Compassion Quotes

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The most politically painless way to hand out goodies, without taking responsibility for their costs, is to pass a law saying that somebody else must provide those goodies at their expense, while the politicians take credit for generosity and compassion.

Doubt is an old disease.
Faith is an old medicine.
Compassion is an old doctor.
Concern is an old nurse.

As I crawled out of the abyss of combat and over the rail of the Sea Runner, I realized that compassion for the sufferings of others is a burden to those who have it. As Wilfred Owen's poem "Insensibility" puts it so well, those who feel most of others suffer most in war.

Probably Providence has implanted peevishness and ill-temper in sick and old persons, in compassion to the friends or relations who are to survive; as it must naturally lessen the concern they might otherwise feel for their loss.

Laurence Sterne

When we get emotionally and spiritually involved in helping a person who is in pain, a compassion enters our heart. It hurts, but the process lifts some of the pain from another.

When the Sun of compassion arises darkness evaporates and the singing birds come from nowhere.

Compassion is one of the highest states of consciousness that you can choose to assist you in times of enormous pain.

Yours is a race whose imagination is limited to its own small appetites. Greed, lust, envy - these are the motivating forces of humankind. What redeems you is that in every man and woman there is a seed that can grow to encompass love, joy and compassion. But this seed is never allowed to prosper in fertile ground. It struggles for life among the rocks of your human soul.

Love is the main generator of all good writing... Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.

Carson McCullers

With compassion, we see benevolently our own human condition and the condition of our fellow beings. We drop prejudice. We withhold judgment.

Christina Baldwin

Compassion is the heart that never stops loving others. It is like a wellspring that never runs dry.

Don't be upset that it takes a long, long time to find wisdom because nobody knows where wisdom can be found. It tends to break out at unexpected times like a rare virus and mostly people with compassion and understanding are susceptible to it.

Have compassion for yourself when you write. There is no failure - just a big field to wander in.

Natalie Goldberg

Our world can be moved Godward only by leaders who have shared to a deep degree the heartbreak as He looks in compassion and love on the world. Until you sense the suffering tears in the heart of God, until you share to some extent our Saviors suffering passion in Gethsemane, until you come close enough to God to enable the Spirit to yearn within you with His infinite and unutterable yearnings, you are not prepared to minister about the cross.

Wesley L Duewel

Are you trying to grasp the quality of intelligence, compassion, the immense sense of beauty, the perfume of love and that truth which has no path to it?

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Feeling compassion for ourselves in no way releases us from responsibility for our actions. Rather, it releases us from the self-hatred that prevents us from responding to our life with clarity and balance.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

If we could see the whole truth of any situation, our only response would be one of compassion.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

Education confers humility, endows one with the authority to command, that will entitle one to affluence. With the help of charity and compassion this affluence can be made fruitful, and by this means, happiness in this world and peace in the next can be won.

Sathya Sai Baba

Standing by the crib of one's own baby, with that world - old pang of compassion and protectiveness toward this so little creature that has all its course to run, the heart flies back in yearning and gratitude to those who felt just so toward one's self. Then for the first time one understands the homely succession of sacrifices and pains by which life is transmitted and fostered down the stumbling generations of men.

Christopher Morley

Your path is your own, but you must walk side by side with others, with compassion and generosity as your beacons. If anything is required it is this: fearlessness in your examination of life and death; Willingness to continually grow; and openness to the possibility that the ordinary is extraordinary, and that your joys and your sorrows have meaning and mystery

Elizabeth Lesser

Heir to your own karma doesn't mean 'You get what you deserve.' I think it means 'You get what you get.' Bad things happen to good people. My happiness depending on my action means, to me, that it depends on my action of choosing compassion--for myself as well as for everyone else--rather than contention. [p.61]

Sylvia Boorstein

The volcano which the colonists had long ignored, pretending it did not exist, was now in full eruption. Masses of slaves poured down from the hills, emerging from the plantations as though they had been spewed up from a crater. Being armed they now struck back savagely in turn, likewise without pity or compassion.

Marie Vieux Chauvet

Power is violence, its promise, its deed. Power cares nothing for reason, nothing for justice, nothing for compassion. It is, in fact, the singular abnegation of these things - once the cloak of deceits is stripped away, this one truth is revealed.

When your mind is liberated, your heart floods with compassion.