Quotes About Compassion

Just because you can't understand me, doesn't mean I can't understand you

Most importantly we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people.

What do you want, Patrick? she sighs. I just want peace, love, friendship, understanding, I say dispassionately.

While walking back to the highway I stop, choke back a sob, my throat tightens. I just want to... Facing the skyline, through all the baby talk, I murmur, keep the game going. As I stand, frozen in position, an old woman emerges behind a Threepenny Opera poster at a deserted bus stop and she's homeless and begging, hobbling over, her face covered with sores that look like bugs, holding out a shaking red hand. Oh will you please go away? I sigh. She tells me to get a haircut.

when you were young and your heart was an open book you used to say live and let live.

Back at our table Reeves is telling Hamlin about how he taunts the homeless in the streets, about how he hands a dollar to them as he approaches and then yanks it away and pockets it right when he passes the bums.

On my way into the Chinese cleaners I brush past a crying bum, an old man, forty or fifty, fat and grizzled, and just as I'm opening the door I notice, to top it off, that he's also blind and I step on his foot, which is actually a stump, causing him to drop his cup, scattering change all over the sidewalk. Did I do this on purpose? What do you think? Or did I do this accidentally?

Not being able or willing to put yourself in someone else's shoes—to view life differently from how you yourself experience it—is the first step toward being not empathic, and this is why so many progressive movements become as rigid and as authoritarian as the institutions they're resisting.

Animals need as much love and respect and care as we give people. I consider this. I think about all the things I've seen and done, and I consider this. I think they're better off without that, baby, I say. In fact I think they're doing okay.

Something deep in our conscience tells us that hostility is part of the problem to be overcome in the world, not the means by which problems will be overcome. Hostility is a symptom of the disease, not part of the cure.

and somehow, the more we would face our own demons of pride, greed, and lust, the more gentle and kind we would become toward others, the less judgmental, the less harsh, the more empathetic, because we realize as never before that everyone is pitched in an invisible inner battle, and the battle isn't easy for anyone.

To be truly good means more than not robbing people . . . To be truly good means more than being righteously religious . . . To be truly good means being a good neighbor. . . . And to be a good neighbor means recognizing that there are ultimately no strangers. . . . Everybody is my neighbor! . . . Everybody is my brother! . . . There are no isolated monads wounded on the other side of the street! . . . We're all connected.

God is not the tribal deity of one group of "chosen" people. God is not for us and against all others. God is for us and for them, too. God loves everyone everywhere, no exceptions.

stay Christian while rejecting supremacy and embracing solidarity instead.

Can you imagine Jesus saying, "Believe that I am the only way. Why? Because I said so, that's why! And if you don't believe, then you're going straight to hell!" But isn't that how we present him through our slogans?

Surely many courageous Christians spoke out against the savagery of their so-called civilized fellow Christians? And surely many compassionate Christians spoke out for the humanity of the so-called savages? Sadly, very, very few actually did, notable among them a Dominican friar, Bartolomé de las Casas. His

Brian D. McLaren

helping human nature and society mature in their moral and spiritual development, evolving in the direction of nonviolence and love before it's too late.

Why can't we admit that focusing on getting our words and beliefs right has not succeeded in helping us be good?

Because I follow Jesus, then, I am bound to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, atheists, New Agers, everyone (even religious broadcasters, I was just reminded by a still, small voice). Not only am I bound to them in love, but I am also actually called to, in some real sense (please don't minimize this before you qualify it), become one of them, to enter their world and be with them in it.

A generous orthodoxy is like that. It acknowledges that we're all a mess. It sees in our worst failures the possibility of our deepest repentance and God's opening for our most profound healing. It remembers Jesus' parable that wherever God sows good seed, "an enemy" will sow weed seeds. It realizes that you can't pull up the bad without uprooting the good too, and so it refrains from judging. It just rejoices wherever good seed grows.

I'm often asked if I have hope for Christianity. These days, I say, "My hope for Christianity depends on my hope for humanity, and we humans are not trending well." And in that realization, I find a compelling reason to stay Christian.

Brian D. McLaren

These emerging Christian leaders realize that if their message isn't good news for the poor, a message of liberation for the oppressed, it isn't the same message Jesus proclaimed.