Quotes About Compassion

Do we meet each person curious about the miracle of a human being that we are about to connect with? Or do we meet a poor person that we are about to help?

Until you do the inner work of learning how to see with "your eyes and your heart open," as Kabat-Zinn puts it, deep problems will persist.

love is the only emotion that expands intelligence

I'm surprised you holy people talk to me," Wolfie said suddenly, "after what I done." He swayed there a moment, frowning. "As a Catholic priest, I must accept men's frailty. And as a European I am too old and tired to expend emotion upon matters I can do nothing about.

The point of life is to help others through it

That's it. I'm asking you, I'm really asking you—how is it possible that we aren't in a permanent state of mourning?

She was one of those rare girls that you just felt you wanted to be always happy, even if you weren't going to be the source of that happiness.

Christianity was useless if it forgot people and the here and now. Faith and belief, she felt, were no use without charity, love and compassion; religion was nothing if it focused entirely on the afterlife.

If we are prepared to take the life of another being merely in order to satisfy our taste for a particular type of food, then that being is no more than a means to our end.

Putting yourself in the place of others...is what thinking ethically is all about.

Until we boycott meat, and all other products of animal factories, we are, each one of us, contributing to the continued existence, prosperity, and growth of factory farming and all the other cruel practices used in rearing animals for food.

Living a minimally acceptable ethical life involves using a substantial part of our spare resources to make the world a better place. Living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good we can.

Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.

Why [..] should the boundary of sacrosanct life match the boundary of our species?

If doing the most you can for others means that you are also flourishing, then that is the best possible outcome for everyone.

those who have enough to spend on luxuries, yet fail to share even a tiny fraction of their income with the poor, must bear some responsibility for the deaths they could have prevented.

If it is so easy to help people in real need through no fault of their own, and yet we fail to do so, aren't we doing something wrong? At a minimum, I hope this book will persuade you that there is something deeply askew with our widely accepted views about what it is to live a good life.

The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?5

What we must do is bring nonhuman animals within our sphere of moral concern and cease to treat their lives as expendable for whatever trivial purposes we may have.

But pain is pain, and the importance of preventing unnecessary pain and suffering does not diminish because the being

So the researcher's central dilemma exists in an especially acute form in psychology: either the animal is not like us, in which case there is no reason for performing the experiment; or else the animal is like us, in which case we ought not to perform on the animal an experiment that would be considered outrageous if performed on one of us. Another

If we could see our lives objectively, we could see that they are not something we should inflict on anyone.

If we can prevent something bad, without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it.

Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval scholar whose ideas became the semi-official philosophy of the Roman Catholic church, wrote that whatever we have in "superabundance"—that is, above and beyond what will reasonably satisfy our own needs and those of our family, for the present and the foreseeable future—"is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance.