Quotes About Compassion

To consider, Is this man of our own or an alien? is a mark of little-minded persons; but the whole earth is of kin to the generous-hearted.*

Everywhere and at all times, it is up to you to rejoice piously at what is occurring at the present moment, to conduct yourself with justice towards the people who are present here and now.4 Although

The two pigeons killed had just given birth. And now the baby pigeon doesn't know who he is. He is going through an identity crisis.

Pankaj Mishra (#iampm)

Let my soul smile through my heart and my heart smile through my eyes, that I may scatter rich smiles in sad hearts.

Making others happy, through kindness of speech and sincerity of right advice, is a sign of true greatness. To hurt another soul by sarcastic words, looks, or suggestions, is despicable.

There is a magnet in your heart that will attract true friends. That magnet is unselfishness, thinking of others first; when you learn to live for others, they will live for you.

Kindness is the light that dissolves all walls between souls, families, and nations.

Be afraid of nothing. Hating none, giving love to all, feeling the love of God, seeing His presence in everyone, and having but one desire - for His constant presence in the temple of your consciousness - that is the way to live in this world.

I'm just saying, grace is available to all of us if we make it available to each other.

We suffer, ironically, from our indifference to those among us who suffer.

The people who help us grow toward true self offer unconditional love, neither judging us to be deficient nor trying to force us to change but accepting us exactly as we are. And yet this unconditional love does not lead us to rest on our laurels. Instead, it surrounds us with a charged force field that makes us want to grow from the inside out — a force field that is safe enough to take the risks and endure the failures that growth requires.

We find common bonds in the shared details of the human journey, not in the divergent conclusions we draw from those details.

To grow in love and service, you must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success.

Violence is what we get when we do not know what else to do with our suffering.

The writer Anne Lamott says, "You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."28

When the heart is supple, it can be "broken open" into a greater capacity to hold our own and the world's pain: it happens every day. When we hold our suffering in a way that opens us to greater compassion, heartbreak becomes a source of healing, deepening our empathy for others who suffer and extending our ability to reach out to them.

If you hold your knowledge of self and world wholeheartedly, your heart will at times get broken by loss, failure, defeat, betrayal, or death. What happens next in you and the world around you depends on how your heart breaks. If it breaks apart into a thousand pieces, the result may be anger, depression, and disengagement. If it breaks open into greater capacity to hold the complexities and contradictions of human experience, the result may be new life.

It's unfair to lay all responsibility for the future on the younger generation. After all, the problems they face are partly due to the fact that we, their elders, screwed up. Worse still, it's not true that the young alone are in charge of what comes next. We—young and old together—hold the future in our hands. If our common life is to become more compassionate, creative, and just, it will take an intergenerational effort.

No habit of the heart is more crucial to making "We the People" a reality than extending hospitality to those who appear alien to us.

Every profession that attracts people for reasons of the heart is a profession in which people, and the work they do, suffer from losing heart.

My core religious beliefs include this simple article of faith: the God who gave all of us life wants us to do the same for each other. When people or groups who claim religious motivation make their points by using violence in any form—spiritual, psychological, verbal, or physical—it seems clear to me that they are driven by fear rather than faith, committed to control instead of trust in God.

Who's in Charge Here? When a congregation is profoundly clergy-centered—when the pedagogy consists of a clergyperson (performer) downloading information and inspiration to parishioners (audience)—the game is rigged. The theological message may be one of community, but the lived experience is one of dependence on an authority. Under those conditions, not much can be done to build the communal trust that allows compassion to flower, no matter how benign the leader is.

the movements that transform us, our relations, and our world emerge from the lives of people who decide to care for their authentic selfhood.