Quotes About Compassion

While the crisis lasted, people loved each other," she wrote in her autobiography. "It was as though they were united in Christian solidarity.

You learn eventually that, while there are no villains, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are therefore all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.

He was a friend to all things wild, and the wild things repaid him with their friendship.

Compassion is the spontaneous response of love; pity the involuntary reflex of fear

looking at things from other people's point of view is practically the secret of success.

Empathy doesn't necessarily mean being self-sacrificing. Far from it. Understanding how someone else sees things doesn't imply that you'll act in his interest; in some situations — in war, for example — you want to do exactly the opposite.

Empathy is probably the single most important difference between a good hacker and a great one.

We need to talk with each other, honestly, simply, caringly. We need to learn how to talk about racism without rhetoric (which fans the flames); without attack or intimidation (which separates people from one another).

I'm asking you to tap into another set of feelings—understanding and compassion for people of color; outrage at injustice; courage, passion, and commitment to building a democratic, multicultural, and just society. Concentrate on what it is we can do, how we can make a difference.

All the lonely people. Where do they all belong

Buy it for anyone you know who cries in the shower, who drinks in the morning, whose life only has meaning when they're asleep and dreaming that they're somebody else. They will find comfort here. And if they don't, it's not your fault. They've always been this way. Some people are just all banged up. Good for you for trying to help. You're a great person. Give yourself a hand.

Just think of AIDS as . . . the guest that won't leave. The one we all hate. But you have to remember. Hey--it's still our party.

The most crucial prerequisite for any couple's longevity is to have both partners unequivocally accept, as a baseline, that the person they love is insane and has no morals.

Kindness is not an illusion and violence is not a rule. The true resting state of human affairs is not represented by a man hacking his neighbor into pieces with a machete. That is a sick aberration. No, the true state of human affairs is life as it ought to be lived.

A sad truth of human nature is that it is hard to care for people when they are abstractions, hard to care when it is not you or somebody close to you. Unless the world community can stop finding ways to dither in the face of this monstrous threat to humanity those words Never Again will persist in being one of the most abused phrases in the English language and one of the greatest lies of our time.

Wherever the killing season should next begin and people should become strangers to their neighbors and themselves, my hope is that there will still be those ordinary men who say a quiet no and open the rooms upstairs.

Quiet, ordinary people are often the only people with the real ability to defeat evil. They can give it the Rwandan no.

As long as we do violence to other animals, we'll keep on doing violence to ourselves.

love, as their parents knew, was not enough. Hunger and poverty could never be reduced by love alone.

Ah, oui, pauvre papillon. C'est un de mes prisonniers

Is not our capacity to laugh and cry the measure of our humanity?

as Henry James had said in a letter to a do-gooding friend, "Only don't, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses—remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another's, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own.

That seemed to be the theme in the Deep South: kindness, generosity, a welcome.

another wildly gesturing to her comatose baby and pleading for help