#compassion

I always try to share with others the idea that in order to become compassionate it is not necessary to become religious. ↗

— Dalai Lama XIV

#religion #religion

You can see the same immorality or amorality in the Christian view of guilt and punishment. There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory. The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (it occurs in a passage of perfectly demented detail about the exact rules governing mutual ox-goring; you should look it up in its context (Exodus 21). The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone. The first is a moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativistic and "nonjudgmental" that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#christianity #compassion #guilt #immorality #justice

If I could make a dream real, I would not kill anything unless it could never be changed at heart. ↗

— Robert Fanney

#death #dream #killing #luthiel #change

Always keep an open mind and a compassionate heart. ↗

— Phil Jackson

#always #compassionate #heart #keep #mind

The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion in the only guarantee of morality. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#animals #barbarism #compassion #cruelty #morality

Love is not patronizing and charity isn't about pity, it is about love. Charity and love are the same -- with charity you give love, so don't just give money but reach out your hand instead. ↗

— Mother Teresa

#christian-behavior #compassion #helping-others #love #service

Don't believe everything you think. Thoughts are just that - thoughts. ↗

— Allan Lokos

#illusion #mindfulness #reality #thinking #thoughts

The willingness to undertake such action cannot be based on certainties, but on those possibilities glimpsed in a reading of history different from the customary painful recounting of human cruelties. In such a reading we can find not only war but resistance to war, not only injustice but rebellion against injustice, not only selfishness but self-sacrifice, not only silence in the fact of tyranny but defiance, not only callousness but compassion. Human beings show a broad spectrum of qualities, but it is the worst of these that are usually emphasized, and the result, too often, is to dishearten us, diminish our spirit. And yet, historically, that spirit refuses to surrender. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#history #hope #injustice #optimisim #spirit

There is one advantage to realizing that you're never going to get it right: you do begin to stop expecting everyone else to get it right too, which makes for less frustration when other people turn out to be just as human as you are. ↗

— Jeff Wilson

#humanity #kindness #perfection #buddhism

Don't judge without having heard both sides. Even persons who think themselves virtuous very easily forget this elementary rule of prudence. ↗

— St. Josemaría Escrivá

#compassion #opus-dei #charity