I’m a pretty tough guy, you know. I’m a pretty hard man. I’ve got a lot of compassion, but I don’t waste time with people.

A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.

Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.

I don’t like to see animals in pain. That was very uncomfortable to me. I don’t like factory farming. I’m not an advocate for the meat industry.

What do you regard as most humane? To spare someone shame.

To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act is better than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal living conditions on this earth?

If you wished to be loved, love.

One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring.

There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.

God is patient with us to become the God’s children he wants us to be but you really can see him weeping.

Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.

Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities of men.

When we believe the best of people, we let go of each thing they do that is hurtful to us. And we choose to think things like, ‚I don’t believe they meant to hurt me.‘ ‚Maybe they’re having a bad day or don’t feel well.‘ ‚They probably don’t even realize how they sound.‘

The real power of the Buddha was that he had so much love. He saw people trapped in their notions of small separate self, feeling guilty or proud of that self, and he offered revolutionary teachings that resounded like a lion’s roar, like a great rising tide, helping people to wake up and break free from the prison of ignorance.

When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It’s inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.

A real Christian is a person who can give his pet parrot to the town gossip.

More compassionate mind, more sense of concern for other’s well-being, is source of happiness.

Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

The just is close to the people’s heart, but the merciful is close to the heart of God.

All religions try to benefit people, with the same basic message of the need for love and compassion, for justice and honesty, for contentment.

It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

Breathe in deeply to bring your mind home to your body. Then look at, or think of, the person triggering this emotion: With mindfulness, you can see that she is unhappy, that she is suffering. You can see her wrong perceptions. You can see that she is not beautiful when she says things that are unkind.

We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

I think those who have a terminal illness and are in great pain should have the right to choose to end their own life, and those that help them should be free from prosecution.

It’s good to remember that in crises, natural crises, human beings forget for awhile their ignorances, their biases, their prejudices. For a little while, neighbors help neighbors and strangers help strangers.

The poor don’t know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

Ethiopia didn’t just blow my mind; it opened my mind. Anyway, on our last day at this orphanage a man handed me his baby and said, ‚Would you take my son with you?‘ He knew, in Ireland, that his son would live, and that in Ethiopia, his son would die.

I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles – the oppression of tyranny – to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke than to add anything that would tend to crush them.

Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.

A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.

When you truly accept that those children in some far off place in the global village have the same value as you in God’s eyes or even in just your eyes, then your life is forever changed; you see something that you can’t un-see.

Nothing can make injustice just but mercy.

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.

We learn martial arts as helping weakness. You never fight for people to get hurt. You’re always helping people.

I am for people. I can’t help it.

Love other human beings as you would love yourself.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

I am sometimes sad when I hear the personal stories of Tibetan refugees who have been tortured or beaten. Some irritation, some anger comes. But it never lasts long. I always try to think at a deeper level, to find ways to console.

I got quite annoyed after the Haiti earthquake. A baby was taken from the wreckage and people said it was a miracle. It would have been a miracle had God stopped the earthquake. More wonderful was that a load of evolved monkeys got together to save the life of a child that wasn’t theirs.

I would go to the deeps a hundred times to cheer a downcast spirit. It is good for me to have been afflicted, that I might know how to speak a word in season to one that is weary.

Meditation is to get insight, to get understanding and compassion, and when you have them, you are compelled to act.

Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

Although the big word on the left is ‚compassion,‘ the big agenda on the left is dependency.

Today we affirm a new commitment to live out our nation’s promise through civility, courage, compassion and character.

If we want to fight people in the world, we should fight them with pillows – pillows stuffed with food, medicine, music… That would be so much cheaper than bombs.

When you are young, you cannot imagine being disabled. You imagine you would conquer it somehow. As I’ve got older, I can imagine it; I can see how life narrows in. I feel compassion for my mother now.

Your own soul is nourished when you are kind; it is destroyed when you are cruel.

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.

We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery.

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the President. I know what it means to send young Americans into battle, for I have held in my arms the mothers and fathers of those who didn’t return. I’ve shared the pain of families who’ve lost their homes, and the frustration of workers who’ve lost their jobs.

I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.

There are more pleasant things to do than beat up people.