Quotes About Compassion

Don't pay back in kind, pay back in kindness. If someone does wrong by you, do right by them.

Part of growing up was learning not to be quite that honest - learning when it was better to lie, rather than to hurt someone with the truth.

It is so easy to presume that while your own world has ground to an absolute halt, so has everyone else's.

After all, the only way to communicate is to find someone who can comprehend; the only way to be forgiven is to find someone who is willing to forgive.

I feel like I've been standing underneath an open window, just as a baby gets tossed out. I grab the baby, right, because who wouldn't? But then another baby gets tossed out, so I pass the baby to someone else, and I make the catch. This keeps happening. And before you know it there are a whole bunch of people who are getting really good at passing along babies, just like I'm good at catching them, but no one ever asks who the fuck is throwing the babies out the window in the first place.

But if you seek forgiveness, doesn't that automatically mean you cannot be a monster? By definition, doesn't that desperation make you human again?

Forgiveness is spiritual. Punishment is legal, Leo says. They're not mutually exclusive.

When you are attracted to people, it's because of the details. Their kindness. Their eyes. The fact that they can get you to laugh when you need it the most.

You know, Sage, Jesus didn't tell us to forgive everyone. He said turn the other cheek, but only if you the one who was hit. Even the Lord's Prayer says it loud and clear: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Not others. What Jesus challenges us to do is to let go of the wrong done to you personally, not the wrong done to someone else. But most Christians incorrectly assume that this means that being a good christian means forgiving all sins, and the sinners.

I tell them that there is nothing more selfish than trying to change someone's mind because they don't think like you. Just because something is different does not mean it should not be respected.

I learned a long time ago with you that folks who were trying to be kind would rather do it with a macaroni-and-cheese bake than any personal involvement. You hand off a serving dish and you've done your job - no need to get personally involved, and your conscience is clean. Food is the currency of aid.

He gently touched his mother's cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips.

How does someone go from thinking that if he cannot rescue, he must destroy? And do you blame him, or do you blame the folks who should have told him otherwise?

For the first time in my life I begin to understand how a parent my hit a child--it's because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn't.

What if the one I choose to discount is one who has been truly hurt?

The thing about a mom is that she's always there. She's the one who rubs your back when you have the flu, who manages to notice you have no clean underwear and does your wash for you, who stocks the refrigerator with all the foods you love without having to ask. The thing about a mom is that you never imagine taking care of her, instead of the other way around.

Violence, from one angle, looked like mercy from another.

You can be happy for someone else's good fortune but that doesn't mean you forget your own bad luck.

When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own.No matter how inconceivable those needs were; no matter how fucked up; no matter how much it made you feel like you were ripping yourself into pieces.

She falters, then gather up the weeds of her thoughts and offers me the saddest, truest bouquet.

the part of the brain, physiologically, that allows us to blame everything on people we do not really know is the same part of the brain that allows us to have compassion for strangers

Sometimes your kids will say the nastiest things, won't they, Rose? You want to ask, 'Whose child is this?'"Rose chuckled."But usually, they're just in some kind of pain. They need to work it out.

Work for purpose, be for others.

God gave you two hands one belongs to you and the other to your fellow man.