Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.
Dalai Lama
The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. Compassion was the litmus test for the prophets of Israel, for the rabbis of the Talmud, for Jesus, for Paul, and for Muhammad, not to mention Confucius, Lao-tsu, the Buddha, or the sages of the Upanishads.
Karen Armstrong
If fine speech-making, appeals to reason, or pleas for compassion had the power to move them, the terrorists would long ago have abandoned the field.
Richard Bruce "Dick" Cheney
Compassion is the ultimate and most meaningful embodiment of emotional maturity. It is through compassion that a person achieves the highest peak and the deepest reach in his or her search for self-fulfillment.
Arthur Jersild
A diner having a row with a waiter in a swanky restaurant chills the blood in a way that a quarrel over a pizza order elsewhere would never do. Compassion is rarely the custom of the privileged.
Derren Victor Brown
The students [of the 60s] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents conspicuous consumption.
Allan David Bloom
The well taught philosophic mind To all compassion gives; Casts round the world an equal eye, And feels for all that lives.
Anna Letitia Barbauld
Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people, and mention how important it is that compassion is the key, that it's the sine qua non of religion, people look kind of balked, and stubborn sometimes, as much to say, "what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people?" And sometimes we use religion just to back up these unworthy hatreds, because we're frightened too.
Karen Armstrong
Compassion takes imagination.
Jennifer Beals
A good motivation is what is needed: compassion without dogmatism, without complicated philosophy; just understanding that others are human brothers and sisters and respecting their human rights and dignities. That we humans can help each other is one of our unique human capacities.
Tenzin Gyatso
Woman is closer to angels than man because she knows how to mingle an infinite tenderness with the most absolute compassion.
Honore de Balzac
These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness and worship without awareness
Anthony de Mello
Pain and sorrow and misery have a right to our assistance: compassion puts us in mind of the debt, and that we owe it to ourselves as well as to the distressed.
Joseph Butler
He is man whose heart is spirited and eyes are wet each moment on account of the sorrow, compassion, virtue, beauty, and nobility that decorate this world.
Kedar Joshi
Compassion is the use of public funds to buy votes
Thomas Sowell