's affecting. I am so honored to be part of that.

Yoga is about compassion and generosity towards others. It means being mindful of the world around us.

People on a spiritual path - personal growth, spiritual practice, recovery, yoga and so forth - are the last people who should be sitting out the social and political issues of our day.

Yoga has given me more compassion for my imperfections.

It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles - the oppression of tyranny - to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke than to add anything that would tend to crush them.

I lived in New York until I was eleven years old, when my mother left my two older sisters and my father. My mother is 90 percent blind and deaf. She left and moved all the way to California. So I left my two older sisters and my father behind at the age of eleven and moved cross-country to take care of her.

That's the spirit in which I went to New York to be with my husband, and when I knocked on the hotel door, she opened the door as Caitlyn as we now know her - full makeup and fully dressed as a woman. So it was devastating to me to see because I had envisioned Bruce opening the door, but it was helpful in my process.

People don't talk about small-town racism in Illinois or upstate New York. They're like, 'It's the South.' And it is. It's there. But it's everywhere. But everywhere, there are also amazing people.

I'm going to do whatever I have to do to help a New Yorker, whether it's a girl on the street or a tenant in a housing development.

I'm always thinking about how what I'm doing is affecting the people around me. As a New Yorker, you have to be that way.

The truth is, we all face hardships of some kind, and you never know the struggles a person is going through. Behind every smile, there's a story of a personal struggle.

If you aren't humble, whatever empathy you claim is false and probably results from some arrogance or the desire to control. But true empathy is rooted in humility and the understanding that there are many people with as much to contribute in life as you.