Quotes about Compassion

What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.

Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why.

Difficult to "move on" from any site of suffering if that suffering goes unacknowledged and undescribed.

Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.

It may even be that some of us know what it is like to be actually hated—hated for things we have no control over and cannot change.

It wasn't a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human.

And in the night, when my coughing was dry and tough, feet padded into my room, hands repinned the flannel, readjusted the quilt, and rested a moment on my forehead. So when I think of Autumn, I think of someone with hands who does not want me to die.

I'll explain to her, even though I don't have to. Why I did it. How if I hadn't killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her.

We will be judged by how well we love.

And then she knew. Her friends and neighbors were angry at her because she had overstepped, given too much, offended them by excess.

I want to do good work. I want to be involved in other people's doing good work.

In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart. She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound and pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they could not have it.