Famous Quotes & Sayings

Pema Chodron

we come to realize that other people's welfare is just as important as our own. In helping them, we help ourselves. In helping ourselves, we help the world.

Pema Chodron

In order to have compassion for others, we have to have compassion for ourselves.

Pema Chodron

Compassionate action involves working with ourselves as much as working with others.

Pema Chodron

Compassion starts with making friends with ourselves.

Pema Chodron

Compassion isn't some kind of self-improvement project or ideal that we're trying to live up to. Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves, all those imperfections that we don't even want to look at.

Pema Chodron

The root of compassion, is compassion for oneself.

Pema Chodron

As we learn to have compassion for ourselves, the circle of compassion for others - what and whom we can work with, and how - becomes wider.

Pema Chodron

As long as our orientation is toward perfection or success, we will never learn about unconditional friendship with ourselves, nor will we find compassion.

Pema Chodron

Use what seems like poison as medicine. Use your personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings.

Peter Coyote

Where I didn't have the maturity and the compassion to consider other people's needs, I did a lot of damage.

Haruki Murakami

In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion.

Gustave Flaubert

My kingdom is as wide as the universe and my wants have no limits. I go forward always, freeing spirits and weighing words, without fear, without compassion, without love, without God. I am called science.

Greg Boyle

If there is a fundamental challenge within these stories, it is simply to change our lurking suspicion that some lives matter less than other lives.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Mankind is not a tribe of animals to which we owe compassion. Mankind is a club to which we owe our subscription.

Karen Armstrong

And so, one of the reasons why I started my Charter for Compassion, was to bring the Golden Rule back to the center of religion and morality and not put other's secondary goals, less demand goals, into the forefront

Karen Armstrong

Compassion is not a popular virtue

Karen Armstrong

Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day.

Karen Armstrong

When you feel compassion, you dethrone yourself from the centre of the world.

Karen Armstrong

The early doctrines of the church, even doctrines like Trinity and Incarnation were originally also calls for action, calls for selflessness, calls for compassion, and unless you live that out compassionately, selflessly, you didn't understand what the doctrine was saying.

Karen Armstrong

...there is something wrong with any spirituality that does not inspire selfless concern for others

Karen Armstrong

Religions don't own compassion; it is a human virtue.

Karen Armstrong

Compassion is not an option. It's the key to our survival.

Joseph Butler

Compassion is a call, a demand of nature, to relieve the unhappy as hunger is a natural call for food

Leonard Cohen

Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph; killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith: their compassion will be true.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Because of his compassion Owen was always in trouble with his partners. They would have much preferred a tough, down-to-earth manager who would get a days work out of the little bastards.

John Kenneth Galbraith

From the fact of general well-being came the new position of the poor. They were now in most communities a minority. The voice of the people was now the voice of relative affluence. Politicians in pursuit of votes could be expected to have a diminishing concern for the very poor. Compassion would have to serve instead - an uncertain substitute.

Joy Bryant

Acknowledgement: Understanding and compassion for others and their suffering is the next step. Put yourself in the shoes of people who don't have the luxury of being wasteful.

Paul Theroux

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.

Martin Luther

I should have no compassion on these witches; I should burn them all.

Paul Bloom

It's hard to pull apart empathy from compassion. What is really clear is that we innately care for other people at least to some extent.

Paul Bloom

People differ in where they direct their empathy and their compassion. Many people are intensely concerned about the suffering of non-human animals, and some do not care at all. There are cultural differences.

Matthew Fox

What is of most moment of compassion is not feelings of pity but feelings of togetherness.

Matthew Fox

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.