#compassion

To be compassionate is to experience divinity in our everyday life ↗

— Dada J.P. Vaswani

#experience

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

#empathy #imagination

No daylight to separate us. Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away. ↗

— Gregory Boyle

#compassion #god #kinship #margins #solidarity

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. ↗

— Yann Martel

#empathy #imagination

For animals that are overworked, underfed, and cruelly treated; for all wistful creatures in captivity that beat their wings against bars; for any that are hunted or lost or deserted or frightened or hungry; for all that must be put to death...and for those who deal with them we ask a heart of compassion and gentle hands and kindly words. ↗

— Albert Schweitzer

#animals #compassion #death

Compassion is the key to the ultimate survival of our species. ↗

— Doug Dillon

#humanity #inspiration #survival #inspirational

You and I cannot possibly know the hidden pain eating holes in individual lives, so if we want to be saviors, in partnership with the Lord, we will be kind to everyone, everywhere, all of the time. ↗

— Virginia H. Pearce

#kindness-compassion #inspirational

The essence of the Dharma (the teachings of the Buddha) is about identifying the cause of our suffering & alleviating it. ↗

— Allan Lokos

#compassion #inspirational #inspirational

The key to cultivating confidence in ourselves is understanding our right to make the truth our own. ↗

— Sharon Salzberg

#compassion #inspiration #inspirational

Dear God, give bread to those who are hungry and a hunger and thirst for justice to those who have plenty. Amen. ↗

— Benedictine prayer

#inspirational #justice #inspirational