Quotes About Compassion

WHEN TRAMPS and hoboes would come to their door for food, the southern white people would drive them away. But if a Negro come, they will feed him. They'll even give them money. They'll ask them: Do you smoke, do you dip snuff? Yes, ma'am, yes, ma'. They was always nice in a nasty way to Negroes. But their own color, they wouldn't do that for 'em.

It's very important you learn people as people are. Anybody can go around and write a book about a person, but that book doesn't always tell you that person really. At that particular moment when you are talkin' to that person, maybe that's how that person were. Tomorrow they can be different people.

As long as you can say I'm better than they are, then there's somebody below you can kick. But once you get over that, you see that you're not any better off than they are. In fact, you're worse off 'cause you're believin' a lie.

My neighbors were angry with my mother, because she fed hungry men at the back door. They said it would bring others, and then what would she do? She said, "I'll feed them till the food runs out." It wasn't until years later, I realized the fear people had of these men. We didn't have it in our house.

They would sit and talk and tell us their hard luck story. Whether it was true or not, we never questioned it. It's very important you learn people as people are.

The greatest gift we can give one another is rapt attention to one another's existence.

Lucky is the spouse who dies first, who never has to know what survivors endure.

I think it's possible that when you think that the future might bring great sadness, you become more generous that you ever has been before, so you can carry other people's happiness with you.

goodness is ours to dispense. It's a currency that each of us gets to invent and denominate. David's had pictures of Chopin and Keith Richards on it. Mine had my dog.

We often talk about "getting out of our comfort zone," but rarely about entering someone else's.

For loving-kindness to be real, for it to have moral value, he observed, it must be practiced with consideration "of the other's distress alone".

Love has an immense ability to help heal the devastating wounds that life sometimes deals us. Love also enhances our sense of connection to the larger world. Loving responsiveness is the foundation of a truly compassionate, civilized society.

I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy...that makes you unkind.

It seems we need someone to know us as we are--with all we have done--and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone's sight: Know this about me, and yet love me. Please. ...for...others it seems there must be a person to redeem us to ourselves. It isn't enough, apparently, to know oneself. To forgive oneself in secret.

I learned a long time ago that some people would rather die than forgive. It's a strange truth, but forgiveness is a painful and difficult process. It's not something that happens overnight. It's an evolution of the heart.

And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love.

People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It's that hard.

Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.

In a weird way I must have loved my little collection of hurts and wounds. They provided me with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional...What a special case I was.

We all need to feel understood and connected to ourselves and to others.

Considering the fact that we're all laced with flaws, idiosyncrasies, and vulnerabilities, wouldn't it be wise and kind to adopt an attitude of gentleness in relating to each other?

We get off the guilt train by reminding ourselves that we are not responsible for other people's happiness.

Be kind, for everybody you meet is fighting a hard battle' attributed to Plato, and many others

Goodness means telling good lies, so that people won't get hurt by true words.