Quotes About Compassion

You don't look at another person's plate to see if they have more than you. You look to see if they have enough.

You would be surprised at the lengths you will go to believe the best about someone if you truly love him

be a good listener, don't judge and don't put boundaries on someone else's grief.

People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love. —NELSON MANDELA, LONG WALK TO FREEDOM

The thing that most people didn't understand, if they weren't in his line if work, was that a rape victim and a victim of a fatal accident were both gone forever. The difference was that the rape victim still had to go through the motions of being alive.

you can love a person and still hate the decisions they've made, can't you?

Doctors put a wall up between themselves and their patients; nurses broke it down.

In a lot of ways, having a teenager isn't all that different from having a newborn. You learn to read the reactions, because they're incapable of saying exactly what it is that's causing pain.

I truly believed that the cost of success for us shouldn't be the cost of failure for a good friend.

when people we love make choices, we don't always understand them. But we can go on loving them, just the same. It isn't a matter of comprehension. It's forgiveness.

Could it be as simple as that? Could love be not grand gestures or empty vows, not promises meant to be broken, but instead a paper trail of forgiveness? A line of crumbs made of memories, to lead you back to the person who was waiting?

Her hands quieted. Yeah. Because even if the law says that no one is responsible for anyone else, helping someone who needs it is the right thing to do. I sat down beside her, close enough that the skin of her arm hummed right next to mine. You really believe that? She looked down at her lap Yeah. Then how, I asked, can you walk away from me?

You can't hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.

There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken babies go, who look at our children and see instead the faces of the ones they never met.

I am not a religious man. I have not attended a service for many years. But I do believe in God. My own practice of religion, you could say, it a nonpractice. I personally feel that it's just as worthy on a weekend to rake the lawns of an elderly neighbor or to climb a mountain and marvel at the beauty of this land we live in as it is to sing hosannas or go to Mass. In other words, I think every many finds his own church- and not all of them have four walls - Judge Haig (Page 399)

When you love someone, you don't see parts of him you don't like.

As Lacy waited for her turn to speak on Peter's behalf, she thought back to the first time she realized she could hate her own child.

Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late that we've wounded the people we are trying to protect.

But that's what love is, isn't it? When it hurts you more to see someone suffer than it does to take the pain away?

You give her all your french fries, even when she won't give you back onion rings,' Sophie says. 'And when you say her name it sounds different.' How?' Sophie thinks. 'Like it's covered with blankets.

It still hurts, she whispered. Even when you're doing it for someone else, that doesn't stop your ribs from getting cracked, or your wrist swelling, or your cuts from bleeding.

the universe wants from us is two things: don't do any intentional harm to yourself or anyone else, and get happy.

Everyone is afraid of saying the wrong thing. It's more important to be there than to be right.

Sometimes you hurt the people you love. And sometimes you love the people who hurt you.