Quotes About Compassion

It is strange that we, who are capable of so much suffering, should inflict so much suffering.

His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at their feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet.

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves.

What is nobler, she mused, turning over the photographs, than to be a woman to whom every one turns, in sorrow or difficulty?

I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.

O friendship, how piercing are your darts - there, there, again there.

When I heard you cry I followed you, and saw you put down your handkerchief, screwed up, with its rage, with its hate, knotted in it.

But we have other lives, I think, I hope,' she murmured. 'We live in others, … We live in things.

If anyone could have saved me it would have been you.

I was fighting with Thoby on the lawn. We were pommelling each other with our fists. Just as I raised my fist to hit him, I felt: why hurt another person? I dropped my hand instantly, and stood there, and let him beat me. I remember the feeling. It was a feeling of hopeless sadness. It was as if I became aware of something terrible; and of my own powerlessness. I slunk off alone, feeling horribly depressed.

The reason why it is easy to kill another person must be that one's imagination is too sluggish to conceive what his life means to him - the infinite possibilities of a succession of days which are furled in him, & have already been spent.

And then she looked up and saw Flush. Something unusual in his look must have struck her. She paused. She laid down her pen. Once he had roused her with a kiss, and she thought that he was Pan. He had eaten chicken and rice pudding soaked in cream. He had given up the sunshine for her sake. She called him to her and said she forgave him.

the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water

But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

It is the fate of the innocent to suffer.

Later she wasn't so positive perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.

And if anyone complains that prunes, even when mitigated by custard, are an uncharitable vegetable (fruit they are not), stringy as a miser's heart and exuding a fluid such as might run in misers' veins who have denied themselves wine and warmth for eighty years and yet not given to the poor, he should reflect that there are people whose charity embraces even the prune.

it was impossible to dislike any one if one looked at them.

After all, we are not responsible. We are not judges. We are not called upon to torture our fellows with thumb-screws and irons; we are not called upon to mount pulpits and lecture them on pale Sunday afternoons. It is better to look at a rose, or to read Shakespeare as I read him here in Shaftesbury Avenue.

Like all feelings felt for oneself, Mrs. Ramsay thought, it made one sad. It was so inadequate, what one could give in return; and what Rose felt was quite out of proportion to anything she actually was.

Little Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life but could be unsealed suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally, by this sort of thing––poor women waiting to see the Queen go past––poor women, nice little children, orphans, widows, the War––tut tut––actually had tears in his eyes.

Once you stumble... human nature is on you.

A imensa autopiedade dele, sua exigência de compaixão jorrava e se espraiava em poças aos pés dela, e a única coisa que ela fazia, miserável pecadora que era, era arrepanhar um pouco a saia em volta dos tornozelos para não se molhar.