Quotes about compassion

In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone.

Real success is about helping other people succeed. To be well educated in a society of increasing illiteracy is not real success; neither is to be well fed and healthy while millions die of malnutrition.

There have been many people for whom limitation, failure, loss, illness, or pain in whatever form turned out to be their greatest teacher. It taught them to let go of false self-images and superficial ego-dictated goals and desires. It gave them depth, humility, and compassion. It made them more real.

"And she said, in a voice strangely unlike her own: “I see the vision of a poor, weak soul striving after good. It was not cut short, and in the end it learnt, through tears and much pain, that holiness is an infinite compassion for others; that greatness is to take the common things of life and walk truly among them; that”—She moved her white hand and laid it on her forehead—“happiness is a great love and much serving. It was not cut short; and it loved what it had learnt—it loved—and—”

This is a kindness, a thing done to another human being for no reason other than compassion. A private, dignified act of basic human decency, which history, being the bastard that it is, will probably neglect to commemorate.

They feared the man I was; the man I am they'd pity.

All she felt was pity, and pity was death to desire.

Mercy, thought Theon as Luwin dropped back. There's a bloody trap. Too much and they call you weak, too little and you're monstrous ... His father thought only in terms of conquest, but what good was it to take a kingdom if you could not hold it? Force and fear could only carry you so far.

"What strange fit of madness led you to tell the queen that you had learned the secret of Joffrey's birth?"

"The madness of mercy."

For mankind may survive and live without machines, and still be civilised. But without compassion, the human race can only elaborate upon the futile cunning and the barren intelligence of the great apes.

A diner having a row with a waiter in a swanky restaurant chills the blood in a way that a quarrel over a pizza order elsewhere would never do. Compassion is rarely the custom of the privileged.

The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. Compassion was the litmus test for the prophets of Israel, for the rabbis of the Talmud, for Jesus, for Paul, and for Muhammad, not to mention Confucius, Lao-tsu, the Buddha, or the sages of the Upanishads.