Quotes About Compassion

Yes, I'd been a loving daughter and yes, I'd been there for her when it mattered, but I could have been better. I could have been what I'd begged her to say I was: the best daughter in the world.

Inhabit the beauty that lives in your beastly body and strive to see the beauty in all the other beasts.

I want someone special. I want to be loved and to receive love; to have someone there for me. My hunger for this is so great that I fear it's too much to ask anyone for. I'm afraid that if the volunteer coordinator did go out with me, I'd share all this with her at once, and though she'd be compassionate, she'd be scared off because she'd perceive me as needy.

I think we underestimate the universe's desire to be kind to us.

If I believed in God, I'd see evidence of his existence in that. In your darkest hour you were held afloat by the human love that was given to you when you most needed it. That would have been true regardless of the outcome of Emma's surgery. It would have been the grace that carried you through even if things had not gone as well as they did, much as we hate to ponder that.

You need to stop feeling sorry for yourself. I don't say this as a condemnation—I need regular reminders to stop feeling sorry for myself too.

I'm going to address you bluntly, but it's a directness that rises from my compassion for you, not my judgment of you.

It all matters - every sin, every regret, every affliction. As a proof, she offered an account of her own struggle to reckon with a cruelty she'd absorbed.

It will never be okay," a friend who lost her mom in her teens said to me a couple years ago. "It will never be okay that our mothers are dead.

My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours.

when we're in the presence of someone else's pain, the burden of not-doing is so much greater than the burden of doing. Doing lifts the burden. Even if it's a small thing. Like writing a letter.

And in the meanwhile, cultivate an understanding of a bunch of the other things that the best, sanest people on the planet know: that life is long, that people both change and remain the same, that every last one of us will need to fuck up and be forgiven, that we're all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.

But Cheryl wasn't just trying to shock some callow kid into greater compassion. She was announcing the nature of her mission as Sugar. Inexplicable sorrows await all of us. That was her essential point. Life isn't some narcissistic game you play online. It all matters—every sin, every regret, every affliction.

But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got.

your sister was attempting to show you what a real perfect couple looks like: happy, humane, and occasionally all fucked up.

In this sense, she offers what we wish every mother would: enough compassion to make us feel safe within our broken need, and enough wisdom to hold on to hope.

that life is long, that people both change and remain the same, that every last one of us will need to fuck up and be forgiven, that we're all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way, that all roads lead eventually to the mountaintop.

I've long believed literature's greatest superpower is how it makes us feel less alone. Across generations, cultures, classes, races, genders, and every other divide, stories and sentences can make us think, Oh yes, me too. That is precisely how it feels to love and lose and triumph and try again.

She was a real human being laying herself bare, fearlessly, that we might come to understand the nature of our own predicaments.

think the answer to most problems is more often than not outside of the right/wrong binary that we tend to cling to when we're angry or scared or in pain.

The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over anything. Or at least not anything that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering.

The only thing I ever hope to do as a writer is to make people feel less alone, to make them feel more human, to make them feel what I have felt so many times as a reader: stories have the power to save us by illuminating the most profoundly beautiful and terrible things about our existence.

Anything else? To be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of being. Your life will be a hundred times better for it. This is good advice for anyone at any age, but particularly for those in their twenties.

Why? Because in your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.