Compassion

“Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is an ancient law.”

“No man is devoid of a heart sensitive to the suffering of others. Suppose a child were about to fall into a well: anyone who saw it would experience a heart of alarm and distress. This would not be in order to gain favor with the child's parents, or to seek praise from neighbors and friends, or out of dislike for the child's cries.”

“Love, and do what you will.”

“The capacity for suffering and enjoyment is a prerequisite for having interests at all.”

“Speciesism — a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species.”

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

“Radical acceptance is the courage to let things be as they are. It is not resignation. It is the willingness to see clearly what is happening, without the veil of judgment, and to respond from that clarity.”

“The trance of unworthiness is the feeling that something is wrong with me, that I am not enough. It is a trance because it is not the truth — it is a spell cast by conditioning, by fear, by forgetting who we are.”

“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.”

“Our happiness does not stand alone, nor does it come from being alone. It is inextricably linked with the happiness of others.”

“The rain from a single cloud falls in a single stream, yet each plant and tree, each herb and shrub, receives its own measure of water and grows.”

“Though our brother is on the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.”

“All men have the mind which cannot bear to see the suffering of others. If men suddenly see a child about to fall into a well, they will all without exception experience a feeling of alarm and distress. And from this we may infer the four beginnings: the feeling of commiseration is the beginning of benevolence; the feeling of shame and dislike is the beginning of righteousness; the feeling of deference and compliance is the beginning of propriety; the feeling of right and wrong is the beginning of wisdom.”

“If we accept that our own interests count, and we can find no non-arbitrary reason for denying that the interests of others count equally, reason pushes us toward a more universal standpoint, one that takes into account the interests of all those affected by our actions.”

“Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.”

“No man is devoid of a heart sensitive to the suffering of others. Such a heart is the origin of humaneness.”