Compassion Quotes

Compassion, acceptance and LOVE is the cure to MOST of the issues that plague this world.

~ Yvonne Pierre

Today's society is wanting in such a way that Honor, Integrity, Trust, Compassion, Empathy are left for the homeless and their pets.

~ Solange Nicole

Muhammad adhered meticulously to the charter he forged for Medina, which - grounded as it was in the Quranic injunction, Let there be no compulsion in religion (2:256) - is arguably the first mandate for religious tolerance in human history.

~ Huston Smith

When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them.

~ Criss Jami

Your emotional understanding about the preciousness of your human birth comes through conscious, repetitive mind training.

~ Tsoknyi Rinpoche

Our work is not to become a better person, but to become present to the perfection we already are.

~ Allan Lokos

I’m helped by a gentle notion from Buddhist psychology, that there are “near enemies” to every great virtue—reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an ineffectual path. Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can’t possibly make a difference. The wise Buddhist anthropologist and teacher Roshi Joan Halifax calls this a “pathological empathy” of our age. In the face of magnitudes of pain in the world that come to us in pictures immediate and raw, many of us care too much and see no evident place for our care to go. But compassion goes about finding the work that can be done. Love can’t help but stay present

~ Krista Tippett

One either cares what others think about him, or cares what others think he thinks about them. If you want to find someone who doesn't care in the slightest what anyone thinks, try a lunatic asylum.

~ Criss Jami

Hearing has consequences. When I truly hear a person and the meanings that are important to him at that moment, hearing not simply his words, but him, and when I let him know that I have heard his own private personal meanings, many things happen. There is first of all a grateful look. He feels released. He wants to tell me more about his world. He surges forth in a new sense of freedom. He becomes more open to the process of change. I have often noticed that the more deeply I hear the meanings of the person, the more there is that happens. Almost always, when a person realize he has been deeply heard, his eyes moisten. I think in some real sense he is weeping for joy. It is as though he were saying, Thank God, somebody heard me. Someone knows what it's like to be me.

~ Carl Rogers

We cannot own each other, Bo. We can only offer what is ours to give.

~ Sarah Fine

In social life we hardly stop to consider how much of that daring spirit which gives mastery comes from hardness of heart rather than from high purpose, or true courage. The man who succumbs to his wife, the mother who succumbs to her daughter, the master who succumbs to his servant, is as often brought to servility by a continual aversion to the giving of pain, by a softness which causes the fretfulness of others to be an agony to himself,—as by any actual fear which the firmness of the imperious one may have produced. There is an inner softness, a thinness of the mind's skin, an incapability of seeing or even thinking of the troubles of others with equanimity, which produces a feeling akin to fear; but which is compatible not only with courage, but with absolute firmness of purpose, when the demand for firmness arises so strongly as to assert itself.

~ Anthony Trollope

Look for the person everyone hates, and love them.

~ Criss Jami

Compassion is a sign of inner peace. Kindness is a sign of inner strength. Be kind and be compassionate.

~ Debasish Mridha

Your suffering is here to help you unfold and to awaken into compassion, love and strength.

~ Bryant Mcgill

No matter who we are, where we live, what we look like, the circumstances of our birth or the situations we face; each of us has gifts within us. Strength, beauty, courage, compassion, hope, joy, talent, imagination, reverence, wisdom, love and faith are among them. They are not like material presents we unwrap and hold in our hands. We can’t see these gifts with our eyes. But they are real and powerful. When we open ourselves to them, they can enrich every aspect of our lives. They can help us transform challenges into opportunities and tragedies into triumphs. They can help us make a difference in the world.

~ Charlene Costanzo

But the healing place is within you. Healing is a gift you were granted at birth, just as you were granted others. Use your gifts, child. Use the beauty, the courage, the hope and the love that is in you. Call upon your strength. Use compassion and faith. Even during sad times joy is within you. Bring it forth. Wisdom is there to guide you. Use any one of your gifts and you will rouse the power of your healing place. Use all of them and you will sustain it.

~ Charlene Costanzo

The depth of our compassion is proportional to the depth of our living. (65)

~ Jean-Yves Leloup

I learn so much that I previously did not know about the world of the immobile that it is hard to believe it all takes place over a few hours. At random: I learn about the casual indifference of the London cabbie to the wheelchair user and that the clearance on accessible entrances is measured in millimetres less than a knuckle. I learn how intractable it is to push a grown man around for hours and how spontaneity is the privilege of the able-bodied. In solid counterpart to all this grief, I learn about the lengths nurses are prepared to go to assist a purely recreational and ambitious project by one of their patients.

~ Marion Coutts

Courage can't exist without action. Anything else is a lion without his roar.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Blessed are those with cracks in their broken heart because that is how the light gets in.

~ Shannon L. Alder

As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.

~ Natalie Goldberg

All forms of writing are an act of conception; writing must lead to creation. Each time that we write, we begin again. Writing is an act of self-affirmation. Each time that we place our thoughts onto paper, we receive a new opportunity to claim our reality. Writing is also an act of explication and deconstruction. Writing empowers us to shape and modify our fiery constitutions. Writing allows us to explore the essential ingredients that lead to a life of serenity by exhibiting compassion, love, patience, generosity, and forgiveness.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Sufism expresses what I have found to be Real.

~ Efrat Cybulkiewicz

Jnana yoga is the yoga of kindness and compassion - serving the self that is everywhere.

~ Amit Ray

Even over the sound of a thousand voices...I still can hear my own, only after I listened to hers.

~ James Emlund

No matter where you go, there’s always something to deal with; if it’s not greed, it’s lust, or envy, or pride, or something else. You just have to live your life so uncorrupted that it offsets the corruption as much as possible.

~ A.j. Darkholme

I loved reading the Dalai Lama's words: My religion is loving-kindness. I realized that meant loving-kindness to everyone in my life: past, present, and future; and that meant loving-kindness to myself--in my pain, in my jealousy, in my fear.

~ Elizabeth Kim

Sometimes you have to put yourself in other people’s shoes to really understand the hardships of their souls.

~ Kellie Elmore

The more at ease you are in the world, the more vibrant, creative and easygoing the world in you becomes.

~ Laurie Perez

Our readers are curious, creative, and compassionate fairy punks who are citizens of the world.

~ Quail Bell Magazine

Laughter has got to be the single healthiest activity one can perform. Just think how healthy you would be if you could sincerely laugh at that which now oppresses you.

~ Darrell Calkins

Recovery through sleep isn’t going to happen if the majority of the components of your being aren’t getting enough stimulation or resistance to work against. Your brain may be tired after work, but if your body and emotions haven’t been challenged through the day, they’re going to keep irritating you even if you’re asleep. They don’t need rest; they need work for real recovery to take place.

~ Darrell Calkins

The typical image of a depressed, lazy and tired person is someone hunched over and inert. Often, the assumption is that if one had more enthusiasm and inspiration, he would then stand up straight and move. In many cases, this equation is backward. But, as with everything related to one’s physicality, balance is the key. An overly erect and rigid posture may convey confidence and power to some, but it also causes a subtle accumulation of tension and rigidity on various levels, including psychological and emotional.

~ Darrell Calkins

No one will improve his health significantly without accurately perceiving priorities, knowing clearly what is at stake if those are not attended to and what is to be gained if acted on correctly. That’s the basic homework before any change can come about. Then that knowledge has to be transformed into a sustainable motivation.

~ Darrell Calkins

Well-being, or wholeness, implies integrity and harmony between all existing elements, providing freedom for the whole.

~ Darrell Calkins

Ironically, many of the institutions that run the economy, such as medicine, education, law and even psychology are largely dependent upon failing health. If you add up the amounts of money exchanged in the control, anticipation and reaction to failing health (insurance, pharmaceutical research and products, reactive or compensatory medicine, related legal issues, consultation and therapy for those who are unwilling to improve their physical health and claim or believe the problem is elsewhere, etc.), you end up with an enormous chunk. To keep that moving, we need people to be sick. Then we have the extreme social emphasis placed on the pursuit and maintenance of a lifestyle based on making money at any cost, often at the sacrifice of health, sanity and well-being.

~ Darrell Calkins

Physical well-being necessitates listening to what you already know, and then taking it seriously enough to act accordingly. When you wake up and feel the impulse to arch your back, stretch and exhale with a loud sigh, for God’s sake, do it.

~ Darrell Calkins

In my experience, most people are actually seeking recovery from the monotony and anxiety of qualitative repetition. This applies to body, emotions and mind. And that monotony and anxiety involves inertia just as much as over-use, meaning inertia in some areas and over-use in others.

~ Darrell Calkins

Yearning often does not provide a sense of attainment or “peace,” as it is fuel for one’s personal purpose, to in some specific way give or create; to do that is not necessarily easy or peaceful.

~ Darrell Calkins

If I were to make a list of focus for well-being, I would begin with lifestyle (the totality of one’s circumstance and how that is engaged, including job and relationships, and proximity to nature), attending to the physical functions correctly (posture, breathing, exercise, food, rest, etc.), consistent expression of your natural range of qualities, working and playing well and hard, and designing things so that you are doing what compels you. Obviously, you can’t give this list out as a prescription for physical problems and diseases, but then again, it is probably the correct prescription. If one were to follow it, any specific problem, even extreme, would almost certainly resolve itself.

~ Darrell Calkins