Compassion quotes
2.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside compassion — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Compassion is our most important practice. Understanding brings compassion. Understanding the suffering that living beings undergo helps liberate the energy of compassion. And with that energy you know what to do."
"In every one of us there are good seeds and bad. We have the seed of brotherhood, love, compassion, insight. But we have also the seed of anger, hate, dissent."
"The energy of compassion is very strong. We suffer. That is real. But we have learned not to get angry and not to allow ourselves to be carried by anger. We realize right away that that is fear. That is corruption."
"When you look deeply into your anger, you will see that the person you call your enemy is also suffering. As soon as you see that, the capacity of accepting and having compassion for them is there."
"By taking a look at your anger it can be transformed into the kind of energy that you need - understanding and 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."
"I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, to fear and to hope. The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that is alive."
"Anyone who is practicing understanding and compassion can exemplify true power. Anyone can be a Buddha."
"Compassion is a mind that removes the suffering that is present in the other."
"Scientists tell us that we have enough technology to save our planet. . . . Yet we don't take advantage of this new technology. . . . The technological has to work hand-in-hand with the spiritual. Our spiritual life is the element that can bring about the energies of peace, calm, brotherhood, understanding, and compassion. Without that, our planet doesn't stand a chance."
"We are able to help animals all around the world as a result of the media and entertainment business, which is able to spread compassion and change at rapid speed."
"To be proactive is to educate yourself and get the word out via social media, or through one of the many animal-welfare organizations around the world, and by signing petitions, starting your own campaigns, rescuing and fostering animals, organizing cleanups, recycling, volunteering at your local animal shelter, going to eco-tourist destinations or photo safaris. This will help get the word out to the masses, and hopefully, this will bring more awareness and more compassion to animal welfare."
"Animals should have rights and should be treated with compassion and empathy; we are their caretakers. If you don't have it in your heart to help them, then just leave them alone and do no harm."
"It's easy enough to predict that there will be conflict, but you place yourself in a maelstrom when you offer a view about the conflict, and I don't have an investment in one side or the other; I feel compassion for both sides. I've spent a fair amount of time in Gaza and Israel, done a lot of reporting and lived over there, and the tragedy is sometimes overwhelming. At the same time, America does have an investment in what happens."
"In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion."
"In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'" she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. "So what does that really mean? In simple terms." I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently. "I think it means," I say, "that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms."
"We should only affect compassion, and carefully avoid having any."
"Compassion is the fellow-feeling of the unsound."
"There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men."
"Normal: lacking in taste, compassion, understanding, kindness, and ordinary human decency."
