Quotes About Compassion

Power is power, Garion. The results are the same. You don't have to hurt people if you don't want to.

I realized then that if I could teach my children only one or two basic principles, tolerance would be one of them.

Un époux, c'est quelqu'un qui travaille au jardin avec toi et qui te réchauffe la nuit dans le lit conjugal. Un homme qui s'inquiète pour toi quand personne d'autre n'a remarqué que tu n'allais pas bien. Quelqu'un qui te tient la main quand tu es malade ou aux portes de la mort.

It's a thin line between what we're calling acceptable and not acceptable. As a leader, you're supposed to know when not to cross it. But how do you know? Does the army teach us how to control our emotions? Does the army teach us how to deal with a friend bleeding out in front of you? No.

Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.

Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.

There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it.

I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.

It is within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

That what appears to be egoism so often isn't.

If you've never wept and want to, have a child.

The encaged and suicidal have a really hard time imagining anyone caring passionately about anything.

That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it.

That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.

The drunk and the maimed both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether.

You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain.

I'm awful sorry to bother. I can come back. I was wondering if maybe there was any special Program prayer for when you want to hang yourself.

That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.

The doctor gazed at her with a patience she was meant to see.

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention ad awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad, petty, unsexy ways every day.

That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt.

true decency was very different from pathological generosity, because pathological generosity did not take into account the feelings of the people who were the object of the generosity?

Lenore, it's simply that I love you. You know that. Every fiber of your being is loved by every fiber of my being. The thought of things about you, concerning you, troubling you, that I don't know about, makes blood run from my eyes, on the inside.