Quotes About Compassion

Tests and exams do not determine who is in the right standing. Tests and exams only determine who is left standing. However even if you are knocked down you can still rise again. How far you go in life does not depend on tests and exams but on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the old, sympathetic and tolerant with others who are not as strong as yourself.

Putting our expectations on others is an exercise in pressure and disappointment. Why not accept people just as they are? That's love.

Having another Christian woman who was dealing with cancer, one I could talk to, had been a real help.

Talking to others who understand what you're going through can help.

There was one thing my daddy wouldn't tolerate in any shape, form or fashion, and that was being unkind or rude to somebody. That was just very important to my folks. And as it turns out, that was a legacy that he left me that money can't buy, is how to be able to treat people.

When it's said and done, the one thing I want to leave on this earth is hope. I have felt hopelessness, and it's a terrible feeling. Hopelessness will destroy you. I want to bring hope to other people.

You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening so you might as well.

I imagine there's a timid animal inside me...When it's afraid, I feel it tremble. It can't hear. It only knows the fear it feels. It doesn't have memory or an idea of the future. It lives in the present—the right now—and I try to remember it is only a part of myself, a small frightened thing I can pity. When I'm able to do that, something happens. The animal grows less afraid.

She'd been noticing the feet of colored people ever since she'd come south. "They've been pressed down to the earth so hard," she said. "And the weight of what they carry tortures their feet.

Naivety can be a terrible thing. Jesus wept.

Wednesday: Pray for Strangers You See throughout This Day One of the elders said: Just as a bee, wherever she goes, makes honey, so a monk, wherever he goes, if he goes to do the will of God, can always produce the spiritual sweetness of good works.5

Then the king will say to those on his right, "Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me." (Mt 25:34–36)

One of the lesser-known contributions of the great Harriet Tubman was the devotion of her life after the war to a similar project. The woman who personally led three hundred slaves to freedom, who was a spy and "general" for the Union, spent her final years trying to establish the John Brown Home for the Aged. When the government refused to give her a full veteran's pension, the former general sold fruit and had a biography published to raise money for the institution.

Knowing he was suffering pained me. That's the way love tangles you up. I couldn't stop loving him, and couldn't shut off the feelings of wanting to care for him— but I also didn't have to run to answer his letters. I was hurting, too, and no one was running to me.

I knew that I could hate him all I wanted for the way he was hurting me, but I couldn't ever stop loving him, absolutely, for what he was.

Maybe no one can know how it is for anyone else.

Are you always this wise, Ruth?" "Only when it comes to other people's lives.

I've sometimes thought that being loved a little less than others can actually make a person, rather than ruin them.

What is all the suffering for if not so we can see how alike we are, and not alone? Where will the mercy come from, if not from us?

Is it nice? It's hard to care about people. You end up fretting all the time and feeling helpless, hoping they'll live forever. Only no one does.

But what does it all add up to? What is all the suffering for if not so we can see how alike we are, and not alone? Where will the mercy come from, if not from us?

Perhaps I will begin by walking where he has walked." Arap

How is it I'm the enemy when she's the other woman? That seems very unfair, doesn't it?

Who knows what anyone deserves? We like to play judge and jury, but we're all a rotten mess under our skins.