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Compassion Quotes

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Compassion Quotes

“I was blessed enough to meet Pope John Paul when I was about 19 or 20 years old in the Vatican; I had that privilege, .. My mother took me to visit him and I remember distinctly his incredible charisma and personal charm and his warmth and compassion. You felt it immediately the minute you met him, and that spirit I came away with, having met the man, is something that I've been constantly working on to infuse the character with, so that we can have his spirit and his love and his compassion, because that's really the essence of the man.”

“It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.”

“How far does one combine resistance to over-control with social justice, i.e. tolerable living for people in general? We are too selfish to be trusted, if left free, to give away enough to make people comfortable enough to give them a chance. Yet if all this is ordered for us, as to some extent it has to be, it so soon leads to tyranny. It is a very difficult problem. If only human beings had more pity, unselfishness, and justice and didn't need coercion to treat each other decently.”

“Our world can be moved Godward only by leaders who have shared to a deep degree the heartbreak as He looks in compassion and love on the world. Until you sense the suffering tears in the heart of God, until you share to some extent our Saviors suffering passion in Gethsemane, until you come close enough to God to enable the Spirit to yearn within you with His infinite and unutterable yearnings, you are not prepared to minister about the cross.”

“The lessons we have begun to learn make me hopeful, that human beings will become friendlier, more harmonious, less harmful. Compassion and the seeds of peace will be able to flourish. At the same time, every individual is responsible to help guide our global family in the right direction. Good wishes alone are not enough; we have to take responsibility. Large human movements spring from individual human initiatives”

“For the moment a lot of attention is given to economic concerns, and these problems at hand easily eclipse all others. But the remedies proposed for these problems all come out of outmoded ways of thinking... The remedy? Compassion. The logical feeling that we find in ourselves if we search deeply enough that has to be exercised toward all other living creatures.”

“Tonight, the news debated the intelligence of a bear. And it got my wondering why humanity rewards itself for passing tests that we create. And that got me wondering why we care. I've studied enough wars to know that the intelligence of the target isn't on the mind of the person with the gun. Maybe we should stop talking about intelligence and start discussing our grades in compassion.”

“As the photographer, it's challenging to make images that read quickly and are powerful, but have enough humanity and compassion. I've worked on these issues in the developing world because that's where the risk to girl's safety and access to education is the highest. But that doesn't mean that we don't have issues in the U.S. or western countries. For me, I focused on the developing world because it felt like the issue was more urgent there.”

“It's easy enough to predict that there will be conflict, but you place yourself in a maelstrom when you offer a view about the conflict, and I don't have an investment in one side or the other; I feel compassion for both sides. I've spent a fair amount of time in Gaza and Israel, done a lot of reporting and lived over there, and the tragedy is sometimes overwhelming. At the same time, America does have an investment in what happens.”

“Expect nothing, live frugally on surprise. Become a stranger to need of pity. Or if compassion be freely given out, take only enough. Stop short of the urge to plead, then purge away the need. Wish for nothing larger than your own small heart or greater than a star. Tame wild disappointment with caress, unmoved and cold. Make of it a parka for your soul. Discover the reason why so tiny human midget exists at all, so scared and so unwise. But expect nothing, live frugally on surprise.”

“They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled...mother's big enough, wide enough for us to hide in...mother's who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.”

“I know that as a very young child, I was afraid of death. Many children become aware of the notion of death early and it can be a very troubling thing. We're all in this continuum: I'm this age now, and if I live long enough I'll be that age. I was 20 once, I was 10, I was 4. People who are 20 now will be 50 one day. They don't know that! They know it in the abstract, but they don't know it. I'd like them to know it, because I think it gives you compassion.”

“Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?”

“My old mind hadn’t been capable of holding this much love. My old heart had not been strong enough to bear it. Maybe this was the part of me that I’d brought forward to be intensified in my new life. Like Carlisle’s compassion and Esme’s devotion. I would probably never be able to do anything interesting or special like Edward, Alice, and Jasper could do. Maybe I would just love Edward more than anyone in the history of the world had ever loved anyone else. I could live with that.”

“Grief, of course, is not something that operates according to a specific time frame, and it seems cold to suggest otherwise. Yet when we do not grasp that God is present in pain, we eventually insist on victory or, worse, blame the sufferer for not "getting over it" fast enough. This is more than a failure to extend compassion; it's an exercise in cruelty.”

“The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognize the physical, material, and psychological suffering of others, to put ourselves "inside the skin" of the other. We "go inside" their body, feelings, and mental formations, and witness for ourselves their suffering. Shallow observation as an outsider is not enough to see their suffering. We must become one with the subject of our observation. When we are in contact with another's suffering, a feeling of compassion is born in us. Compassion means, literally, "to suffer with."”