Quotes about Compassion

Hospitality is the virtue which allows us to break through the narrowness of our own fears and to open our houses to the stranger, with the intuition that salvation.

If I could meet Rembrandt right where he had painted father and son, God and humanity, compassion and misery, in one circle of love, I would come to know as much as I ever would about death and life. I also sensed the hope that through Rembrandt's masterpiece I would one day be able to express what I most wanted to say about love.

Compassion must become the core and even the nature of authority. When the Christian leader is a man of God for the future generation, he can be so only insofar as he is able to make the compassion of God with man—which is visible in Jesus Christ—credible in his own world.

The situation which brought about your pain was simply the form in which you came in touch with the human condition of suffering.

God loves us before any human person can show love to us. He loves us with a "first" love, an unlimited, unconditional love, wants us to be his beloved children, and tells us to become as loving as himself.

Jesus, the man of sorrows, and we, the people of sorrow, hang there between heaven and earth, crying out, "God, our God, why have you forsaken us?

Thus the authority of compassion is the possibility for each of us to forgive our brothers and sisters, because forgiveness is only real for those who have discovered the weakness of their friends and the sin of their enemies in their own hearts, and are willing to call each human being their sister and brother.

We resist getting near the suffering of another partly out of our unwillingness to suffer ourselves.

If you believe that you are the beloved, you can offer forgiveness, even when it cannot be received.

When our love grows from God's love we no longer divide people into those who deserve it and those who don't. It is this love that allows us to see the enemy as someone loved with the same love with which we are loved.

To be chosen as the Beloved of God is something radically different. Instead of excluding others, it includes others. Instead of rejecting others as less valuable, it accepts others in their own uniqueness. It is not a competitive, but a compassionate choice.

Jesus reaches out to the suffering world from the silent center where he stands in full attentiveness to his Father.