quotations about compassion
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
Heaven seems to indicate the duty of even barren compassion, by inclining us to weep for evils which we cannot remedy.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Life and Writings
The family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people.
KAREN ARMSTRONG
Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Our hearts of stone become hearts of flesh when we learn where the outcast weeps.
BRENNAN MANNING
Abba's Child
When we know ourselves to be connected to all others, acting compassionately is simply the natural thing to do.
RACHEL NAOMI REMEN
The Heart of Learning
There's no prescription that's sold
That can heal you like compassion
TODD RUNDGREN
"Compassion"
Compassion is the chief law of human existence.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Idiot
Compassion is a mixed passion, composed of love and sorrow.
NOAH WEBSTER
An American Dictionary
Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.
ERIC HOFFER
In Our Time
There is no small kindness; every compassionate act makes large the world.
MARY ANNE RADMACHER
Live with Intention: Rediscovering What We Deeply Know
Some people's compassion is worse than their indifference or even hatred.
E. P. DAY
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
The ugliest thing I have ever seen is a human being without compassion.
ANONYMOUS
Compassion crowns the soul with its truest victory.
ABERJHANI
The River of Winged Dreams
A kind gesture can reach a wound that only compassion can heal.
STEVE MARABOLI
Life
Compassion is like a passage. Everything passes through it. Nothing can stay there. Compassion is love expressed in all its fullness.
SRI MATA AMRITANANDAMAYI DEVI
Unity is Peace
Compassion is not pity ... compassion never considers an object as weak or inferior. Compassion, one might say, works from a strength born of awareness of shared weakness, and not from someone else's weakness. And from the awareness of the mutuality of us all. Thus to put down another as in pity is to put down oneself.
MATTHEW FOX
A Spirituality Named Compassion
Compassion is not just a feeling; it is a response to pain that is deeply rooted in wisdom. It is a commitment to alleviating suffering and the cause of suffering in all its forms.
CHRISTINA FELDMAN
Compassion: Listening to the Cries of the World
Compassion goes on giving, but knows no feeling of giving, knows no feeling that "I am the giver." And then existence goes on responding in thousands of ways. You give a little love and from everywhere love starts flowing. The man of compassion is not trying to snatch anything away, he is not greedy. He does not wait for the return, he goes on giving. He goes on getting too, but that is not in his mind.
OSHO
Compassion: The Ultimate Flowering of Love
I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral ... 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 CARRE
Tinker