Quotes About Compassion

I had never before considered that people near me might have problems that were not caused by me. I had been created to please people. If the people around me weren't happy, I must be doing something wrong. Lynn helped me see that I lacked the power to make other people feel anything.

Yes! Oh, yes! Of course I forgive you! And I love you, Marnie. I shall never forget you, ever!

If compassion is so good for us, why don't we train our health care providers in compassion so that they can do what they're supposed to do, which is to transform suffering?

In being with dying, we arrive at a natural crucible of what it means to love and be loved. And we can ask ourselves this: Knowing that death is inevitable, what is most precious today?

Conceptual knowledge is so valued in our world. Yet in many cultures wisdom is equated not with knowledge but with an open heart. And

Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole.

A world without empathy is a world that is dead to others—and if we are dead to others, we are dead to ourselves. The sharing of another's pain can take us past the narrow canyon of selfish disregard, and even cruelty, and into the larger, more expansive landscape of wisdom and compassion.

In the end, I learned that the practice of Not-Knowing is the very ground of altruism, because it opens us up to a much wider horizon than our preconceptions could ever afford us and can let in connection and tenderness.

the way out of the storm and mud of suffering, the way back to freedom on the high edge of strength and courage, is through the power of compassion.

Listening to the testimony of a dying person or a grieving family member can serve the one speaking; it all depends on how we listen. Maybe we can reflect back the words and feelings in such a way that the speaker can at last really hear what he's said.

if we manipulate others into not sharing so we don't have to hear, so we don't have to listen, or if we react with horror or abandon the scene, we stifle our empathy and rob ourselves of this fundamental virtue of humanity.

action, calls us to turn or return to the world with

The second tenet, bearing witness, calls us to be present with the suffering and joy in the world, as it is, without judgment or any attachment to outcome.

Most of us are shrinking in the face of psycho-social and physical poisons, of the toxins of our world. But compassion actually mobilizes our immunity.

Birdfoot's Grampa The old man must have stopped our car two dozen times to climb out and gather into his hands the small toads blinded by our lights and leaping, live drops of rain. ******** The rain was falling a mist about his white hair and I kept saying you can't save them all accept it, get back in we've got places to go. But the leathery hands full of wet brown life knee deep in the summer roadside grass he just smiled and said they have places to go too.

I do not knowingly kill any living thing - including insects or rodents - and I thank my food for sustaining me.

I love sports. I love animals. I love kids. I want to save the world. So how do I combine all those things? I don't know.

Cutting meat out of your diet is the best thing you can do for animals and your own health.

Poverty doesn't make anyone an inferior being.

Even as a little girl, Irma Leopold had wanted above all things to see everyone happy with the cake of their choice. Sometimes it became an almost unbearable longing, as when she had looked down at Mademoiselle asleep on the grass this afternoon.

Sometimes it's easier not to try to understand people.

And while he worked he told her about the hand that had been holding his. Debbie gasped. "How could you stand it? I'm glad it didn't happen to me! I would have died, right there on the stairs, and you would have had to drag my body all the way down.

A heart filled with anger has no room for love.

Coalition politics, the building of bridges between disparate groups who share a common vision of how things should be, is a strategy that calls for a tough blend of clarity, compassion, and most of all the willingness to experience someone else's history.