Compassion means to suffer with, but it doesn't mean to get lost in the suffering, so that it becomes exclusively one's own. I tend to do this, to replace the person for whom I am feeling compassion with myself.

We want nothing from you that you do without grace," Mrs Whatsit said, "or that you do without understanding.

When two people, lovers, or sometimes friends, have an enduring care for each other, allow each other to be human, faulted, flawed, but real, then being human becomes a glorious thing to be. If the human race ever makes progress, that is how.

Expand my love, Lord, so I can help to bear the pain, help your love move my love into the tired prostitute with false eyelashes and bunioned feet, the corrupt policeman with his hand open for graft, the addict, the derelict, the woman in the mink coat and discontented mouth, the high school girl with heavy books and frightened eyes. Help me through these scandalous particulars to understand your love. Help me to pray.

The obligations of normal human kindness—chesed, as the Hebrew has it—that we all owe. But there's a kind of vanity in thinking you can nurse the world. There's a kind of vanity in goodness.

Even though men and women are different in our thinking, we all share the need and desire for compassion, compliments, and companionship.

Just as white light consists of colored rays, so reverence for life contains all the components of ethics: love, kindliness, sympathy, empathy, peacefulness and power to forgive.

Three-fourths of the people you will ever meet are hungering and thirsting for sympathy. Give it to them, and they will love you.

The world does not understand theology or dogma, but it understands love and sympathy.

A great man, tender of heart, strong of nerve, boundless patience and broadest sympathy, with no motive apart from his country.

It is a man's sympathy with all creatures that first makes him truly a man.

His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be