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
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
Our hearts of stone become hearts of flesh when we learn where the outcast weeps.
BRENNAN MANNING
Abba's Child
Compassion is a mixed passion, composed of love and sorrow.
NOAH WEBSTER
An American Dictionary
There is no small kindness; every compassionate act makes large the world.
MARY ANNE RADMACHER
Live with Intention: Rediscovering What We Deeply Know
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
The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Most women bestow their favors upon men, not from Passion, but from Compassion.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
The ugliest thing I have ever seen is a human being without compassion.
ANONYMOUS
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
Some people's compassion is worse than their indifference or even hatred.
E. P. DAY
attributed, Day's Collacon
Compassion is not a quality to be cultivated in isolation, aloof from life. It is easy to be compassionate from a distance, when your heart is undisturbed. When you are surrounded by those who love and care for you, when you have built a world where pain is repressed or ignored, you can easily immerse yourself in thoughts of love and tolerance. Yet that is a fragile world, built on foundations that will always crumble. Compassion speaks of the willingness to engage with tragedy, loss, and pain. Its domain is not only the world of those you love and care for, but equally the people who threaten you, the countless people you don't know, the homeless person you meet on the street, and the situations of anger and hatred you recoil from. It is here that you learn about the depths of tolerance and understanding that are possible for each one of us. It is here that you learn about dignity, meaning, and greatness of heart.
CHRISTINA FELDMAN
Compassion: Listening to the Cries of the World
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
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
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
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
Liberals measure compassion by how many people are given welfare. Conservatives measure compassion by how many people no longer need it.
RUSH LIMBAUGH
"35 Undeniable Truths of Life"