Quotes About Compassion

and, in its own sweet way, more beautiful than we realize. The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness.

The value of a life can be measured by one's ability to affect the destiny of one less advantaged. Since death is an absolute certainty for everyone, the important variable is the quality of life one leads between the times of birth and death.

the R-Directed aptitudes so often disdained and dismissed—artistry, empathy, taking the long view, pursuing the transcendent—will increasingly determine who soars and who stumbles. It's a dizzying—but ultimately inspiring—change.

Empathy is the ability to imagine yourself in someone else's position and to intuit what that person is feeling. It is the ability to stand in others' shoes, to see with their eyes, and to feel with their hearts. It is something we do pretty much spontaneously, an act of instinct rather than the product of deliberation.

Empathy isn't sympathy—that is, feeling bad for someone else. It is feeling with someone else, sensing what it would be like to be that person. Empathy is a stunning act of imaginative derring-do, the ultimate virtual reality—climbing into another's mind to experience the world from that person's perspective.

Treat everyone as you'd treat your grandmother, but assume that Grandma

we do better when we move beyond solving a puzzle to serving a person.

This is what it means to serve: improving another's life and, in turn, improving the world. That's the lifeblood of service and the final secret to moving others.

She is staring into hell and I'm not brave enough to join her.

Necessity can obliterate our hatreds.

I say we keep building new versions of ourselves, keep exploring the unknown, and keep growing. We're gonna be fine. Different, but fine. Because most people are good. Right?

In the grand scheme of things, all human beings are part of the same family, regardless of origin.* The divisions we have built between ourselves along the lines of race and geography are illusions.

most people are good," says Jim. "But not when they're afraid.

To survive, humans will work together. Accept each other. For a moment, we are all equal. Backs against the wall, human beings are at their finest.

It's dangerous to be people-blind.

Tran Van Hay soigne

I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it. —Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, p. xii

Because romantic love is what gets written about, talked about, filmed and sung about so much, we can temporarily forget that love comes in many different forms—the love between parents and children, between friends, love of God, love of one's way of life, and love of country. What all these forms of love have in common is intense caring (the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference), caring more about someone or something else than you care about yourself.

For a child or an adult, it's extremely powerful to hear someone say, "I get you. I understand. I see why you feel this way." This kind of empathy disarms us.

It's also crucial to keep in mind that no matter how nonsensical and frustrating our child's feelings may seem to us, they are real and important to our child. It's vital that we treat them as such in our response.

Say yes to the feelings, even as you say no to the behavior.

when a child is upset, logic often won't work until we have responded to the right brain's emotional needs. We

Engage, don't enrage.

Connection is about walking through the hard times with our children and being there for them when they're emotionally suffering, just like we would if they scraped their knee and were physically suffering.