Quotes About Compassion

Action without compassion is like planting a dead tree. It will never grow. But any action that contains compassion is planting a living tree that grows endlessly and never dies. Or even if the tree dies, it always leaves a seed behind, which will grow into another tree. That organic quality of compassion goes on and on and on.

sleeping—you should always take the attitude of being of benefit to all sentient beings.

The Root Text of the Seven Points of Training the Mind, and on the commentary by Jamgön Kongtrül.

Compassion has nothing to do with achievement at all. It is spacious and very generous. When a person develops real compassion, he is uncertain whether he is being generous to others or to himself because compassion is environmental generosity, without direction, without 'for me' and without 'for them.' It is filled with joy, spontaneously existing joy, and constant joy in the sense of trust, in the sense that joy contains tremendous wealth, richness.

Chögyam Trungpa

1. Not practicing the four dharmas of a practitioner (not returning curses for curses, anger for anger, blow for blow, or insult for insult)

4. Not correcting those who are heedless

reads: [1] May their evil deeds ripen in me. May all my virtue without exception ripen in them. [2] I offer all my profit and gain to sentient beings, those honorable ones; I will take on all loss and defeat. [3] May all the evil deeds and suffering of sentient beings ripen in me, and all my virtue and happiness ripen in sentient beings.

When you commit yourself to the bodhisattva path, the path of helping others, you feel as if you have done it before and you have been doing it all along. It is like living up to your inheritance, or taking over your parents' business. You feel that there is something quite natural and right about it.

If you search for awakened heart, if you put your hand through your rib cage and feel for it, there is nothing there except for tenderness. You feel sore and soft, and if you open your eyes to the rest of the world, you feel tremendous sadness.

nyingje, which literally means "noble heart.

Refusing to Give Up The essence of human bravery is refusing to give up on anyone or anything. We can never say that we are simply falling to pieces or that anyone else is, and we can never say that about the world either. We can save the world from destruction, to begin with. That is why the Shambhala vision exists. It is a centuries-old idea: by serving the world we can save it.

Because we all make mistakes, we also know that everyone else makes mistakes. So, within reason, we don't judge each other on the mistakes we make. We judge each other on how we deal with those inevitable mistakes.

Forgive me…for everything…I have done…A - a wiser father…may have done differently. I am not…wise.

How will I teach this mind what it is to have a soul? How will I teach this mind to understand pain? How will I teach it to want to take on another person's suffering?

There are better ways to teach a child compassion.

When a person comes to talk to you, you should be patient and listen. Especially if he has hurt you in any way.

You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it. ... You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn't always talk. Sometimes - sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to.

I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, "What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul!

But really, we also need to learn how to love one another as women. How to appreciate and respect each other.

Fair words without good deeds to a man in misery are like a saddle of gold clapped upon a galled horse.

Then, putting his palm on top of my head, like a warm hat, he whispered, "Pay attention. Be a person for whom love is not lost.

How hard it is to hate a person you've once loved.

Thank you for grieving with me. Your tears made me feel as if my own were worth shedding.