Quotes About Compassion

We commit to doing all it takes to free ourselves completely from all our varieties of confusion and unconscious habit and suffering, because these prevent us from being fully there for others. In the language of Buddhism, our ultimate commitment is to attain "enlightenment." In essence, this means knowing fully who we really are.

It's about being able to stay present with ourselves. It becomes increasingly clear that we won't be free of self-destructive patterns unless we develop a compassionate understanding of what they are.

IN the morning when you wake up, reflect on the day ahead and aspire to use it to keep a wide-open heart and mind. At the end of the day, before going to sleep, think over what you've done. If you fulfilled your aspiration, even once, rejoice in that. If you went against your aspiration, rejoice that you are able to see what you did and are no longer living in ignorance. This way you will be inspired to go forward with increasing clarity, confidence, and compassion.

In a nutshell, when life is pleasant, think of others. When life is a burden, think of others. If this is the only training we ever remember to do, it will benefit us tremendously and everyone else as well.

all of us have had to start in the same place—as confused, reactive, but basically good human beings.

This pattern is what we observe in many difficult situations. For instance, if someone is very ill, everyone pulls together to help, but if the illness goes on for a year or two, people start pulling away because they're not up for that much.

IN ORDER to feel compassion for other people, we have to feel compassion for ourselves. In particular, to care about people who are fearful, angry, jealous, overpowered by addictions of all kinds, arrogant, proud, miserly, selfish, mean, you name it—to have compassion and to care for these people means not to run from the pain of finding these things in ourselves.

I realized that it is these two things that staying with regrets offers: It can become the seed of compassion and empathy so that you can stand in the shoes of other people because you'er feeling exactly what they feel. And it spurs you on to help people in the future rather than hurt them.

This is where tenderness comes in. When things are shaky and nothing is working, we might realize that we are on the verge of something. We might realize that this is a very vulnerable and tender place, and that tenderness can go either way. We can shut down and feel resentful or we can touch in on that throbbing quality. There is definitely something tender and throbbing about groundlessness.

As long as we don't want to be honest and kind with ourselves, then we are always going to be infants. When we begin just to try to accept ourselves, the ancient burden of self-importance lightens up considerably. Finally there's room for genuine inquisitiveness, and we find we have an appetite for what's out there.

Selfless help, helping others without an agenda, is the result of having helped ourselves. We

In reality, whatever arises in our experience is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong. Yet we spend so much energy and suffer so much because we believe in all these concepts.

Our story lines are different, but when it comes to pain and pleasure and our reaction to them, people everywhere are the same.

How do we work with our minds when we meet our match? Rather than indulge or reject our experience, we can somehow let the energy of the emotion, the quality of what we're feeling, pierce us to the heart. This is easier said than done, but it's a noble way to live. It's definitely the path of compassion—the path of cultivating human bravery and kindheartedness.

There comes a time when we are able to be pierced to the heart by our own suffering and the suffering of others, and by our own regrets, without it dragging us down. We can hold the sadness of life in our hearts while never forgetting the beauty of the world, and the goodness of being alive.

Often we think of the people we don't like as our enemies, but in fact, they're all-important to us. They're our greatest teachers: special messengers who show up just when we need them, to point out our fixed identity.

learned that a person can only take so much. He found that taking on suffering had to be balanced with love and kindness, with the completeness of life.

Before we can heal others with our speech, we need to get a handle on our own mind and its propensities.

The Buddha taught that all beings have the potential to wake up completely, and that all of us will eventually get there. He and many other wise people in this world have given us tools for taking whatever occurs in our lives and using it to cultivate our basic goodness and become more and more able to be there for others. Whatever the future brings—welcome or unwelcome—we can use on our path of awakening. To me, this attitude is the best kind of optimism.

The way to reunite with bodhichitta is to lighten up in your practice and in your whole life. Meditation

The idea isn't to try to get rid of your anger, but to make friends with it, to see it clearly with precision and honesty, and also to see it with gentleness.

Rather than letting our negativity get the better of us, we could acknowledge that right now we feel like a piece of shit and not be squeamish about taking a good look. That's the compassionate thing to do. That's the brave thing to do. We could smell that piece of shit. We could feel it; what is its texture, color, and shape?

The problem isn't with the beliefs themselves but with how we use them to get ground under our feet, how we use them to feel right and to make someone else wrong

Cutting our expectations for a cure is a gift we can give ourselves.