Quotes About Compassion

The best thing is what you think should be done. The rightest thing is what needs to be done-when you think not just of you and how you feel, but also the extra stuff-who else is involved, and what's happened before, and what the rules say.

He could stand pain, himself. He just couldn't stand hers

When the elevator doors open there is only one other person inside it, a homeless man with electric blue sunglasses and six plastic grocery bags filled with rags. Close the doors, dammit, he yells as soon as we step inside. Can't you see I'm blind? [...] From the back, the homeless man shoves between us, his bounty rustling in his arms. Stop yelling, he shouts. though we stand in utter silence. Can't you tell that I'm deaf?

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

Che cosa significa essere diversi nella nostra società? Fino a che punto può arrivare il desiderio di vendetta di una vittima? E soprattutto: che diritto ha, chiunque, di giudicare gli altri?

Because it takes more strength to change someone else's life than it takes to change your own.

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

Could you love someone so much that, even without meaning to, you hurt them?

Every holocaust starts with an ember. You just have to know what to look for.

No matter what you do for someone-no matter if you feed him a bottle as a baby or curl up with him at night to keep him warm or give him food so he's not hungry-make one wrong move at the wrong moment, and you become someone unrecognizable.

That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?

Could you forgive someone if she hurt you and the people you love, if she truly believed she was only trying to help? I

Just because you had every right to feel sorry for yourself didn't mean you ever took the opportunity to do so. In fact, sometimes I was sure that the reason people stared at you with your crutches and wheelchair had nothing to do with your disabilities, and everything to do with the fact that you had abilities they only dreamed of.

When Javert finally realized that Valjean had something he himself didn't—mercy—did he shrug and find a new obsession, like knitting or Game of Thrones? No. Because without Valjean to hate, he didn't know who he was anymore.

Power isn't doing something terrible to someone who's weaker than you, Reiner. It's having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.

Life's most persistent and urgent question is, Dr. King had said, what are you doing for others?

Sage shakes her head. "Surely there were some Germans who were better than others, some who didn't want to go along with what Hitler said. If you can't see them as individuals—if you can't forgive the ones who ask for it—doesn't that make you just as bad as any Nazi?""No," I admit. "It makes me human.

You would think bearing witness to something like this would make a difference, and yet this isn't so. In the newspapers I have read about history repeating itself in Cambodia. Rwanda. Sudan.

the mercy of their good graces.

I eat kung pao chicken like it's going out of style, but I'm pretty sure I don't have an Asian cell in my body. I love Toni Morrison novels although I'm not black. I'm straight and I'm happily married. The reason I work here is because I think you deserve that, too.

It is impossible to believe anything in a world that has ceased to regard man as man, that repeatedly proves that one is no longer a man. —Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower

My sister's in pain, and I'm relieved. What does that say about me?

that allows us to have compassion for strangers. Yes, the Nazis made Jews the scapegoats, to the point of near extinction. But that same bit of tissue in the mind is what led others to send money and supplies and relief, even when they were half a world away.

He was the kind of dog whose heart was too big for his own body, and so he continuously offered it up to me.