Quotes About Compassion

words are more for strangers, for hospitals, not kin. Little emotional Band-Aids like that aren't what he needs or what's sought…. I don't know what he needs, or what's sought.

Il posto per migliorare il mondo è innanzitutto nel proprio cuore, nella propria testa e nelle proprie mani; è da qui che si può partire verso l'esterno.

If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

In a world of stressful lack of control, an amazing source of control we all have is the ability to make the world a better place, one act at a time.

In the West we nearly all have strong moral intuitions about the wrongness of slavery, child labor, or animal cruelty. But that sure didn't used to be the case. Their wrongness has become an implicit moral intuition, a gut instinct concerning moral truth, only because of the fierce moral reasoning (and activism) of those who came before us, when the average person's moral intuitions were unrecognizably different. Our guts learn their intuitions.

The childhood capacity for empathy progresses from feeling someone's pain because you are them, to feeling for the other person, to feeling as them.

Science provides us with some of the most elegant, stimulating puzzles that life has to offer. It throws some of the most provocative ideas into our arenas of moral debate. Occasionally, it improves our lives. I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means that you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.

I was once at a conference of neuroscientists and all-star Buddhist monk meditators, the former studying what the brains of the latter did during meditation. One scientist asked one of the monks whether he ever stops meditating because his knees hurt from all that cross-leggedness. He answered, "Sometimes I'll stop sooner than I planned, but not because it hurts; it's not something I notice. It's as an act of kindness to my knees.

Feeling someone else's pain can be more effective for learning than just knowing that they're in pain. At its core the ACC is about self-interest, with caring about that other person in pain as an add-on.

The opposite of love is not hate; its opposite is indifference." The biologies of strong love and strong hate are similar in many ways, as we'll see.

Elie Wiesel, el ganador del Premio Nobel y superviviente de un campo de concentración: «Lo contrario al amor no es el odio; lo contrario es la indiferencia». Las biologías del amor fuerte y del odio fuerte son parecidas en muchos aspectos, tal como veremos.

Expose subjects to evidence of someone else in pain. If their heart rate increases a lot (a peripheral indicator of anxious, amygdaloid arousal), they are unlikely to act prosocially in the situation. The prosocial ones are those whose heart rates decrease; they can hear the sound of someone else's need instead of the distressed pounding in their own chests.

If their heart rate increases a lot (a peripheral indicator of anxious, amygdaloid arousal), they are unlikely to act prosocially in the situation. The prosocial ones are those whose heart rates decrease; they can hear the sound of someone else's need instead of the distressed pounding in their own chests.fn9,48

The opposite of love is not hate; its opposite is indifference.

the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

Here are some words of central importance to this book: aggression, violence, compassion, empathy, sympathy, competition, cooperation, altruism, envy, schadenfreude, spite, forgiveness, reconciliation, revenge, reciprocity, and (why not?) love. Flinging us into definitional quagmires.

All stories are love stories

Când iubeÅŸti, totul este iubire, chiar ÅŸi atunci când e suferin?? ÅŸi repulsie.

In love everything is love, even pain and revulsion.

The love that you give another is what knits the wounds of the world.

El verdadero sanador, el verdadero sabio, es el que permanece sabio entre aquellos que todavía no han despertado. Ten valor, y permanece en pie.

El dolor experimentado en mi vida me había hecho extremadamente sensible al sufrimiento de los demás, y hacía que me sintiese plenamente motivado a aliviarlo.

duelo es un proceso gradual del corazón, que hay que vivir suavemente y en gracia, con atención y con compasión por nosotros mismos.

Our breath is brief, and being so Let's make our heaven here below, And lavish kindness as we go.