Quotes about Compassion
To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world's sake - even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death - that little by little we start to come alive.
— Frederick Buechner
Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality-not as we expect it to be but as it is-is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.
— Frederick Buechner
in the long run, there can be no joy for anybody until there is joy finally for us all.
— Frederick Buechner
The life thatI touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.
— Frederick Buechner
Love yourself not in some egocentric, self-serving sense but love yourself the way you would love your friend in the sense of taking care of yourself, nourishing yourself, trying to understand, comfort, and strengthen yourself.
— Frederick Buechner
O thou who art the sparrow's friend, he said, have mercy on this world that knows not even when it sins. O holy dove, descend and roost on Godric here so that a heart may hatch in him at last. Amen.
— Frederick Buechner
To love your neighbor is to see your neighbor. To see somebody, really to see somebody, you have to love somebody.
— Frederick Buechner
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