Quotes About Compassion

When we find ourselves in a situation in which our buttons are being pushed, we can choose to repress or act out, or we can choose to practice. If we can start to do the exchange, breathing in with the intention of keeping our hearts open to the embarrassment or fear or anger that we feel, then to our surprise we find that we are also open to what the other person is feeling. Open heart is open heart.

People who are hungry don't have the heart to think about others. Sometimes they can't even care for their own family. Hunger quashes man's will to help his fellow man. I've seen fathers steal food from their own children's lunchboxes. As they scarf down the corn they have only one overpowering desire: to placate, if even for just one moment, that feeling of insufferable need.

For sorrow to which one gives voice is worth nothing if it does not touch the heart.

Here's the thing: You rescue us every day in small, quiet ways, so why not in this way? Let us into your mystery, tell us how you would like to be loved, show us how to see you, really see you.

I think that most writers who are trying to write important and difficult books are in many ways putting their own humanity into question. Sometimes the journey is finding out where you stand in relationship to your own humanity and to the humanity of others.

What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion.

As with much of the world's problems, they become public--or much more of interest--the moment they begin to impact the West.

But the thing is that, in the end, we each must decide how comfortable we are with how much we hurt other people.

I shall not weep for any of them, nor regret their fate, nor shake one feather in sympathy.

Maybe, she thought, the reign of malicious sarcasm was over and she could be a good person again.

when the subject matter is potentially a hot button, it never hurts to be prepared, anticipating the kinds of thoughts and feelings that your partner might experience.

The only way to BE happy is to GIVE happy.

The reason why I love people, and writing about them, is because they don't always respond with hate and anger. If they did I wouldn't have a story to tell. Who wants to know about someone who was brutalised and became brutal? I'm interested in the exceptions.

I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.

This was how a kind heart broke, after all: inward, making no shrapnel. Dear

It was an air one might still breathe, if everyone forgiven was brave.

Still shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn't the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and I didn't deserve my own pity.

I smiled back at Charlie and I knew that the hopes of this whole human world could fit inside one soul. This is a good trick. This is called, globalization.

If you cannot read the beautiful things that have happened in someone's life, why should you care about their sadness?

Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it. For me and the girls from my village, horror is a disease and we are sick with it.

Don't you think we shall all be kinder to one another? I hope one's class will matter less and one's convictions more. I hope we might be more inclined to pardon one another for our errors with both.

It is possible to do good things with an imperfect situation.

Ä°f you cannot read the beautiful things that have happened in someone's life, why should you care about their sadness? That is why people do not like us refugees. It is because they only know the tragic parts of our life, so they think we are tragic people.

Let them say whatever gives them comfort.