Quotes About Compassion

You're not angry, Mma?" She shook her head. What was the point of anger? There were occasions when Mma Ramotswe, like all of us, could feel angry, but they were few—and they never lasted long. Anger, Obed Ramotswe had explained to her once, is no more than a salt that we rub into our wounds. She had never forgotten that—along with the things he said about cattle, and Botswana, and the behaviour of the rains.

of being linked with each other, we have every temptation to be selfish and unmoved by others and by their plight. Our towns, our cities, our places become no more than hotels, with all that lack of intimacy that is a feature of hotels – strangers under one roof, no more. Well, we should not be strangers to one another. We

Be gentle...Many of the people who will come to see you are injured in spirit. They need to talk about things that have hurt them, or about things that they have done. Do not sit in judgement on them, but listen. Just listen.

It's not hard to do anything if you do it with love.

As a general rule, making other people happy is one of the few things we can do with utter certainty that what we're doing is the right thing.

Reflections on human smallness have often prompted me to think that. What do divisions between people matter? What does it matter if somebody is English or Scottish or whatever?

We should be happy when people have chairs," he admonished. "We should be happy, even if we do not have a chair ourselves.

YOU DO NOT CHANGE PEOPLE BY SHOUTING AT THEM

we all have some things we are ashamed of.

The real art in going through life with dignity and with a modicum of happiness was to accept what you were, and, at the same time, to accept others—and to love them all equally. That was hard, and for some people it was impossible, but you had to try. We were all brothers and sisters, after all, and should embrace one another as such. That seemed so obvious, and yet there were people who refused to accept it, and made others unhappy because of their refusal.

There are plenty of good stories. There are plenty of good people who go through life without … well, without anger. Who are kind to other folk. Who don't rant and rage.

It was all very well occupying the moral high ground on electoral reform, but what really mattered, she thought, was how you treated your mother.

but then where would one end if one started to compose a list of the wrongs that this world had seen? Better perhaps, thought Mma Ramotswe, to make a list of those things that were right with the world, of people who had made life better for other people, or who had done what they had been called to do with honour and without complaint.

wrong to think the less of another for what he or she was. There was no moral obligation to like others, nor necessarily to enthuse over them, but we did have to recognize their equal worth.

If your friend smells of fish you should not try to let it affect your friendship. Everybody, thought Ranald Braveheart Macpherson, knows that.

Mma Ramotswe had been understanding. Men who sired children and then failed to accept responsibility for them were anathema to her, and she reserved particular disapproval for those who then completely disappeared. She

and the vestiges of that early feeling were still there, as she could not bring herself to punish the snails or caterpillars for their depredations. They were her fellow creatures, after all. They had not asked to be snails or caterpillars, and they needed to eat, as we all did.

There were countless injustices and difficulties in this world, but small points of light too, where the darkness was held back.

there was something that Isabel had said that always stuck in his mind. Remember what you have and the other person doesn't. It was simple--almost too simple--advice and yet, like all such home advice, it expressed a profound truth.

There were so many lives, she thought, that could only be led with difficulty, with pain, and because we were so bound up in our own lives, so many of these were invisible to us until suddenly we saw, and knew, and felt that sudden pang of human sympathy that comes with knowing.

It was curious how some people had a highly developed sense of guilt, she thought, while others had none.

Nihil humanum mihi alienum est

Love and compassion are the only balm

It would be wonderful, she thought, to write a book which would help other people.