Compassion Quotes

To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for unsentimental compassion and love. (157)

~ Stephen Batchelor

I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,' Smiley went on, more lightly. 'Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.

~ John Le Carré

Embrace love and compassion with all your spirit. Understand that they never hurt or offend, they just heal and empower.

~ Steve Maraboli

...It also taught me that while cruelty can be fun for a few moments, compassion has a much longer shelf life.

~ Doreen Orion

one does not remember one’s own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us

~ Anna Funder

How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?

~ George Eliot

As long as you are standing, give a hand to those who have fallen.

~ Persian Proverb

It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.

~ Aldous Huxley

Being kind to someone, only to look kind to others, defeats the purpose of being kind.

~ Shannon L. Alder

A dog has the soul of a philosopher.

~ Plato

If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. (95)

~ Karen Armstrong

Everyone has baggage, maybe we should help each other carry it.

~ Rob Liano

Perhaps,” murmured his lordship, “I yielded to a compassionate impulse.”“A what?” gasped his best friend. “Oh, did you think I never did so?” said his lordship, the satirical glint in his eyes extremely pronounced. “You wrong me! I do, sometimes—not frequently, of course, but every now and then!

~ Georgette Heyer

Patience has all the time it needs.

~ Allan Lokos

In great hearts the cruelty of life gives birth to good.

~ Vasily Grossman

O my son Absalom,' Bean said softly, knowing for the first time the kind of anguish that could tear such words from a man’s mouth. 'my son, my son Absalom. Would God I could die for thee, O Absalom, my son. My sons!

~ Orson Scott Card

A single act of kindness is like a drop of oil on a patch of dry skin—seeping, spreading, and affecting more than the original need.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Experience, or what we call experience, is not the inventory of our pains, but rather the learned sympathy towards the pain of others.

~ Juan Gabriel Vásquez

If there is a fundamental challenge within these stories, it is simply to change our lurking suspicion that some lives matter less than other lives.

~ Gregory J. Boyle

If bullies actually believe that somebody loves them and believes in them, they will love themselves, they will become better people, and many will even become saviors to the bullied.

~ Dan Pearce

The ragamuffin gospel reveals that Jesus forgives sins, including the sins of the flesh; that He is comfortable with sinners who remember how to show compassion; but that He cannot and will not have a relationship with pretenders in the Spirit.

~ Brennan Manning

What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears.

~ Rosa Luxemburg

We don’t need any sort of religious orientation to lead a life that is ethical, compassionate & kind.

~ Sharon Salzberg

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.

~ Walt Whitman

One who utters speech that isn't rough But instructive and truthfulSo that he offends no one, Him I call Brahmin.

~ Anonymous

Should I, too, prefer the title of 'non-Jewish Jew'? For some time, I would have identified myself strongly with the attitude expressed by Rosa Luxemburg, writing from prison in 1917 to her anguished friend Mathilde Wurm:An inordinate proportion of the Marxists I have known would probably have formulated their own views in much the same way. It was almost a point of honor not to engage in 'thinking with the blood,' to borrow a notable phrase from D.H. Lawrence, and to immerse Jewishness in other and wider struggles. Indeed, the old canard about 'rootless cosmopolitanism' finds a perverse sort of endorsement in Jewish internationalism: the more emphatically somebody stresses that sort of rhetoric about the suffering of others, the more likely I would be to assume that the speaker was a Jew. Does this mean that I think there are Jewish 'characteristics'? Yes, I think it must mean that.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Humans have long since possessed the tools for crafting a better world. Where love, compassion, altruism and justice have failed, genetic manipulation will not succeed.

~ Gina Maranto

Instead of seeing how much pain I can dish out towards those I disagree with, or who I believe have done me wrong, I seek to follow the golden rule and use my words and behavior to create more of what the world needs – love, compassion, and connection.

~ Aspen Baker

It is curious what patches of hardness and tenderness lie side by side in men’s dispositions. I suppose he has some test by which he finds out whom Heaven cares for.

~ George Eliot

It is therefore of supreme importance that we consent to live not for ourselves but for others. When we do this we will be able first of all to face and accept our own limitations. As long as we secretly adore ourselves, our own deficiencies will remain to torture us with an apparent defilement. But if we live for others, we will gradually discover that no expects us to be 'as gods'. We will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another.

~ Thomas Merton

How good life is when one does something good and just!

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I think people believe empathy to be compassion, that compassion is an inner sense (a sense of the soul). But empathy is a sense, while compassion isn't a sense. Empathy is an affinity, a communion, a comprehension. They say that empathy is compassion, but I think that the two are independent of each other. You see, through empathy you will feel what another is feeling, including all those plans for manipulation and persuasion. You will feel everything, not just the parts that make you take compassion for the person, but also all the red flags! You see, empathy is a sense that works with the other senses such as foresight and intuition. So, we can feel compassion but we have to move with empathy.

~ C. Joybell C.

Pardon all runners,All speechless, alien winds,All mad waters.Pardon their impulses,Their wild attitudes,Their young flights, their reticence.When a message has no clothes onHow can it be spoken.

~ Thomas Merton

To be grounded in an attitude of compassion is to be capable of receiving and welcoming the suffering, which the other is giving us. This does not mean that we suffer for them, but that we offer them possibility of going beyond the separate self in which suffering is harbored. (59)

~ Jean-Yves Leloup

We numb our minds and heart so one need not be broken and the other need not be bothered.

~ Peggy Haymes

We find greater lightness & ease in our lives as we increasingly care for ourselves & other beings.

~ Sharon Salzberg

The Goddess spoke to all the dead. She was beloved for it. It seemed she passed on that gift to you. Oh, it taxed her immensely, but she tried to set as many to rest as she could. Sometimes it only takes one word of kindness, you know, to set a soul at ease.

~ Leanna Renee Hieber

Once someone appears to us primarily as an object, kindness has no place to root.

~ Sharon Salzberg

What is the real origin of my own anger? Is it the ego defending its territory, or is it something that has its source in the desire for the well-being of all? (73)

~ Jean-Yves Leloup

surround yourself with people who allow you to be yourself, it does not mean be around others who do not have a sense of right or wrong, who lack respect, love and compassion for others.

~ Tasha Hoggatt