quotations about compassion
The nature of compassion isn't coming to terms with your own suffering and applying it to others: It's knowing that other folks around you suffer and, no matter what happens to you, no matter how lucky or unlucky you are, they keep suffering. And if you can do something about that, then you do it, and you do it without whining or waving your own fuckin' cross for the world to see. You do it because it's the right thing to do.
JOHN CONNOLLY
Dark Hollow
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 CHODRON
The Places That Scare You
If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.
JACK KORNFIELD
Buddha's Little Instruction Book
If one doth act in friendly wise,
With no evil thought toward any single creature,
And in so doing becometh proper,
And if he have compassion in his soul
Toward all living beings--this noble one
Doth acquire abundant Virtue.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
Iti-Vuttaka
Be kind to people whether they deserve your kindness or not. If your kindness reaches the deserving good for you if your kindness reaches the undeserving take joy in your compassion.
JAMES FADIMAN
Essential Sufism
Pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
Compassion to an offender who has grossly violated the laws is, in effect, a cruelty to the peaceable subject who has observed them.
JUNIUS
letter to the Printer of the Public Advertiser, Nov. 14, 1769
The tears of the compassionate are sweeter than dewdrops falling from roses on the bosom of the earth. Shut not thine ear, therefore, against the cries of the poor, neither harden thine heart against the calamities of the innocent.
ROBERT DODSLEY
The Economy of Human Life
Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it.
HENRI J. M. NOUWEN
The Way of the Heart: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers
A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
attributed, Einstein and Zen: Learning to Learn
The eternal God, in whom we live, and move, and have our being, has impressed upon us all one nature, which as an emanation from him, who is universal life, presses us by natural society to a close union with each other; which is, methinks, a sort of enlargement of our very selves when we run into the idea, sensations and concerns of our brethren: by this force of their make, men are insensibly hurried into each other; and, by a secret charm, we lament with the unfortunate, and rejoice with the glad; for it is not possible for an human heart to be averse to any thing that is human: but, by the very mien and gesture of the joyful and distressed, we rise and fall into their condition; and since joy is communicative, 'tis reasonable that grief should be contagious, both which are seen and felt at a look, for one man's eyes are spectacles to another to read his heart: those useful and honest instruments do not only discover objects to us, but make ourselves also transparent; for they, in spite of dissimulation, when the Heart is full, will brighten into gladness, or gush into tears: from this foundation in nature is kindled that noble spark of celestial fire, we call charity or Compassion, which opens our bosoms and extends our arms to embrace all mankind.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
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
Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.
DALAI LAMA XIV
The Art of Happiness
Let's get loose with compassion. Let's drown in the delicious ambience of love.
HAFIZ
"The Ambience of Love"
If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void.
KAREN ARMSTRONG
Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Each of us has only a quantum of compassion ... if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Tinker
To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion.
ALBERT CAMUS
Carnets: 1942-1951
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
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 in the only guarantee of morality.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
The Basis of Morality
He that relieves another upon the bare suggestion and bowels of pity, doth not this so much for his sake as for his own; for by compassion we make others' misery our own; and so by relieving them, we relieve ourselves also.
SIR THOMAS BROWN
Religio Medici