quotations about compassion
Compassion is the chief law of human existence.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Idiot
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
DALAI LAMA XIV
The Art of Happiness
Grief for the calamity of another is pity, and arises from the imagination that the like calamity may befall himself; and, therefore, it is called compassion, or in the phrase of the present time a fellow-feeling.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Let our compassion express itself in efforts to bring the erring back to sacred principles, and if they persist, let us pity them the more for a blindness so fatal to themselves.
S. E. D. CHARNAGE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Meditation is a flower and compassion is its fragrance. Exactly like that it happens. The flower blooms and the fragrance spreads on the winds in all directions, to be carried to the very ends of earth. But the basic thing is the blooming of the flower. Man is also carrying a potentiality for flowering within him. Until and unless the inner being of man flowers, the fragrance of compassion is not possible. Compassion cannot be practiced. It is not a discipline. You cannot manage it. It is beyond you. If you meditate, one day, suddenly, you become aware of a new phenomenon, absolutely strange--from your being, compassion is flowing towards the whole of existence. Undirected, unaddressed, it is moving to the very ends of existence.
OSHO
Compassion: The Ultimate Flowering of Love
The ugliest thing I have ever seen is a human being without compassion.
ANONYMOUS
Cruelty is no more the cure of crimes than it is the cure of sufferings; compassion, in the first instance, is good for both; I have known it to bring compunction when nothing else would.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
Compassion is that species of affection which is excited either by the actual distress of its object, or by some impending calamity, which appears inevitable; it is a benevolent sorrow for the sufferings or approaching misery of another.
CHARLES BUCK
A Theological Dictionary
Most women bestow their favors upon men, not from Passion, but from Compassion.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
Compassion is a Shepherd,
Always tending his herd.
PEGGY HEADLUND
The Spirit Moves
Compassion is the basis of morality.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
The Philosophy of Schopenhauer
All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart.
TAHEREH MAFI
Shatter Me
Some people's compassion is worse than their indifference or even hatred.
E. P. DAY
attributed, Day's Collacon
The symptoms of compassion and benevolence, in some people, are like those minute guns which warn you that you are in deadly peril.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles,", The Writings of Madame Swetchine
He who pitieth another recommendeth himself; but he who is without compassion deserveth not.
ROBERT DODSLEY
The Economy of Human Life
If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.
JACK KORNFIELD
Buddha's Little Instruction Book
Compassion is a verb.
THICH NHAT HANH
attributed, A Heart Full of Peace
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
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships
Pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch