Compassion Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Some people say that compassion is the purest form of love because it neither expects nor demands anything in return.

Compassion is a mind that removes the suffering that is present in the other.

Opposers of compassion urge: 'If we should live on vegetable food, what shall we do with our cattle? What would become of them? They would grow so numerous they would be prejudicial to us—they would eat us up if we did not kill and eat them.' But there is abundance of animals in the world whom men do not kill and eat; and yet we hear not of their injuring mankind, and sufficient room is found for their abode. Horses are not usually killed to be eaten, and yet we have not heard of any country overstocked with them.

George Nicholson (printer)

Compassion is the ability to understand how difficult it is for people to be the best of what they want to be at all times.

Joan Chittister

We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time.

Chekhov said: let's put God - and all these grand progressive ideas - to one side. Let's begin with man; let's be kind and attentive to the individual man - whether he's a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin Islands, or a waiter in a restaurant. Let's begin with respect, compassion, and love for the individual - or we'll never get anywhere.

Vasily Grossman

For after all, as great scientists have said and all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, compassion, and hope.

Ursula K. Le Guin

I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.

The life of Jesus suggests that to be like Abba is to show compassion. Donald Gray expresses this: "Jesus reveals in an exceptionally human life what it is to live a divine life, a compassionate life.

Brennan Manning

the distance
between this pigeon's brain
and mine
is minute compared to that
between mine
and Bodhi's
Wisdom
Compassion

Frederick Franck

Awakening self-compassion is often the greatest challenge people face on the spiritual path.

When we are devoted to the development of kindness, it becomes our ready response, so that reacting from compassion, from caring, is not a question of giving ourselves a lecture: 'I don't really feel like it, but I'd better be helpful, or what would people think?'

Sharon Salzberg

Idea at play here is that of morality. When young women are taught about morality, there's not often talk of compassion, kindness, courage, or integrity. There is, however, a lot of talk about hymens

Jessica Valenti

Within that moment was trust, compassion, and our mutual sense of irony. He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life. We were both aware of that, I know.

Compassion for the mother is extremely important, but is never served through destroying the innocent.

At heart, the issues raised in a work of fantasy are those we face in real life. In whatever guise—our own daily nightmares of war, intolerance, inhumanity; or the struggles of an Assistant Pig-Keeper against the Lord of Death—the problems are agonizingly familiar. And an openness to compassion, love and mercy, is as essential to us here and now as it is to any inhabitant of an imaginary kingdom.

Lloyd Alexander

Allah wants us to be merciful, compassionate and forgiving. And He wants us to look at everyone with compassion — so much so that in the Qur'an, Allah wants us to assure the life security of even idolaters.

Corruption and envy and lust for power. Cruelty and coldness. A vicious probing curiousity. Pure, poisonous, toxic malice. You have never from your earliest years shown a shred of compassion for sympathy or kindness without calculating how it would return to your advantage. You have tortured and killed without regret or hesitation; you have betrayed and intrigued and gloried in your treachery. You are a cess-pit of moral filth.

It matters, it matters very much, what each of us chooses to do. The journey toward self-discovery and self-knowledge is not only life's highest adventure, but also the only way to transform society from one based on self-centeredness and compulsory compassion to one based on service and mutual responsibility.

Arianna Huffington

Imagine a culture in which everything is geared toward helping all individuals become the best human beings they can be; in which individuals are driven to devoting their lives to becoming enlightened by the natural flood of compassion for others that arises from their wisdom.

Lissa knelt down, compassion on her face. I wasn't surprised, since she'd always had a thing for animals. She'd lectured me for days after I'd instigated the infamous hamster-and-hermit-crab fight. I'd viewed the fight as a testing of worthy opponents. She'd seen it as animal cruelty.

Public emergencies may require the hand of severity to fall heavily on those who are not personally guilty, but compassion prompts, and ever urges to milder methods

Mercy Otis Warren

There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul agains the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one at counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.

I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means 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.

Robert Sapolsky

A diner having a row with a waiter in a swanky restaurant chills the blood in a way that a quarrel over a pizza order elsewhere would never do. Compassion is rarely the custom of the privileged.