Quotes About Compassion

You don't know what's happening on the other side of the wall, because you don't want to know.

So what can we really do for each other except--just love each other and be each other's witness? And haven't we got the right to hope--for more? So that we can really stretch into whoever we really are?

Love him,' said Jacques, with vehemence, 'love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

It was better not to judge the man who had gone down under an impossible burden. It was better to remember: Thou knowest this man's fall, but thou knowest not his wrassling.

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own-which it is-and render impassable with our bodies the corridors to the gas chamber. For if they come for you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

The way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one's head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain. You ought to have some apprehension that the man you see before you was once even younger than you are now and arrived at his present wretchedness by imperceptible degrees.

I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them.

For here you were, Big James, named for me—you were a big baby, I was not—here you were, to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.

But what was the point, the purpose, of my salvation if it did not permit me to behave with love toward others, no matter how they behaved toward me? What others did was their responsibility, for which they would answer when the judgment trumpet sounded.

Whereas Jesus and his disciples were distrusted by the state largely because they respected the poor and shared everything, the fundamentalists of the present hour would appear not to know that the poor exist.

We had our arms round each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who know that he is going under in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion. This energy is all that one finds in the rubble of vanished civilizations, and the only hope for ours.

And his mind could not contain the terrible stretch of time that united twelve men fishing by the shores of Galilee, and black men weeping on their knees tonight, and he, a witness.

the righteous must be able to locate the damned.

You stop that,' he said, in a voice which he did not recognise. 'You stop that. You stop trying to kill me. It's not my fault I'm white. It's not my fault you're black. It's not my fault he's dead.

He had been bruised so badly that the eyes of strangers lacerated him like salt.

We are happy, even, that we have food for Daniel, who eats peacefully, not knowing that we are laughing, but sensing that something wonderful has happened to us, which means that wonderful things happen, and that maybe something wonderful will happen to him. It's wonderful, anyway, to be able to help a person to have that feeling.

He had been bruised, so to speak, so badly that the eyes of strangers lacerated him like salt.

I know I can't help you very much right now—God knows what I wouldn't give if I could. But I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends.

The burden of his salvation seemed to be on me and I could not endure it.

For the first time in her life she hated it all. The white city. The white world. She could not that day think of one decent white person in the whole world. She sat there and she hoped that one day God with tortures inconceivable would grind them utterly into humility and make them know that black boys and black girls whom they treated with such condescension, such distain and such good humor had hearts like human beings too, More human hearts than theirs.