Quotes about Compassion

We have just enough religion to make us hate one another," Jonathan Swift once observed, "but not enough to make us love one another.

Anything can become a spiritual practice once you are willing to approach it that way—once you let it bring you to your knees and show you what is real, including who you really are, who other people are, and how near God can be when you have lost your way.

If Jesus meant for his followers to rule the world, then why did he teach them to wash feet? As difficult as it is to accept, I believe that his death on the cross reveals the God who suffers for love instead of punishing the unloving, the God who lays down his life for his friends.

To be a priest is to know that things are not as they should be and yet to care for them the way they are.

As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God. In the words of Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas, "People of the Book risk putting the book above people.

When this young priest received my news with grace instead of anger, he reminded me that salvation is not something that happens only at the end of a person's life. Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.

If Jesus meant for his followers to rule the world, then why did he teach them to wash feet?

I had refused the body and blood of Christ because it was painful to the person beside me. I had chosen to abstain with him rather than to participate without him. Though I knew full well that he did not expect that of me - that it was possible for a full-fledged Christian and a full-fledged Jew to stand together in their difference - at that moment I did not want to celebrate any Communion that did not include him.

I am not sure whether the virtue of holy envy requires holy humility or creates it, but the two are clearly related. After you have allowed the other to define herself, listening carefully to all the ways in which she is not you, it is hard to overlook the fact that you and she are made of the same basic material. You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Here is a law as reliable as gravity: The degree to which we believe our faith is makes us human is the same degree with which we will question the humanity of those who do not share our faith.

Here is a law as reliable as gravity: the degree to which we believe our faith is what makes us human is the same degree to which we will question the humanity of those who do not share our faith.

If someone walks by or speaks to you, you may find that your power of attentiveness extends to this person as well. Even if you do not know him, you may be able to see his soul too, the one he thinks he has so carefully covered up. There is something he is working on in his life, the same way you are working on something. Can you see it in his face? You are related, even if you do not know each other's names.