Quotes About Compassion

perhaps the most important lesson I learned is that there are no walls between humans and the elephants except those we put up ourselves, and that until we allow not only elephants, but all living creatures their place in the sun, we can never be whole ourselves.

Something I learned long ago. It is not necessary to know what a person is afraid of. It is enough to know the person is afraid.

My God, these folks don't know how to love -- that's why they love so easily.

No form of love is wrong, so long as it is love.

For the robot classes and masses are only kept sane by the kindness of living women and men.

The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time... love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know.

Empathy involves at least emotional sensitivity to others and at most an ability to understand another's point of view.

Lawrence Freedman

Try to make at least one person happy every day. If you cannot do a kind deed, speak a kind word. If you cannot speak a kind word, think a kind thought. Count up, if you can, the treasure of happiness that you would dispense in a week, in a year, in a lifetime!

Strength of character means the ability to overcome resentment against others, to hide hurt feelings, and to forgive quickly.

Nobody needs a smile so much as the one who has none to give. So get used to smiling heart-warming smiles, and you will spread sunshine in a sometimes dreary world.

The practice of patience toward one another, the overlooking of one another's defects, and the bearing of one another's burdens is the most elementary condition of all human and social activity in the family, in the professions, and in society.

At one point in one's life you get a sense of your own mortality. You view death in a certain way. From that point on you look at your fellow man with a new understanding. I have some feelings for it now. They say it happens in your mid-thirties. Sometimes I have a fantasy of my corpse being carried around in a box, people mourning me. Saying, "We shouldn't have treated him so badly.

Never have I met a person doing terrible things who would meet my own eyes peacefully. To gaze into another person's face is to do two things: to recognize their humanity, and to assert your own.

Feelings aren't supposed to be rational. If we stop judging fears as invalid, we can find a deeper empathy.

Maybe we swore we would never be harsh with our children the way others were harsh with us. Then, just when they need us most - when they act up and misbehave and call us names and son on - we get angry and punish them, or feel hurt and block them out. We momentarily forget how fragile our little ones are, just as they forget about cooperation or sharing or calming down and following the rules.

You must protect people who have no social clout because the health of a congregation is measured by its ability to tolerate dweebs.

If the human species is differentiated from the beasts by the marvel of consciousness, then we enact our humanity and the very authenticity of our being by straining to "know" through awareness the "unthinkable" experience of others.

Those laboratory animals have done us no harm. They are tortured and murdered in the name of science. I know, I used to do it myself to my great shame. Is the benefit to humanity worth the sacrifice of so many animal lives? I say, No.

Love is always right.

My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak. What I see in my country, progressively over these years, is that the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer. The rich have become indifferent through a philosophy of greed, and the poorer have become hopeless because they're not properly cared for. That's actually something that is happening in many Western societies. Your own, I am told, is not free from it.

Each of us has only a quantum of compassion ... if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.

It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.

Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.