Quotes About Compassion

The new spirituality is that it will produce an experience in human encounters in which we become a living demonstration of the basic spiritual teaching 'We are all one.

You can _know_ yourself to be generous, but unless you _do_ something which displays generosity, you have nothing but a concept. You can _know_ yourself to be kind, but unless you _do_ someone a kindness, you have nothing but an idea about yourself.

Give yourself abundant pleasure, that you may have an abundant pleasure to give others.

Yet do not choose sex instead of love, but as a celebration of it. And do not choose power over, but power with. And do not choose fame as an end in itself, but as a means to a larger end. And do not choose success at the expense of others, but as a tool with which to assist others. And do not choose winning at any cost, but winning that costs others nothing, and even brings them gain as well.

All of your life you have been taught that it is better to give than to receive. Yet you cannot give what you do not have. This is why self-gratification is so important—and why it is so unfortunate that it has come to sound so ugly. Obviously, self-gratification at the expense of others is not what we're talking about here. This is not about ignoring the needs of others. Yet life should also not have to be about ignoring your own needs.

Compassion is not created as a result of certain conditions. Certain conditions are created as a result of compassion. Abundance is not created as a result of certain conditions. Certain conditions are created as a result of abundance.

there is great healing in acknowledging "mine is not a better way, mine is merely another way.

Noelle: But I look like a freak now. Craig: I told you, Noelle, everybody has problems. Some people just hide their crap better than others. But people aren't going to look at you and run away. They're going to look at you and think that they can talk to you, and that you'll understand, and that you're brave, and that you're strong. And you are. You're brave and strong. p.366-367

Misfortune is no excuse for cruelty.

Dad nods, looks me dead in the eyes; slowly and regretfully, he banishes all the smiling and joking from his face, and for once he's just my dad, watching his son who has fallen so low.

Don't kill yourself, okay?

You have a chemical imbalance, that is all. If you were a diabetic, would you be ashamed

After college, I went through my own shit and decided that all physical suffering in the world couldn't compare to mental anguish. And when I got myself, I decided to help other people.

And you shouldn't assume that everything is always about you.

Now Mom is crying, and I learn something I didn't know about the human body: if your mom cries, you cry.

The more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.

Humans aren't as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.

And sometimes I forget that powerful people rarely do all they can to help those who cannot help themselves.

Children do not yet know that the world doesn't revolve around them.

If we instead back away from all that divides us, you might find common, unifying perspectives on the world. If so, watch where you step.

Because I wanted to save women when mean people were trying to harm them.

But we take better care of our cats and dogs than we do of homeless humans in the street. If we serve as pets to aliens, might they take better care of us than we ever will of ourselves?

If humans are intelligent, so is the rest of Nature. Native peoples have always said this. The human species shows its decreasing ability to communicate--both internally and externally--by its failure to recognize this intelligence. In this sense, our immune failures are one more example of not having ears (receptors) to hear the voice of Nature with compassion.

And just when you'd think [humans] were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they occasionally showed more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of.