Compassion Quotes - Page 51

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

Regardless of anyone’s dietary motivations, the healthiest lifestyle is the one that’s most compassionate.

On some deep cosmic level, we are all one, and within us we each contain the potential for good and for destruction, for compassion and hate, for generosity and greed.

Life is more than matter. If it were just matter, there would be no need for comfort. Matter does not feel comfort or discomfort, beauty or ugliness, love or compassion, joy or sorrow. Will a chair ever feel sorry or happy? No, matter does not have these finer values. They belong to the realm of the spirit. But life is also more than spirit. If it were just spirit, there would be no need for water, food, or rest. Human life is a combination of both matter and spirit.

In the beginner's mind there is no thought, "I have attained something." All self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind. When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can really learn something. The beginner's mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless. Dogen-zenji, the founder of our school, always emphasized how important it is to resume our boundless original mind. Then we are always true to ourselves, in sympathy with all beings, and can actually practice.

We can have skills training in mindfulness so that we are using our attention to perceive something in the present moment. This perception is not so latent by fears or projections into the future, or old habits, and then I can actually stir loving-kindness or compassion in skills training too, which can be sort of provocative, I found.

By practicing meditation we establish love, compassion, sympathetic joy & equanimity as our home.

Eating meat and drinking liquor are demonic vices. Those indulging in drink lose all sense of propriety, have no compassion or love and become demons.

Our challenge is to find the compassion for others that we want them to have for us.

What is my great wish and intention, is to make a base of compassion and to encourage people to work to shift the energy.

Liberals measure compassion by how many people are given welfare. Conservatives measure compassion by how many people no longer need it.

How far does one combine resistance to over-control with social justice, i.e. tolerable living for people in general? We are too selfish to be trusted, if left free, to give away enough to make people comfortable enough to give them a chance. Yet if all this is ordered for us, as to some extent it has to be, it so soon leads to tyranny. It is a very difficult problem. If only human beings had more pity, unselfishness, and justice and didn't need coercion to treat each other decently.

The tradition of nonviolence, optimism, concern for the individual, and unconditional compassion that developed in Tibet is the culmination of a slow inner revolution, a cool one, hard to see, that began 2,500 years ago with the Buddha's insight about the end of suffering. What I have learned from these people has forever changed my life, and I believe their culture contains an inner science particularly relevant to the difficult time in which we live.

Everyone used to chuck snails at each other at school, and I used to try and save them. And not only did I get in trouble for it, I got suspended for doing it. For saving the snails I kept about four or five hundred of them at the back of the class -- in Snail Land. We were like six or seven or something, people didn't even realise what they were doing. I had a strange compassion for snails. And the teacher just chucked them all in the trash in the end.

There is no effect more disproportionate to its cause than the happiness bestowed by a small compliment.

The potential possibilities of any child are the most intriguing and stimulating in all creation.

When our hearts open, when we know that we are in fact the world, when we experience the pain of others in our own blood and muscle, we are feeling compassion.

Only when all your desires disappear does that energy become compassion, KARUNA. You cannot cultivate compassion. When you are desireless, compassion happens; your whole energy moves into compassion. And this movement is very different. Desire has a motivation in it, a goal; compassion is nonmotivated, there is no goal to it, it is simply overflowing energy.

Compassion is an essential element of love.

Ours is not a culture that respects the sick, the old or the vulnerable. We strive for independence, competence, and mastery. In embracing such 'frontier' values, we may become intolerant of human wholeness, contemptuous of anything in ourselves, and in others, that has needs or is capable of suffering. The denial of a vulnerability is the ultimate barrier to compassion.

It is important that when we are engaged in admonition or exhortation or confrontation with a brother who is overcome in sin, we call attention to the truth in an extraordinarily compassionate and tender and loving spirit.

Change that does not lead to liberation from fear, greed and delusion is not wholesome. Furthermore, any change that does not yield more compassion and loving-kindness for yourself and others is a waste of precious life energy.

Anyone familiar with the numerous accounts of the Buddha's extraordinary compassion and reverence for living beings - for example his insistence that his monks strain the water they drink lest they inadvertently cause the death of any micro-organisms - could never believe that he would be indifferent to the sufferings of domestic animals caused by their slaughter of food

It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.

For there are deeds which have no form, sufferings which have no tongue.