Quotes About Compassion

I'm not sure that insecurity is a good enough excuse for that sort of behavior. We're all insecure, and I really think he's old enough to have discovered the reasons behind his insecurity, and do something about them." ...Lucy

Halfway across town, Father Tibor Kasparian lay on the long hard cement cot that was what this jail cell had for a bed and wished he had a book. It could be any book. He didn't really think he could read right now, but it always made him feel better, and calmer, and more sane, to hold a book. He had never been able to understand people who did not read. He had never been able to understand how they held on to themselves.

if the people who called themselves Christians behaved like Christians, there wouldn't be any people sleeping in the street.

We all need people to tell us that we were the ones who had been deeply wronged.

It was about forgiving. I understood that forgiveness itself was strong, durable—like strands of a web weaving around us, holding us.

Emma, Emma, Emma," I said, wishing I could somehow teach her to take the smaller blows of life in her stride.

The City Surveyor had never before heard of disabled people wanting to cross the city as far as Marks & Spencer to buy their own underwear, so he failed to see the need for such an expedition – as if disabled people and their families had no right to venture that far. Injustice spurred us into action. Why should Stephen have to suffer restraints on his lifestyle other than those inflicted by an unkind Nature?

tear-filled eyes. I could handle her tears of pain, and her tears of anger. But these… these tears are from something that breaks me a little.

And that other self, who watches me from the distance of decades, what will she say? Will she look at me with hatred or with compassion, I whose choices made her what she will be?

Perimeter is not meaning, but it changes meaning,/as wit increases distance, and compassion erodes it.

The heart's reasons seen clearly, even the hardest will carry its whip-marks and sadness and must be forgiven. As the drought-starved eland forgives the drought-starved lion who finally takes her, enters willingly then the life she cannot refuse, and is lion, is fed, and does not remember the other. So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance. The world asks of us only the strength we have and we give it. Then it asks more, and we give it.

Tenderness does not choose its own uses. It goes out to everything equally, circling rabbit and hawk. Look: in the iron bucket, a single nail, a single ruby - all the heavens and hells. They rattle in the heart and make one sound.

The griefs of others—beautiful, at a distance.

Plants, stones, utensils, each thing has its individual feelings, similar to those of men," Bash? wrote.

The Buddha himself had strongly discouraged this inward tendency and had always encouraged his followers to go out into the world.

There is much misunderstanding about who or what the Buddha was. The word Buddha literally means "awakened one".

Paradoxically, if we accept our own suffering and fully relate it with the suffering of others, we transform that pain into a means of liberation.

True compassion is the result of experiencing sunyata. 'Sunya' means empty; and 'ta' means 'ness'. The doctrine of emptiness is the essential teaching of Mahayana. It is the ultimate truth of non-ego.

Several men I can think of are as capable, as smart, as funny, as compassionate, and as confused — as remarkable you might say — as most women.

Kindness is the beaded belt that binds all together. Expect kindness. Whatever you give out will be returned

A tragedy tears away a hope; a kindness brings it back.

Are you prepared then, to shoot a human being?" he asked, trying not to let Jenny sense his own internal unease. "It's not the same as shooting a duck or gazelle." Jenny's violet eyes met his straight on. "If that human being was about to harm any one of us, I'd feel worse about shooting the duck. It, at least, would have done nothing to deserve a bullet.

She would not exploit anyone. People would not observed by irony run amok. The audience would not have their superiority confirmed. Somehow they would feel like everyone was in it together.

When the time capsule from the past bursts open, flooding her with feelings, she will confuse her traumatic memory from the past with her experience in the present. Painful experiences from the past, if not understood, validated, processed, and integrated with a compassionate and trusted other, will continue to intrude on our present and form our beliefs and expectations of others and life experiences.