Compassion

Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors. - Unknown

The ideal of compassion is not feeling bad for what we cannot do; it is joyfully and energetically doing all that we can for others in any given moment. - Lorne Ladner

The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others. - Albert Schweitzer

The ugliest thing I have ever seen is a human being without compassion. - Unknown

There is no small kindness; every compassionate act makes large the world. - Mary Anne Radmacher

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

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. - Martin Luther King Jr

Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living beings, man will not himself find peace. - Albert Schweitzer

We have to make mistakes, it’s how we learn compassion for others. - Curtis Sittenfeld

What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion. - Chris Abani

When we know ourselves to be connected to all others, acting compassionately is simply the natural thing to do. - Rachel Naomi Remen