Quotes About Compassion

What can I know? Nothing for sure. What ought I to do? Try not to hurt anyone. What may I hope for? For the best (but it won't make any difference).

Those of us who have the luck to enjoy good health forget about this vast parallel universe of the unwell-their daily miseries, their banal ordeals. Only when you cross that frontier into the world of ill-health do you recognize its quiet, massive presence, its brooding permanence.

Love is not a feeling. It does not belong to that category of bodily experience which would include, for instance, pain.

What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise?

It was ... a love engendering gentleness and goodness that moved me and that I saw in you

Complaint They call me and I go. It is a frozen road past midnight, a dust of snow caught in the rigid wheeltracks. The door opens. I smile, enter and shake off the cold. Here is a great woman on her side in the bed. She is sick, perhaps vomiting, perhaps laboring to give birth to a tenth child. Joy! Joy! Night is a room darkened for lovers, through the jalousies the sun has sent one golden needle! I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.

Each one of us must suffer long to himself before he can learn that he is but one in a great community of wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from the foundation of the world.

What sets our species apart is not just what men will do to other men, but how tirelessly they justify it.

We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.

Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won't have to haunt for happiness

It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.

surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity..

We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

On the instant when we come to realize that tragedy is second-hand.

The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of man's puny, inexhaustible, voice still talking! ...not simply because man alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because man has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion, sacrifice and endurance.

So never be afraid, never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion; against injustice, lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the other thousands of rooms like this one today and tomorrow and next week will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.

If we could have just done something so dreadful and Father said That's sad too people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today and I said, You can shirk all things and he said, Ah can you.

Hush, now, she said, stroking his head. Hush. Dilsey got you. But he bellowed slowly, abjectly, without tears; the grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sound.

So the next day we all said, "She will kill herself"; and we said it would be the best thing.

The work of the artist is to lift up people's hearts and help them endure.

I am not religious, I reckon. But peace is in my heart: I know it is. I have done things but neither better nor worse than them that pretend otherlike, and I know that Old Marster will care for me as for ere a sparrow that falls.

sardonic cerebral pity of the intelligent for any human injustice or folly or suffering