Quotes About Compassion

I think animal testing is a terrible idea; they get all nervous and give the wrong answers.

You don't have to be rich to leave a positive legacy; you don't have to be intelligent, famous, powerful or even particularly well organised, let alone happy. You need only to treat people with kindness, compassion and respect, knowing they will have been enriched by their encounters with you.

It's inevitable that people who are trying to manipulate, persuade or deceive us in their own interests would try to pretend that they are driven by...the finest expressions of our common humanity - altruism, compassion and kindness. [p63]

We do the right things because it's the right thing to do. We respond to others' needs because they have those needs. Our survival depends on cooperation. [p61, paraphrased]

Forgiveness calls on deep reserves of moral courage: the courage to break out of the spiral of self-pity; the courage to set aside resentment; the courage to rise above biterness; the courage to act well, when all our instincts call on us to act badly. p112

Indolent and unworthy the beggar may be—but that is not your concern: It is better, said Joseph Smith, to feed ten impostors than to run the risk of turning away one honest petition.

Man's dominion is a call to service, not a license to to exterminate.

You can always somebody who is worse than you are to make you feel virtuous. It's a cheap shot: those awful terrorists, perverts, communists--they are the ones who need to repent! Yes, indeed they do, and for them repentance will be a full-time job, exactly as it is for all the rest of us.

Today I acknowledge that I am not in position to judge what mistakes anyone is making or what lessons anyone needs to learn. I don't know how far someone has come or when that person will have a breakthrough, I simply don't know what other people should be doing. But when I think I do know, I clearly am not doing what I should be doing, which is taking responsibility for my own life.

Pacifism is not a panacea; it asks only that people should relinquish the habit of deliberate imposition of suffering.

Once men inure themselves against the obvious injustices of slavery and defend its use for the economic advantages they believe it brings, humanity deserts them

Ese grado de sensibilidad, uno tiene que y uno puede desarrollarlo. La capacidad de amar es infinita, es infinita, infinita. Desarrollémosla.

From time immemorial, healthy people have held sick people hostage…I believe hostage-holding of the sick is immoral, fundamentally unethical, and needs to be stopped.

And though he liked drawing trees he liked most of all to be with trees. He would climb them, lean against them, even talk to them. It saddened him to discover the not everyone shared his feelings towards them.

The most generous person is the one who offers help to those who do not expect him to help.

If your heart isn't in the right place, you're no different from the beasts in the forest.

What kind of soldier carries music instead of guns?

Help others find their way, their own values, and guide them through life's ups and downs.

As one person put it, passing on the good news is simply a matter of one beggar telling another where to find bread. That

With plenty of practice, we have learnt how to make a ritual of grief, even for those we have never met and know little about.

The Buddha proclaimed sunyata, or Emptiness, to be the underlying nature of all phenomena, a web of causal relationships that the philosopher-poet Octavio Paz referred to as a "fathomless abyss above which metaphysical thought flaps its wings." In the Buddhist Tantras, this "truth that does not itself exist" and the concurrent freedom from self-identity is celebrated as the birth of a radiant, compassionate awareness, often symbolized by luminous multiarmed deities.

Rather than renouncing the ephemeral thoughts and emotions that bolster self-identity, Tantra, or Vajrayana, seeks to transform them into potent catalysts for entering deeper, less restricted strata of consciousness, and unveiling the enlightened mind of wisdom and compassion said to be inherent within all beings.

I understand how insubstantial this seems, how minor: man buys a coffee in French! But it was Gégé and Jean-Claude, and my own Walker, who reminded me how to do that simpest thing. They reminded me not to be ashamed. That is never a small accomplishment.

Like that time I came home and Mum was sick, not letting me upstairs. Later on I heard Dad actually blaming her for being sick. That must have been the first time I felt queer.