Quotes About Compassion

All you ever did was watch woman suffer and blame her for it.

For when the people flock to your house in mourning, people joined by blood or by law, it don't matter what feeling you carry for them, if you carry any at all. For grief is a burden that don't care about anything other than we bear it. You don't need love to withstand it, you need shoulders. I didn't discover this until now, that mourning is the work of many, and we have only us.

All the joy the world contains has come through wishing happiness for others. All the misery the world contains has come through wanting pleasure for oneself. —Shantideva, ninth-century Indian mystic

Treat others as compassionately as you want to be treated. Keep in mind that needy, demanding behaviors often arise from a healthy, natural longing for the deep connections upon which humanity is designed to thrive.

how to tame sex without destroying love, how to tame avarice without destroying creativity, and how to tame violence without destroying courage

God, I don't have enough _________ (love, patience, etc) for so and so just now, but You do. I need some of Yours. Thanks!

Great thoughts always come from the heart.

Jesus God!" His fingers sprang open, releasing her. They rose to gingerly probe the lump at back of his skull and he groaned again. The sound was echoed by the body crushed beneath him. "Beacom?" A lavender arm lifted to see what was beneath. "Good God, man, what are you doing under there?" "Waiting for you to rouse, your grace," came the gasped reply. "Hoping that in your boundless compassion, you might even be willing to heave off me!

I honestly didn't realize at the time that I was dealing with myself. But I suppose it's true that I developed a therapy that provides the things I needed for so many years and never got.

My only requirement was that the house have a basement so we could provide housing for the poor. Kelly

Acceptance can transform but if you accept in order to transform, it is not acceptance. It is like loving. Love seeks no reward but when given freely comes back a hundredfold. He who loses his life finds it. He who accepts, changes.

Keeping a stiff upper lip may be needed while around the person invalidating you, but on your own, there is every reason to be compassionate and self-­soothing. It does hurt to be invalidated.

Responding to a suicide attempt by insisting that it must stop, and devoting the full resources of therapy to preventing it, is a communication with compassion and care at its very core.

I didn't know! I was here with you all the time. How could I know you were so alone?

How can I get up everyday knowing you had to kill yourself to make it stop hurting and I was here all the time and I never even saw it. And then you gave me this chance to make it better, convince you to stay alive and I couldn't do it. How can I live with myself after this, Jessie?

when people hear anything that sounds like criticism, they tend to invest their energy in self-defense or counterattack. If we wish for a compassionate response from others, it is self-defeating to express our needs by interpreting or diagnosing their behavior. Instead, the more directly we can connect our feelings to our own needs, the easier it is for others to respond to us compassionately.

there is considerably less violence in cultures where people think in terms of human needs than in cultures where people label one another as "good" or "bad" and believe that the "bad" ones deserve to be punished. In

Our attention is focused on classifying, analyzing, and determining levels of wrongness rather than on what we and others need and are not getting.

All criticism, attack, insults, and judgments vanish when we focus attention on hearing the feelings and needs behind a message. The more we practice in this way, the more we realize a simple truth: behind all those messages we've allowed ourselves to be intimidated by are just individuals with unmet needs appealing to us to contribute to their well-being.

This world is what we have made of it. If it is ruthless today it is because we have made it ruthless by our attitudes. If we change ourselves we can change the world, and changing ourselves begins with changing our language and methods of communication. I highly recommend reading this book and applying the Nonviolent Communication process it teaches. It is a significant first step toward changing our communication and creating a compassionate world. –Arun Gandhi

While we may not consider the way we talk to be "violent," words often lead to hurt and pain, whether for others or ourselves. In

We only feel dehumanized when we get trapped in derogatory images of other people or thoughts of wrongness about ourselves. As author and mythologist Joseph Campbell suggested, "'What will they think of me?' must be put aside for bliss." We begin to feel this bliss when messages previously experienced as critical or blaming begin to be seen for the gifts they are: opportunities to give to people who are in pain.

Do not judge, and you will not be judged. For as you judge others, so you will yourselves be judged… —Holy Bible, Matthew 7:1

The more we practice in this way, the more we realize a simple truth: behind all those messages we've allowed ourselves to be intimidated by are just individuals with unmet needs appealing to us to contribute to their well-being.