Twelve Steps To A Compassionate Life Quotes

If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. (95)

We can either emphasize those aspects of our traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicion or work with those that stress the interdependence and equality of all human beings. The choice is yours. (22)

[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68)

Saint Augustine … insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity.

Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.

We have a duty to get to know one another, and to cultivate a concern and responsibility for all our neighbors in the global village.

And before you embark on an argument or a debate, ask yourself honestly if you are ready to change your mind.

As we develop our compassionate mind, we should feel an increasing sense of responsibility for the suffering of others and form a resolve to do everything we can to free them from their pain.

Remember that we can become twinned with an enemy and come to resemble him. Our hatred may become an alter ego, a part of our identity.

Remember that in a threatening environment, the human brain becomes permanently organized for aggression.

Humiliate your enemy is dangerous.

A double standard, albeit unintended, violates our integrity and damages our credibility. In a global society, conflict is rarely the fault of only one party.

But Christina never forgot that “when I was a child, I needed only one person to understand my suffering and pain.… One is very important.”5

what Tibetan Buddhists call “the inability to bear the sight of another’s sorrow,” so that we feel it almost as intensely as we feel our own. We

we sometimes fail to recognize the signs of poverty, loneliness, grief, fear, and desolation in our own city, our own village, or our own family.

Enmity shapes our consciousness and identity.

the anonymous Chinese author we know as Laozi pointed out that no matter how good his intentions, violence always recoils upon the perpetrator.

Everything that goes up must come down: that is a law of life, so to strengthen your enemy by yielding to him would actually hasten his decline. The

true insight does not consist of the acquisition of information but comes from mastering our egotism and greed.5

Martin Luther King Jr. believed that the highest point of Jesus’s life was the moment when he forgave his executioners,

our version of the same event is also likely to be a reflection upon our own situation and suffering rather than a dispassionate and wholly factual account. We

the attempt to become a compassionate human being is a lifelong project.

A person who is impartial, fair, calm, gentle, serene, accepting, and openhearted is indeed a refuge.

You entered into a Socratic dialogue in order to change; the object of the exercise was to create a new, more authentic self.

if they did not interrogate their most fundamental beliefs, they would live superficial, expedient lives, because “the unexamined life is not worth living.”7

As we have seen, so many of the things we once took for granted have proved unreliable that we may have to “forget” old ways of thought in order to meet the current challenges.

The philosopher Karl Popper (1902–94) often remarked “We don’t know anything” and believed that this was the most important philosophical truth.16

One of the many great sources of happiness is to get a glimpse, here and there, of a new aspect of the incredible world we live in and of our incredible role in it.”17

What do you think Socrates meant when he said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”? Third,

In your mindfulness practice, notice how often, without thinking, you try to manipulate, control, or exploit others—sometimes in tiny and apparently unimportant ways.

As the Daoists pointed out, we often identify with our ideas so strongly that we feel personally assaulted if these are criticized or corrected.

we may need to find a way of posing Socratic questions that lead to personal insight rather than simply repeating the facts as we see them yet again. We

True listening means more than simply hearing the words that are spoken. We have to become alert to the underlying message too and hear what is not uttered aloud. Angry

But aggression, righteous condemnation, and insult only make matters worse. Somehow we have to break the escalating cycle of attack and counterattack.

Charity,” Davidson continues, “is forced on us, whether we like it or not; if we want to understand others, we must count them right in most matters.”13

The “principle of charity” and the “science of compassion” are both crucial to any attempt to understand discourse and ideas that initially seem baffling, distressing, and alien;

With this new empathetic understanding of the context, we will find that we can imagine ourselves, in similar circumstances, feeling the same.

Understanding different national, cultural, and religious traditions is no longer a luxury; it is now a necessity and must become a priority. The

if we harm our neighbors, we also inflict damage on ourselves. There

Why do you observe the splinter in your brother’s eye and never notice the plank in your own?

it is neither helpful nor accurate to assume that other people are always responsible for our pain.

People who have been taught to despise themselves cannot easily respect others.

We should also make ourselves aware that our cultural, ethical, religious, and intellectual traditions have all been profoundly affected by other peoples’.

Golden rule is not a notional doctrine that you either agree with, or make yourself believe in. It is a method and the only adequate test of any method is to put it into practice.

In fact, the causes of conflict are usually greed, envy, and ambition, but in an effort to sanitize them, these self-serving emotions have often been cloaked in religious rhetoric.

Suffering and want are no longer confined to distant, disadvantaged parts of the globe.

cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies.

the Golden Rule, which asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.

Compassion can be defined, therefore, as an attitude of principled, consistent altruism. The

Our Master’s Way,” explained one of his pupils, “is nothing but this: doing-your-best-for-others (zhong) and consideration (shu).”3

advocates of evolutionary theory since Thomas H. Huxley (1825–95) have found altruism problematic.

Compassion has dropped so far out of sight these days that many are confused about what is required. It even inspires overt hostility.

At their best, all religious, philosophical, and ethical traditions are based on the principle of compassion. I

We are trying to retrain our responses and form mental habits that are kinder, gentler, and less fearful of others.

A myth has been well described as something that in some sense happened once—but that also happens all the time. It is about timeless, universal truth. If

Compassion dervies from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning "to suffer, undergo or experience." So "compassion" means "to endure [something] with another person," to put ourselves in somebody else's shoes, to feel her pain as though it were our own, and to enter generously into his point of view. That is why our hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. Compassion can be defined, therefore, as an attitude of principled, consistent altruism.

it is important to assume that the speaker shares the same human nature as yourself and that, even though your belief systems may differ, you both have the same idea of what constitutes truth.

The people we hate haunt us; they inhabit our minds in a negative way as we brood in a deviant form of meditation on their bad qualities. The enemy thus becomes our twin, a shadow self whom we come to resemble.

Our neocortex has made us meaning-seeking creatures, acutely aware of the perplexity and tragedy of our predicament, and if we do not discover some ultimate significance in our lives, we fall easily into despair.

compassion” derives from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning “to suffer, undergo, or experience.” So “compassion” means “to endure [something] with another person,” to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes,

You could stamp on this natural shoot of compassion, Mencius argued, just as you can cripple or deform your body, but if you cultivate this altruistic tendency assiduously, it will acquire a dynamic power of its own.23 The

Disputes that were secular in origin, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, have been allowed to fester and become “holy,” and once they have been sacralized, positions tend to harden and become resistant to pragmatic solutions.

One of the chief tasks of our time must surely be to build a global community in which all peoples can live together in mutual respect; yet religion, which should be making a major contribution, is seen as part of the problem.

dialogue led participants not to certainty but to a shocking realization of the profundity of human ignorance. However carefully, logically, and rationally Socrates and his friends analyzed a topic, something always eluded them.

The good leader in war is not warlike The good fighter is not impetuous; The best conqueror of the enemy is he who never takes the offensive. The man who gets the most out of men is the one who treats them with humility.3 Tyrants

inhabitants of countries that were colonized by the Europeans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries knew how profoundly distressing it was to watch a cherished way of life disappearing and beloved traditions decried by powerful, disdainful foreigners.

The Socratic dialogue was a spiritual exercise designed to produce a profound psychological change in the participants, and because its purpose was that each person should understand the depth of his ignorance, there was no way that anybody could win. Plato

The implications for politics were immense. If instead of ruthlessly pursuing his own self-interest to the detriment of others, a ruler would "curb his ego and submit to li for a single day," Confucius believed, "everyone under Heaven would respond to his goodness!

To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of all true religiousness.

In other words, when making an effort to understand something strange and alien to you, it is important to assume that the speaker share the same human nature as yourself and that, even though your belief systems may differ, you both have the same idea of what constitutes truth.

The aim of this step is threefold: (1) to recognize and appreciate the unknown and unknowable, (2) to become sensitive to overconfident assertions of certainty in ourselves and other people, and (3) to make ourselves aware of the numinous mystery of each human being we encounter during the day. First,

The Golden Rule requires self-knowledge; it asks that we use our own feelings as a guide to our behavior with others. If we treat ourselves harshly, this is the way we are likely to treat other people. So we need to acquire a healthier and more balanced knowledge of our strengths as well as our weaknesses. As

in a foreign language. Linguists have called this epistemological law the “principle of charity”; it requires that when we are confronted with discourse that is strange to us, we seek an “interpretation which, in the light of what it knows of the facts, will maximise truth among the sentences of the corpus.”11

we have come to depend on the instant rush of energy and delight we feel when we display our cleverness by making an unkind remark and the spurt of triumph when we vanquish an annoying colleague. Thus do we assert ourselves and tell the world who we are. It is difficult to break a habit upon which we depend for our sense of self.

It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others—even our enemies—is a denial of our common humanity.

A truly compassionate person touches a chord in us that resonates with some of our deepest yearnings. People flock to such individuals, because they seem to offer a haven of peace in a violent, angry world. This is the ideal to which we aspire, and it is not beyond our capacity. But even if we achieve only a fraction of this enlightenment and leave the world marginally better because we have lived in it, our lives will have been worthwhile.