Quotes About Compassion

If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly.

At the core of Christ's enterprise is an experience of this fire and the revolutionary passion of charity that blazes from it. This passion, as Christ knew and lived it, cannot rest until it has burnt down all the divisions that separate one human heart from another and so from reality.

Rice would carry that burden for saving lost souls for the rest of his life, and it was driven by genuinely heartfelt compassion based on a powerful rationale: if sinners were going to burn in the literal flames of a materially real eternal fire unless they accepted the atoning sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, then any sensible, empathetic, and responsible person would devote all of his life to saving non-Christians from their God-ordained fate.

I had heard so-called "Christian" military and political leaders proposing that the U.S. bomb the dikes and dams along the Red River delta in Vietnam in order to "defeat Communism," thus potentially killing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people. I began asking myself, what sort of religion would justify such arrogance and criminality?

Fellow Englishman Charles Spurgeon was a fierce opponent of social injustice, especially slavery, and joined other evangelicals in crusades to eliminate poverty, hunger, and homelessness, especially for children.

Accordingly, the test of "loving your neighbor" is showing compassion for someone you might naturally be inclined to hate or fear or despise—not someone who is your natural ally or blood kin or fellow citizen.

The logic of evangelical Protestants in the 18th century led to an inescapable conclusion: If God was indeed no respecter of persons, and if all were equal in the sight of God—men and women, young and old, rich and poor, white and colored—then Christians had no business owning slaves or benefitting from their labor and suffering, and slavery itself was a crime against God.

It was the work of all true Christians, Wesley urged, to act as instruments of God for the suppression of slavery.

Truly Christ blessed the lepers and the whores, but there is no comfort in the Bible for boys with small winks, and they are the most shunned of all.

Because that's what kindness is. It's not doing something for someone else because they can't, but because you can.

It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.

As I said, I'm an unfinished man reassembling the pieces of a broken world, and I have asked you to be a witness because you would never judge me as harsly as I judge myself.

My feelings are spent, my moral rationalizations are empty, and I can't say it's not my problem when I'm pulling and lifting and throwing bodies of people who once only wanted to go about the business of their lives.

My dad was a physician. As a kid, I remember driving around with him on weekends so he could do his rounds at the hospital and talk to patients. We'd spend time in the car talking about what was going on with them, their stories.

If I found the cure for dystrophy tomorrow, I would do a telethon in four weeks for acute pain that in this country is a bigger problem than cancer, heart, sickle cell, anemia, name it. It is - it's hitting 70 million Americans.

Being the only non-Black was a unique experience. After a few weeks, you're not aware of skin color differences. You see the color; you're not blind, but it doesn't matter. You see the human being first.

People inspire me. Every day, I meet amazing individuals in the field. When I see a mother who has walked for three weeks to come to a MSF clinic, with two kids on her back and her belongings on her head, facing intimidation and physical abuse on her way, I am inspired by her resilience - her desire for life.

I first became a vegetarian when I was nine, in response to an argument made by a radical babysitter. My great change - which lasted a couple of weeks - was based on the very simple instinct that it's wrong to kill animals for food.

In 2009, at the Vancouver Peace Summit, I met a supporter of Free the Slaves, an NGO dedicated to eradicating modern-day slavery; weeks later, I flew down to Los Angeles and met with the director of Free the Slaves; thus began my journey into exploring modern-day slavery.

In the weeks after 9/11, out of the pain and the fear there arose also grace and gratitude, eruptions of intense kindness that occurred everywhere, a sharp resolve to just be better, bigger, to shed the nonsense, rise to the occasion.

I started out doing something little. I went to Africa to spend five weeks putting roofs on a building. I seen the small child that stepped on a land mine. Three months later, I'm back helping pull the land mines out. Little things just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Like everyone else in the first weeks after the tragedy of 9/11, I was looking frantically for some way to help.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

Any beast can cry over the misfortunes of its own child. It takes a mensch to weep for others' children.