Compassion & Understanding Quotes

As a society, we come up lacking in many of the marks of compassion and wisdom by which we measure ourselves as civilized.

Sympathy is one of the principles most widely rooted in our nature: we rejoice to see ourselves reflected in another; and, perversely enough, we sometimes have a secret pleasure in seeing the sin which dwells in ourselves existing under a deformed and monstrous aspect in another.

On a level of simple personal survival, understanding and forgiveness are crucial... whether in an intimate personal relationship or on a global level.

For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.

From caring comes courage.

The dew of compassion is a tear.

I have always had tremendous amount of patience, compassion and forgiveness.

Every animal has his or her story, his or her thoughts, daydreams, and interests. All feel joy and love, pain and fear, as we now know beyond any shadow of a doubt. All deserve that the human animal afford them the respect of being cared for with great consideration for those interests or left in peace.

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.

Our uniqueness, our individuality, and our life experience molds us into fascinating beings. I hope we can embrace that. I pray we may all challenge ourselves to delve into the deepest resources of our hearts to cultivate an atmosphere of understanding, acceptance, tolerance, and compassion. We are all in this life together.

Some emotions are essential to law and to public principles of justice: anger at wrongdoing, fear for our safety, compassion for the pain of others, all these are good reasons to make laws that protect people in their rights.

Compassion has enemies, and those enemies are things like pity, moral outrage, fear.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

Whether one believes in a religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn't anyone who doesn't appreciate kindness and compassion.

Kindness is wisdom.

More compassionate mind, more sense of concern for other's well-being, is source of happiness.

It's through the small things that we develop our moral imagination, so that we can understand the sufferings of others.

Mindfulness is about love and loving life. When you cultivate this love, it gives you clarity and compassion for life, and your actions happen in accordance with that.

Positive social emotions like compassion and empathy are generally good for us, and we want to encourage them. But do we know how to most reliably raise children to care about the suffering of other people? I'm not sure we do.

With compassion you can die for other people, like the mother who can die for her child. You have the courage to say it because you are not afraid of losing anything, because you know that understanding and love is the foundation of happiness. But if you have fear of losing your status, your position, you will not have the courage to do it.

The opposite of anger is not calmness, its empathy.

As Christians, our compassion is simply a response to the love that God has already shown us.

If you aren't humble, whatever empathy you claim is false and probably results from some arrogance or the desire to control. But true empathy is rooted in humility and the understanding that there are many people with as much to contribute in life as you.

Communication will bring understanding and understanding will cause harmonious mutual relationships which can establish peace and stability.

I think we learn the most from imperfect relationships - things like forgiveness and compassion.

Empathy begins with understanding life from another person's perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It's all through our own individual prisms.

Empathy is the starting point for creating a community and taking action. It's the impetus for creating change.

Only choices made in love are compassionate. There are no exceptions. Do you have the courage to act with an empowered heart without attachment to the outcome? If not, you have no ability to give or experience compassion. That is the shocking truth.

I have long believed that there are fundamentally two forces or emotions that drive our decisions - love and fear. Love has its many manifestations: compassion, gratitude, kindness, and joy. Fear often manifests in cynicism, anger, jealousy, and anxiety. I worry that many of our communities are being driven by fear.

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

Our human compassion binds us the one to the other - not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.

The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. He has it within his means to nourish the former and outgrow the latter.

Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.

Ultimately, knowing God and reading the Word, it helps with patience with people, understanding, empathy and sympathy that they might not have that I have. If God gave it to me, why not exercise it?

Traits like humility, courage, and empathy are easily overlooked - but it's immensely important to find them in your closest relationships.

You may call God love, you may call God goodness. But the best name for God is compassion.

I know what real courage is, and I understand true compassion.

Humility is attentive patience.

If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.

Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life's search for love and wisdom.

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.

A loving heart is the truest wisdom.

We can learn the art of fierce compassion - redefining strength, deconstructing isolation and renewing a sense of community, practicing letting go of rigid us-vs.-them thinking - while cultivating power and clarity in response to difficult situations.

Sympathy relies on a common experience. If you're clumsy, you might have sympathy for others who tend to bump into things. Empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to understand another person's feelings even if you've never experienced them yourself.

Technology is unlocking the innate compassion we have for our fellow human beings.

Deliberately seek opportunities for kindness, sympathy, and patience.

I've spent quite a bit of my life as a meditation teacher and writer commending the strengths of love and compassion.

I realized a while back that I have an innate ability to be compassionate, and I saw that the strength of compassion is something that healers have and healers use.'

We are mindful of desire when we experience it with an embodied awareness, recognizing the sensations and thoughts of wanting as arising and passing phenomena. While this isn't easy, as we cultivate the clear seeing and compassion of Radical Acceptance, we discover we can open fully to this natural force, and remain free in its midst.

When there's that forgiveness present and compassion, it just helps you live so much easier.

Sometimes we are separated by differences, and sometimes we are united by common ideals of respect and compassion.

We need the compassion and the courage to change the conditions that support our suffering. Those conditions are things like ignorance, bitterness, negligence, clinging, and holding on.

Children, even infants, are capable of sympathy. But only after adolescence are we capable of compassion.

The ultimate lesson all of us have to learn is unconditional love, which includes not only others but ourselves as well.

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.

Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.

Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.

Where there is no human connection, there is no compassion. Without compassion, then community, commitment, loving-kindness, human understanding, and peace all shrivel. Individuals become isolated, the isolated turn cruel, and the tragic hovers in the forms of domestic and civil violence. Art and literature are antidotes to that.

Compassion does not just happen. Pity does, but compassion is not pity. It's not a feeling. Compassion is a viewpoint, a way of life, a perspective, a habit that becomes a discipline - and more than anything else, compassion is a choice we make that love is more important than comfort or convenience.

Caregiving requires the intention of love, caretaking requires the intention of fear. Not acting in anger when you are angry requires the intention of love.

A compassionate mind is very difficult to cultivate because compassion demands a sense of equality between all living beings.

There's something about compassion that causes society to say, 'We're going to take this person seriously.' Take Mother Teresa. She was confrontational on abortion, but she wasn't rejected by society.

Someone who has experienced trauma also has gifts to offer all of us - in their depth, their knowledge of our universal vulnerability, and their experience of the power of compassion.

If you have the chance to be exposed to a loving, understanding environment where the seed of compassion, loving kindness, can be watered every day, then you become a more loving person.

Motherhood is at its best when the tender chords of sympathy have been touched.