Compassion Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

We believe in only the government we need, but we insist on all the government we need.
We believe in a government that is characterized by fairness and reasonableness, a reasonableness that goes beyond labels, that doesn't distort or promise to do things that we know we can't do.
We believe in a government strong enough to use words like "love" and "compassion" and smart enough to convert our noblest aspirations into practical realities.
We believe in encouraging the talented, but we believe that while survival of the fittest may be a good working description of the process of evolution, a government of humans should elevate itself to a higher order.

Thoughts of unselfishness, compassion, and aspiration, act on the minds of others and, returning to their creator, free him from the bonds of recurring births.

Harold W. Percival

Never has so much indifference masqueraded as so much compassion; never has there been such willful blindness. The once pragmatic English have become a nation of sleepwalkers.

Anthony Daniels

Ascribing human brotherhood, social justice, world peace, self-sacrifice and compassion to Christianity and Islam is tantamount to proclaiming that the wolf is a votary of vegetarianism.

If you do not know how to take care of yourself, and the violence in you, then you will not be able to take care of others. You must have love and patience before you can truly listen to your partner or child. If you are irritated you cannot listen. You have to know how to breath mindfully, embrace your irritation and transform it. Offer ONLY understand and compassion to your partner or child - This is the true practice of love.

When you encounter those who are wicked, unrighteous, foolish, dim-witted, deformed, vicious, chronically ill, lonely, unfortunate, or disabled, you should think: How can I save them? And even if there is nothing you can do, at least you must not indulge in feelings of arrogance, superiority, derision, scorn, or abhorrence, but should immediately manifest sympathy and compassion. If you fail to do so, you should feel ashamed and deeply reproach yourself: How far I have strayed from the Way! How can I betray the old sages? I take these words as an admonition to myself.

In opening we can see how many times we have mistaken small identities and fearful beliefs for our true nature and how limiting this is. We can touch with great compassion the pain from the contracted identities that we and others have created in the world.

When God puts love and compassion in your heart toward someone, He's offering you an opportunity to make a difference in that person's life. You must learn to follow that love. Don't ignore it. Act on it. Somebody needs what you have.

I am angry with him but I have compassion for him. The reason I can have a relationship with him is that I don't see him as my father but as an individual. I'm glad I didn't murder him that day. I couldn't have lived with myself if I had.

Our public interest depends on private character, on civic duty and family bonds and basic fairness, on uncounted, unhonored acts of decency which give direction to our freedom. Sometimes in life we are called to do great things. But as a saint of our times has said, every day we are called to do small things with great love. The most important tasks of a democracy are done by everyone. I will live and lead by these principles: to advance my convictions with civility, to pursue the public interest with courage, to speak for greater justice and compassion, to call for responsibility and try to live it as well. In all these ways, I will bring the values of our history to the care of our times.

She has no imagination and that means no compassion

His is a loving, tender hand, full of sympathy and compassion.

Dwight L. Moody

A good biographer should combine the skills of the novelist and the detective, and add to them the patience and compassion of the priest.

Gerald Clarke (author)

Indignation and compassion form a powerful combination. They are indispensable to vision, and therefore to leadership.

Our difficulty comes, of course, in deciding where ethical coercion ends and unethical violence begins. The only person who is able to escape from this dilemma is the complete anarchist who repudiates every form of restraint and compassion—and such a man has no solution to offer for the imminently menacing problems of the hour. All other persons are obliged to draw the line somewhere, and orderly progress depends upon intellectual keenness and ethical sensitiveness with which the situation is confronted.

I firmly believe kids don't want your understanding. They want your trust, your compassion, your blinding love and your car keys, but you try to understand them and you're in big trouble.

Before the passage of the Removal Act of 1830, a group of Cherokee chiefs went to the Senate committee that was studying this legislation to report on what they had already achieved... They expressed the hope that they would be permitted to enjoy in peace "the blessings of civilization and Christianity on the soil of their rightful inheritance." Instead they were... denied even the basic protection of the federal government. The Removal Act was carried out almost everywhere with total lack of compassion, but in the case of the Cherokee—civilized and Christianized as they were—it was particularly brutal.

The greatest things in life - truth, creativity, imagination, love, kindness, compassion -are already inside us, and they're all free.

Honor to those who in the life they lead
define and guard a Thermopylae.
Never betraying what is right,
consistent and just in all they do
but showing pity also, and compassion;
generous when they are rich, and when they are poor,
still generous in small ways,
still helping as much as they can;
always speaking the truth,
yet without hating those who lie.

Constantine P. Cavafy

Upon awakening, let the words Thank You flow from your lips, for this will remind you to begin your day with gratitude and compassion.

Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.

Albert Schweitzer

There are those who do not hold that there is any innate goodness to mankind. To them I say, had you lived my life, you would not believe it. I have known the depths to which mortals are capable of descending, and I have seen the heights. I have seen how kindness and compassion may grow in the unlikeliest of places, as the mountain flower forces its way through the stern rock.

Jacqueline Carey

Even though a lot of people are nervous about what a Trump presidency might look like, a longtime friend of Trump says that Trump intends to build a "wall of understanding." He also said Trump would put up some "barbed wire of compassion" and a "roadblock of empathy."

When asked if he was in good heart about being Archbishop:

The phrase 'in good heart' gives me pause…We are here as a church to represent Christ crucified and the compassion of Christ crucified before the world. And, because that is so, it may be the will of God that our church should have its heart broken and perhaps the heart of its Archbishop broken with it.

The Utopians feel that slaughtering our fellow creatures gradually destroys the sense of compassion, which is the finest sentiment of which our human nature is capable.