Help people help themselves. Don’t judge, just help. In this process, be cautious to simply point them in the right direction and help them get moving. Don’t make your journey theirs, nor make their journey yours.

If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.

we unwittingly project onto God our own attitudes and feelings toward ourselves... But we cannot assume that He feels about us the way we feel about ourselves -- unless we love ourselves compassionately, intensely, and freely.

A saint or monk can afford to be compassionate to all, but a leader or boss cannot always be kind. He may soon be without a job himself if he is unduly compassionate, and chances are, no one would show him any compassion then.

Rage — whether in reaction to social injustice, or to our leaders’ insanity, or to those who threaten or harm us — is a powerful energy that, with diligent practice, can be transformed into fierce compassion.

Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.

There is a kind of virtue that lies not in extraordinary actions, not in saving poor orphans from burning buildings, but in steadfastly working for a world where orphans are not poor and buildings comply with decent fire codes.

How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?

The war has changed you, too, Caroline. Your faith is stronger, your compassion deeper, your love more intense than ever before. It's as if all the qualities I saw in you and fell in love with have been refined and purified.

I don't know how to stop the atrocities. I don't know how to make people care. But looking into my sister's eyes, we seem to have carved out something between us that none of the madness can touch. Invisible threads.

O my son Absalom,' Bean said softly, knowing for the first time the kind of anguish that could tear such words from a man’s mouth. 'my son, my son Absalom. Would God I could die for thee, O Absalom, my son. My sons!

[...] art instills the fundamental moral lesson: That you aren't the center of the universe. That others weren't created for your benefit. That they are just as real as you, with equal claimes to dignity and understanding.

Sensitive people care when the world doesn't because we understand waiting to be rescued and no one shows up. We have rescued ourselves, so many times that we have become self taught in the art of compassion for those forgotten.

The most treasured and sacred moments of our lives are those filled with the spirit of love. The greater the measure of our love, the greater is our joy. In the end, the development of such love is the true measure of success in life.

Christ delves far beyond the means of superficiality, not simply because of his immaculate love, but also because he considers the distinct cases of each individual rather than withholding a broadened perception by use of stereotypes.