Quotes About Compassion

Forgiveness means you've found a way forward that acknowledges harm done and hurt caused without letting either your anger or your pain rule your life or define your relationship with the one who did you wrong.

Also, because it's harder to be magnanimous when you're in your twenties, I think, and so that's why I'd like to remind you of it.

He said, "Don't get me wrong. I want to hear everything about your life. But I want you to know that you don't need to tell me this to get me to love you. You don't have to be broken for me.

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.

you is acceptance. And the thing after that, forgiveness.

Though we live in a time and place and culture that tries to tell us otherwise, suffering is what happens when truly horrible things happen to us.

To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having first been nailed to the cross.

We act as if we don't know that awful things happen to all sorts of people every second of every day and the only thing that's changed about the world or the existence or nonexistence of God or the color of the sky is that the awful thing is happening to us.

I suggest you forget about forgiveness for now and strive for acceptance instead.

You must do everything you can to get what you want and need, to find "that type of love." It's there for you. I know it's arrogant of me to say so, because what the hell do I know about looking like a monster or a beast? Not a thing. But I do know that we are here, all of us—beasts and monsters and beauties and wallflowers alike—to do the best we can. And every last one of us can do better than give up.

I learned then what I have learned in many other ways over the course of my life: that 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.

You are not a terrible person for wanting to break up with someone you love. You don't need a reason to leave. Wanting to leave is enough.

I got you," my friend the writer and teacher Jen Pastiloff says so often she has it tattooed on her arm. That's what this vespers thing felt like to me, Spent. Like someone had me. Like for the tiniest glimmer of a moment I was held by a force more powerful than the force I could muster on my own.

our minds are small, but our hearts are big. Just about every one of us has fucked up at some point or another

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,

Our minds are small, but our hearts are big. Just about every one of us has fucked up at one point or another. You're in a pickle. You did things you didn't hope to do. You have not always been your

feel that way too when I say such things to others who have lost someone they loved. We all do. It feels lame because we like to think we can solve things. It feels insufficient because there is nothing we can actually do to change what's horribly true.

enough compassion to make us feel safe within our broken need, and enough wisdom to hold on to hope.

Not how the kittens suffered during those weeks they were wandering inside the dark building with no way out—though surely there's something there too—but how they saved themselves. How frightened those kittens were, and yet how they persisted. How when two strangers offered up their palms, they stepped in.

Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many

You Don't Have to Be Broken for Me

This is not because he doesn't love you. But love doesn't make a mean drunk not a mean drunk or a narcissist not a narcissist or a jackass not a jackass.

I want to see the contours of your second beating heart.

we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.