Quotes About Compassion

There is something likable in everyone. And to my great surprise, I found that she was right. It's impossible to get to know people deeply and not to come to like them.

Your misery doesn't change their situation. You can't lessen their misery by carrying it for them inside you. It doesn't work that way. There are ways for you to be a better mother to them at this point in all of your lives. Sentencing yourself to live in prison isn't one of them.

He let me tell my story in whatever way I needed to today.

You know what three words are even more romantic to me than 'I love you'?" "You look beautiful?" he tried. "No," his wife said. "I understand you.")

You can have compassion without forgiving.

Above all, I didn't want to fall into the trap that Buddhists call idiot compassion — an apt phrase, given John's worldview. In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people's feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty.

We may want others' forgiveness, but that comes from a place of self-gratification; we are asking forgiveness of others to avoid the harder work of forgiving ourselves.

There's no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn't be ranked, because pain is not a contest. Spouses often forget this, upping the ante on their suffering—I had the kids all day. My job is more demanding than yours. I'm lonelier than you are. Whose pain wins—or loses?

There's no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn't be ranked, because pain is not a contest.

Wendell once pointed out that we talk to ourselves more than we'll talk to any other person over the course of our lives but that our words aren't always kind or true or helpful

You can't get through your pain by diminishing it,

Will you see the human in my being?

What makes therapy challenging is that it requires people to see themselves in ways they normally choose not to. A therapist will hold up the mirror in the most compassionate way possible, but it's up to the patient to take a good look at that reflection

A second quality of mature spirituality is kindness. It is based on a fundamental notion of self-acceptance.

John points to his tears. "See?" he says. "My fucking humanity." "It's magnificent," I say.

You are not the best person to talk to you about you right now. There is a difference, I point out to them, between self- blame and self-responsibility, which is a corollary to something Jack Kornfield said: 'A second quality of mature spirituality is kindness. It is based on a fundamental notion of self-acceptance.

leaving the world a better place than she found it.

She'd choose awkward over ignored. "What do you wish people would say?" I ask. Julie thinks about this. "They can say, 'I'm so sorry.' They can say, 'How can I be helpful?' Or 'I feel so helpless but I care about you.'" She shifts on the couch, her thinner frame not quite filling out her clothes.

Will you see my vulnerabilities, my lies, my shame? Will you see the human in my being?

Tem a expressão intensa, mas gentil, uma combinação de ancião sábio com bichinho de pelúcia, e vem com uma mensagem: Nesta sala, vou te ver e você tentará se esconder, mas mesmo assim te verei, e tudo bem que seja assim.

Sitting-with-you-in-your-pain is one of the rare experiences that people get in the protected space of a therapy room, but it's very hard to give or get outside of it—even for Jen, who is a therapist.

by diminishing my problems, I was judging myself and everyone else whose problems I had placed lower down on the hierarchy of pain. You can't get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me. You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it. You can't change what you're denying or minimizing. And, of course, often what seem like trivial worries are manifestations of deeper ones.

I believe it was the Lord...for who else could know your trouble and ours and bring us together in this right way?

You do good mothering.