Quotes About Compassion

Holmberg tried to help them, but he never fully grasped that the people he saw as remnants from the Paleolithic Age were actually the persecuted survivors of a recently shattered culture. It was as if he had come across refugees from a Nazi concentration camp, and concluded that they belonged to a culture that had always been barefoot and starving.

No need to act all hoity-toity. Aloofness is a bore. We're all lonely in one way or another.

Where exactly do you put your hands on somebody who hurts everywhere?

What kind of damage is done to our ability to love or understand and thus fully judge one another when daily we're encouraged to forget that people are people and view them instead as so much pasteboard, scenery, clutter, generalized instances (of murder, of rape, of embezzlement, etc.)?

There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.

Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

Die Tiere empfinden wie der Mensch Freude und Schmerz, Glück und Unglück.

Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions. This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings.

The moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals

The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute to a man.

En realidad, dudo de que la compasión sea una cualidad natural o innata.

It is not necessary to teach others, to cure them or to improve them; it is only necessary to live among them, sharing the human condition and being present to them in love.

I no longer want a monastery which is too secure, I want a small monastery, like the house of a poor workman who is not sure if tomorrow he will find work and bread, who with all his being shares the suffering of the world.

In the end, he said he judged the Bible to be a sound book. Nevertheless, he wondered why the white people were not better than they are, having had it for so long. He promised that just as soon as white people achieved Christianity, he would recommend it to his own folks.

Some far day when she had become a better person and could feel something besides stinging anger that her beautiful, gentle sister had not protected herself more carefully against a world of threat.

Monroe had in fact preached that God was not at all such a one as ourselves, not one to be temperamentally inclined to tread ragefully upon us until our blood flew up and stained all His white raiment, but rather that He looked on both the best and worst of mankind with weary, bemused pity.

When we bless people and treat them lovingly, we are using our status the way God intended.

After all, anyone can love people who are lovely.

Charles J. Shields

Be good sweet maid and let who will be clever

For I fear the Gods, and show hospitality to all strangers; knowing that good deeds, like evil ones, always return to those who do them.

Put away from you this unfounded grief; only let it be a lesson to you to be as kind as possible to those you love; and remember, when they are gone from you, you will never think you had been kind enough.

Never judge someone by their relatives.

Reese, your books might not tell you this, so I will. Every heart has two parts, the part that pumps and the part that loves. If you're going to spend your life fixing broken hearts, then learn about both. You can't just fix one with no concern for the other.