Compassion & Forgiveness

Empathy and Compassion for others is like caring about yourself, extended beyond your own skin and experience. Your boundaries can become very layered and extensive.

Forgiveness is easy toward someone who you care about. Can you forgive people you don't like? Can you make room in the world for people who you cannot understand?

Quotes

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

“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.”
Dalai Lama

“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”
Dalai Lama

“I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.”
Lao Tzu

“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.”
Rumi

“Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities of men.”
Confucius

“Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.”
Albert Einstein

“For a lot of people, Superman is and has always been America's hero. He stands for what we believe is the best within us: limitless strength tempered by compassion, that can bear adversity and emerge stronger on the other side. He stands for what we all feel we would like to be able to stand for, when standing is hardest.”
J. Michael Straczynski

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”
Maya Angelou

“Mama was my greatest teacher, a teacher of compassion, love and fearlessness. If love is sweet as a flower, then my mother is that sweet flower of love.”
Stevie Wonder

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
Plato

“Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“One love, one heart, one destiny.”
Bob Marley

“Compassion is the basis of morality.”
Arthur Schopenhauer

“No one has ever become poor by giving.”
Anne Frank, diary of Anne Frank

“for 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, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”
Aesop

“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.”
Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions: The Agony of Being Connected to Everything in the Universe


⩫ ⩫ ⩫


“We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
Mahatma Gandhi

“Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.”
Bruce Lee

“Forgiveness is not always easy. At times, it feels more painful than the wound we suffered, to forgive the one that inflicted it. And yet, there is no peace without forgiveness.”
Marianne Williamson

“Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.”
John F. Kennedy

“You can't forgive without loving. And I don't mean sentimentality. I don't mean mush. I mean having enough courage to stand up and say, 'I forgive. I'm finished with it.”
Maya Angelou

“Holding on to anger, resentment and hurt only gives you tense muscles, a headache and a sore jaw from clenching your teeth. Forgiveness gives you back the laughter and the lightness in your life.”
Joan Lunden

“The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.”
Thomas Szasz

“Never forget the three powerful resources you always have available to you: love, prayer, and forgiveness.”
H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

“When you forgive, you in no way change the past - but you sure do change the future.”
Bernard Meltzer

“I learned a long time ago that some people would rather die than forgive. It's a strange truth, but forgiveness is a painful and difficult process. It's not something that happens overnight. It's an evolution of the heart.”
Sue Monk Kidd

“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”
Mark Twain

“Forgotten is forgiven.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.”
Oscar Wilde

“To err is human; to forgive, divine.”
Alexander Pope

“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”
Lewis B. Smedes

“Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.”
Oscar Wilde

“Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.”
Hannah Arendt

“Thank you, God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.”
Garrison Keillor

“Acceptance and tolerance and forgiveness, those are life-altering lessons.”
Jessica Lange

“How does one know if she has forgiven? You tend to feel sorrow over the circumstance instead of rage, you tend to feel sorry for the person rather than angry with him. You tend to have nothing left to say about it all.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes

“One of the secrets of a long and fruitful life is to forgive everybody everything every night before you go to bed.”
Bernard Baruch

“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?”
Bell Hooks

Links

Psychology Today: The Nature of Forgiveness Mustering up genuine compassion for those who have wronged us, instead of allowing anger toward them to eat away at us, is the course of action recommended by most psychologists. An exception to the belief that burying the hatchet brings peace to the soul may be sexual abuse: Some victims of these crimes are empowered when given permission to not forgive.