Quotes About Compassion

How could he ever scorn Henoch? It's normal enough to grow a bit impatient with the boy from time to time. Or so he hopes. But to banish Henoch from sight, the way his own father banished him --- the very idea causes his insides to clench up. He could never do such a thing.

Cuál es la utilidad de ser bueno con un pobre? Preguntó Cicerón.

We can begin to look at our own inner areas of immaturity. Specifically, we need to examine: "Where am I looking to get love rather than to give it?" The more loving we are, the less vulnerable we are to grief and loss, and the less we need to seek attachments.

The real payoff we get is when we let go of our negativity and choose to be loving; we are the ones who benefit. We are the ones who gain from the real payoff. With this increased awareness of who we really are comes the progressive invulnerability to pain. Once we compassionately accept our own humanness and that of others, we are no longer subject to humiliation, for true humility is a part of greatness.

For our purposes, it is really only necessary to recognize that power is that which makes you go strong, while force makes you go weak. Love, compassion, and forgiveness, which may be mistakenly seen by some people as submissive, are in fact profoundly empowering. Revenge, judgmentalism, and condemnation, on the other hand, inevitably make you go weak.

I think what it means is that central to living A life that is good is a life that's forgiving.

I'd tried to straighten him out, but there's only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.

Remember that the most important thing is to try and love other people as much as they love you.

I've always had a way with the little people, making it a point to humor them without looking down my nose at their wasted empty lives.

I can't seem to fathom that the things important to me are not important to other people as well, and so I come off sounding like a missionary, someone whose job it is to convert rather than listen.

I'd always been afraid of sick people, and so had my mother. It wasn't that we feared catching their brain aneurysm or accidentally ripping out their IV. I think it was their fortitude that frightened us. Sick people reminded us not of what we had, but of what we lacked. Everything we said sounded petty and insignificant; our complaints paled in the face of theirs, and without our complaints, there was nothing to say.

We give anonymously because the sackfuls of thank-you letters break our hearts with their clumsy handwriting and hopeless phonetic spelling.

My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for _who_ I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions who hate you for _what_ you are and you're likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks. I haven't got the slightest idea of how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.

It's always so satisfying when you can twist someone's hatred into guilt--make her realize that she was wrong, too quick to judge, too unwilling to look beyond her own petty concerns.

You're not supposed to talk about your good deeds, I know. It effectively negates them and in the process makes people hate you.

didn't need a fifteen-minute conversation, just some human interaction. It can be had, and easily: a gesture, a joke, something that says, "I live in this world too.

The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.

I can't seem to fathom that the things important to me are not important to other people as well, and so I come off sounding like a missionary, someone whose job is to convert rather than listen. ... It's not that I don't like her - far from it - I just worry that, without a regular job and the proper linoleum, she'll fall through a crack and disappear to a place where we can't find her.

Other people's pain is uninteresting. My own, though, is spellbinding.

Following a brief period of hard-won independence she came to appreciate the fact that people aren't foolish as much as they are kind.

She hit bottom when she physically attacked a deaf-mute. This was a boy of fourteen, a beloved neighborhood figure who delivered for the nearby deli.

Following a brief period of hard-won independence she came to appreciate the fact that people aren't foolish as much as they are kind. Peg understood that at a relatively early age. Me, it took years.

At what point had I realized that class couldn't save you, that addiction or mental illness didn't care whether you'd taken piano lessons or spent a summer in Europe? Which drunk or junkie or unmedicated schizophrenic was I crossing the street to avoid when I put it all together?

September 12, 2001 Paris Last night on TV I watched people jump from the windows of the World Trade Center.