Quotes About Compassion

The labor movement is our brother's keeper! The labor movement is our sister's keeper!

I said I thought female labour of the sort exacted from these slaves, and corporal chastisement such as they endure, must be abhorrent to any manly or humane man.

Labour is the party for the many.

My only opinion on childbirth is not to have an opinion, and not to judge. We're all different and anything can happen when it comes to labour: you just don't know until you get there.

Humankind seems to have an enormous capacity for savagery, for brutality, for lack of empathy, for lack of compassion.

I think, a lot of times, where people see they're insufficient or lacking in certain areas, they feel they're being judged even when they're not. And they condemn themselves more than anyone else does.

Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people, and mention how important it is that compassion is the key, that it's the sine qua non of religion, people look kind of balked, and stubborn sometimes, as much to say, "what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people?" And sometimes we use religion just to back up these unworthy hatreds, because we're frightened too.

A project like Pangea, which enables us to enter in to the situations of others, imaginatively, is fulfilling what the religions call the Golden Rule... going into one's own experience, and going into other's experience, and seeing the world from another perspective that's what we desperately need in our dangerously polarized world.

Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity.

Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings.

Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people, and mention how important it is that compassion is the key, that it's the sine-qua-non of religion, people look kind of balked, and stubborn sometimes, as much to say, what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people?

Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day.

If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. (95)

Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.

Respect only has meaning as respect for those with whom I do not agree.

T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68)

Surely it's better to love others, however messy and imperfect the involvement, than to allow one's capacity for love to harden.

Truly loving another means letting go of all expectations. It means full acceptance, even celebration of another's personhood.

The first few times we make the choice to "be peaceful rather than right," it feels like denial. But with practice it will become the preferred choice.

Love is the mortar that holds the human structure together.

It's tricky business trying to place blame. For when we judge someone else's behavior, we quickly come into conflict with our own.

I barely heard him, I was too busy watching Pritkin, who had slumped over with his head on the sofa arm, shoulders shaking helplessly, and what looked suspiciously like tears leaking out from under his closed eyes. "Not that bad," he muttered, and then he was off again.

One day, you will say it to me again. You will be sober. And you will mean it." I was actually terrified that I already meant it. A guy might just be a keeper who hears your cry for help in his head. And comes into a den of thieves to get you out. And then holds your hair while you throw up for ten minutes.

Love brightens and purifies the heart.