Compassion Quotes

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.

~ Plato

Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

Compassion is the basis of morality.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

No one has ever become poor by giving.

~ Anne Frank

for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

~ Milan Kundera

In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.

~ John Bunyan

While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.

~ Chinua Achebe

Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection - or compassionate action.

~ Daniel Goleman

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.

~ Pema Chödrön

If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.

~ Jack Kornfield

And when I came in with tears in my eyes, you always knew whether I needed you to hold me or just let me be. I don't know how you knew, but you did, and you made it easier for me.

~ Nicholas Sparks

The simplest acts of kindness are by far more powerful then a thousand heads bowing in prayer.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

The only time you look in your neighbor's bowl is to make sure that they have enough. You don't look in your neighbor's bowl to see if you have as much as them.

~ Louis C.k.

How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?

~ Orhan Pamuk

We only have what we give.

~ Isabel Allende

That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.

~ Jack Kerouac

On the one hand maybe I’ve remained infantile, while on the other I matured quickly, because at a young age I was very aware of suffering and fear.

~ Audrey Hepburn

If a person seems wicked, do not cast him away. Awaken him with your words, elevate him with your deeds, repay his injury with your kindness. Do not cast him away; cast away his wickedness.

~ Lao Tzu

Give, but give until it hurts.

~ Mother Teresa

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.

~ Doris Lessing

We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. True humanity does not allow us to impose such sufferings on them. It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it. Until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things, humanity will not find peace.

~ Albert Schweitzer

When you're too religious, you tend to point your finger to judge instead of extending your hand to help.

~ Steve Maraboli

Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it.

~ Rick Bragg

Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you.

~ Kahlil Gibran

Hurt people hurt people. We are not being judgmental by separating ourselves from such people. But we should do so with compassion. Compassion is defined as a keen awareness of the suffering of another coupled with a desire to see it relieved. People hurt others as a result of their own inner strife and pain. Avoid the reactive response of believeing they are bad; they already think so and are acting that way. They aren't bad; they are damaged and they deserve compassion. Note that compassion is an internal process, an understanding of the painful and troubled road trod by another. It is not trying to change or fix that person.

~ Will Bowen

Cruel people offer pity when they no longer feel threatened. However, kind people offer compassion and understanding regardless.

~ Shannon L. Alder

The world gives us PLENTY of opportunities to strengthen our patience. While this truth can definitely be challenging, this is a good thing. Patience is a key that unlocks the door to a more fulfilling life. It is through a cultivation of patience that we become better parents, powerful teachers, great businessmen, good friends, and a live a happier life.

~ Steve Maraboli

We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization - black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.... What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

~ Robert F. Kennedy

His lips soften into a smile that cracks apart my spine. He repeats my name like the word amuses him. Entertains him. Delights him.

~ Tahereh Mafi

Why are you touchin

~ Tahereh Mafi

My husband, Andrius, says that evil will rule until good men or women choose to act. I believe him. This testimony was written to create an absolute record, to speak in a world where our voices have been extinguished. These writing may shock or horrify you, but that is not my intention. It is my greatest hope that the pages in this jar stir your deepest well of human compassion. I hope they prompt you to do something, to tell somone. Only then can we ensure that this kind of evil is never allowed to repeat itself.

~ Ruta Sepetys

You stand for what is right, Lina, without the expectation of gratitude or reward.

~ Ruta Sepetys

Nothing that we despise in other men is inherently absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don't do, and more in light of what they suffer.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

When I tried this morning, after an hour or so of unhappy thinking, to dip back into my meditation, I took a new idea with me: compassion. I asked my heart if it could please infuse my soul with a more generous perspective on my mind's workings. Instead of thinking that I was a failure, could I perhaps accept that I am only a human being--and a normal one, at that?

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do -- but who is that 'we'? -- and nothing 'they' can do either -- and who are 'they' -- then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.

~ Susan Sontag

That's how powerful you are, girl...You pretty, but pretty alone is not what people see. You the kinda pretty, the kinda beauty, that's like a mirror. Men and women see themselves in you, only now they so beautiful that they can't bear to see you go.

~ Walter Mosley