Quotes about Compassion

The more you understand, the more you love; the more you love, the more you understand.

In the Diamond Sutra the meditator is urged to throw away, to release, four notions in order to understand our own true nature and the true nature of reality: the notion of "self," the notion of "human being," the notion of "living beings," and the notion of "life span.

Caring for yourself, reestablishing peace in yourself, is the basic condition for helping someone else. So that the other can stop being a bomb, a source of pain for ourselves and others, you really have to help him to defuse the bomb. To be able to provide help, we have to have a little calm, a little joy, a little compassion in ourselves.

According to our narrow view of a truly existing self, life is just my body, my house, my spouse, my children, and my riches. But if we can extend beyond every limit we have created for ourselves, we will see that our life exists in everything, and that the deterioration of phenomena cannot touch that life, just as the arising and disappearing of the waves cannot influence the being of the water.

Men cannot be our enemies--even men called Vietcong! If we kill men, what brothers will we have left? With whom shall we live then?

Avalokiteshvara means "the one who listens deeply to the sounds of the world.

Before you do the work of reconciliation with another, you need to restore communication with yourself.

When we walk, we can walk for our ancestors and future generations. Maybe they had to walk with sorrow; perhaps they were forced to march or migrate. When we walk freely, we are walking for them.

Therefore, in order to take care of you, I have to take care of myself.

Angry in the ultimate dimension I close my eyes and look deeply. Three hundred years from now Where will you be and where shall I be?

When you produce a thought of hatred, anger, or despair, it harms you, and it also harms the world. None of us wants to be continued like that. We all want to produce thoughts of compassion, understanding, and love.

We let individualism prevail in the twentieth century, and frankly, we have made a mess of it. We must begin anew for the twenty-first century; we need a new, different direction. We can no longer continue destroying ourselves and the planet we live on. With determination we can abandon the cult of individualism and the self, and act and live in harmony, in the spirit of interbeing.