Quotes about Compassion
The decisive war is the other one - to become fully human, which means to become compassionate, honest, brave. And this is a war against the darkness which no man fights alone.
— Frederick Buechner
We are commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves, and I believe that to love ourselves means to extend to those various selves that we have been along the way the same degree of compassion and concern that we would extend to anyone else.
— Frederick Buechner
Christ never promises peace in the sense of no more struggle and suffering. Instead, he helps us to struggle and suffer as he did, in love for one another.
— Frederick Buechner
If you want to be holy, be kind.
— Frederick Buechner
When somebody you've wronged forgives you, you're spared the dull and self-diminishing throb of a guilty conscience. When you forgive somebody who has wronged you, you're spared the dismal corrosion of bitterness and wounded pride. For both parties, forgiveness means the freedom again to be at peace inside their own skins and to be glad in each other's presence.
— Frederick Buechner
There are three things that are important in human life. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. The third is to be kind.
— Frederick Buechner
You've been a good steward of it. You've been a good steward of your pain.
— Frederick Buechner
We're all, by and large, comparatively speaking, rich people and have perhaps more than one home. And yet the question is, are we really at home anywhere? Are we really at home in any of our homes? Because it seems to me that to be at home somewhere means to be at peace somewhere and I have a feeling at some deep level there can really be no peace for any of us, no real home for any of us, until there is some measure of real peace for everybody until everybody has a home.
— Frederick Buechner
A smile or a tear has not nationality; joy and sorrow speak alike to all nations, and they, above all the confusion of tongues, proclaim the brotherhood of man
— Frederick Douglass
The Christianity of America is a Christianity, of whose votaries it may be as truly said, as it was of the ancient scribes and Pharisees, 'They bind heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders, but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.
— Frederick Douglass
A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind.
— Frederick Douglass
Men who live by robbing their fellow men of their labor and liberty have forfeited their right to know anything of the thoughts, feelings, or purposes of those whom they rob and plunder. They have by the single act of slaveholding voluntarily placed themselves beyond the laws of justice and honor, and have become only fitted for companionship with thieves and pirates - the common enemies of God and of all mankind.
— Frederick Douglass