Quotes About Compassion

If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even in the brief flashes people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.

Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love?

A French Jesuit priest who encountered them in the 1650s wrote: "No poorhouses are needed among them, because they are neither mendicants nor paupers. . . . Their kindness, humanity and courtesy not only makes them liberal with what they have, but causes them to possess hardly anything except in common.

To put it another way, war in our time is always a war against children. And if the children of other countries are to be granted an equal right to life with our own children, then we must use our extraordinary human ingenuity to find nonmilitary solutions for world problems.

it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

Norris met another survivor on board who told him that he had been bringing home a prized dog on the Titanic and had gone to the kennels and released all the dogs a half hour before the ship went under. Norris described to him how when he was swimming away from the sinking liner he had spied the black face of a French bulldog in the water.

In an election speech in 1936, he said: I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen two hundred limping, exhausted men come out of line – the survivors of a regiment of one thousand that went forward forty-eight hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.

Weapons are the tools of violence; all decent men detest them. Weapons are the tools of fear; a decent man will avoid them except in the direst necessity and, if compelled, will use them only with the utmost restraint. Peace is the highest value.… He enters a battle gravely, with sorrow and with great compassion, as if he were attending a funeral. (ch. 31) That

Dismiss these post facto accounts as legends if we must; there is no question but that in his life as the Buddha the springs of tenderness gushed abundant. Wanting to draw the arrows of sorrow from everyone he met, he gave to each his sympathy, his enlightenment, and the strange power of soul, which, even when he barely spoke a word, gripped the hearts of his visitors and left them transformed.

Suffering led the Buddha to enlightenment, and it may cause us, against our will, to grow in compassion, awareness, and possibly eventually peace.

From the majestic pontifical High Mass in St. Peter's to the quiet simplicity of a Quaker meeting; from the intellectual sophistication of Saint Thomas Aquinas to the moving simplicity of spirituals such as Lord, I want to be a Christian; from St. Paul's in London, the parish Church of Great Britain, to Mother Teresa in the slums of Calcutta-- all this is Christianity.

People hated and killed each other back then. Now even those who survived are dying, leaving this world one by one. Unless we find a way to forgive one another, none of us will ever be able to see each other again. (2007: 88)

R]egardless of one's cause, one should always treat those close to him as well as humanly possible.

I suppose the time is ripe for them now, for the people who were there. They're ready now, I think. So... they appear before us as part of their redemption. But you and I, we weren't to blame, were we? Suddenly slamming his thick palm down on the table, Uncle Some shouted, Show me one soul who wasn't to blame! (2007: 162)

Los niños creíamos que se trataba de una enfermedad sin cura, lo saludábamos con lástima y una vez nos atrevimos a preguntarle si la homosexualidad le dolía mucho.

If you do something to benefit one person, that is an absolute gain, and its relative insignificance in the wider scheme is irrelevant. Benefit two people without concomitant harm to others - or a village, tribe, city, class, nation, society or civilisation - and the benefits are scalable, arithmetic. There is no excuse beyond fatalistic self-indulgence and sheer laziness for doing nothing.

The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what we are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others.

The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others.

How do we justify calling ourselves civilised, after all? Is it the books we read? The delicacy of our tastes? Our place in continuing a line of belief ando of common values which strech back a thousand years and more? All this, indeed, but what does it mean? How does it show itself? Are you civilised if you read the right books, yet stand by while your neighbours ara massacred, your lanas laid waste, your cities brought to ruin?»

a boy can't imagine how hard he will find it, someday, to forgive his own enemies. Or his own loved ones. He has no inkling that good men can sometimes find it impossible to forgive themselves. The darkest mistakes can be forgiven, but they can never be undone.

Slowly, though, I find that the woman coming to my aid is no longer the woman I married. Rather, she is the wife and mother who left behind husband and son, who lived for years in tortured solitude, and who stands before me now as a virtuoso of the self-recrimination I'm only beginning to learn. She is helping me because she loves me, because she knows this darkness and has its map. There is indeed no medicine. But there is a journey I no longer have to make alone.

A priest can forgive a stranger so quickly that a boy can't imagine how hard he will find it, someday, to forgive his own enemies. Or his own loved ones. He has no inkling that good men can sometimes find it impossible to forgive themselves. The darkest mistakes can be forgiven, but they can never be undone. I hope my son will always remain a stranger to those sins

looked at her and at the streaks of his blood down her face he prayed that her eyes would open.

Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and the beginning of morality