Explore a curated selection of compassion quotes, reminding you of the power of small acts of kindness and profound impact of empathy.
In a world that often rushes by, compassion reflect our capacity to connect with one another on a profound level. Rooted in empathy, compassion encompasses the ability to understand and alleviate the suffering of others.
The essence of compassion is woven into the fabric of cultures, religions, and philosophies across the ages. To celebrate this essence, we compiled the most inspiring and enchanting compassion quotes and sayings.
Through these compassion quotes, we invite you to explore the intricate threads that weave together the tapestry of caring. These quotes are more than mere words; they are beacons of light that guide us toward a deeper understanding of others.
Join us in uncovering these 100 compassion quotes that reminds us of the importance of kindness. May they serve as a gentle nudge to encourage to be kind and embrace the transformative power of compassion in our daily lives.
Read also: self–compassion quotes
Inspirational compassion quotes
The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.
Albert Schweitzer
There are no greater treasures than the highest human qualities such as compassion, courage and hope. Not even tragic accident or disaster can destroy such treasures of the heart.
Daisaku Ikeda
The greatness of a man is measured by the way he treats the little man. Compassion for the weak is a sign of greatness.
Myles Munroe
I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.
Laozi
And if we have a good heart, a warm heart, warm feelings, we will be happy and satisfied ourselves, and our friends will experience a friendly and peaceful atmosphere as well. This can be experienced community to community, country to country, continent to continent.
Dalai Lama
The heart is like a garden. It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love. What seeds will you plant there?
Jack Kornfield
When the norm is decency, other virtues can thrive: integrity, honesty, compassion, kindness, and trust.
Raja Krishnamoorthi
The happiness of one’s own heart alone cannot satisfy the soul; one must try to include, as necessary to one’s own happiness, the happiness of others.
Paramahansa Yogananda
My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.
Maya Angelou
The measure of a country’s greatness is its ability to retain compassion in time of crisis.
Thurgood Marshall
Kindness compassion quotes
Courage. Kindness. Friendship. Character. These are the qualities that define us as human beings, and propel us, on occasion, to greatness.
R.J. Palacio
It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.
John Joseph Powell
One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.
Jack Kerouac
It only takes a split second to smile and forget, yet to someone that needed it, it can last a lifetime.
Steve Maraboli
Nurture your mind with positive thoughts: kindness, empathy, compassion, peace, love, joy, humility, generosity, etc. The more you feed your mind with positive thoughts, the more you can attract great things into your life.
Roy T. Bennett
Only your compassion and your loving kindness are invincible, and without limit.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Anger devours almost all other good emotions. It deadens the soul. It numbs the heart to joy and gratitude and hope and tenderness and compassion and kindness.
John Piper
When we know ourselves to be connected to all others, acting compassionately is simply the natural thing to do.
Rachel Naomi Remen
But if we have the energy of compassion and loving kindness in us, the people around us will be influenced by our way of being and living.
Thich Nhat Hanh
If we are to strive as human beings to gain more wisdom, more kindness and more compassion, we must have the intention to grow as a lotus and open each petal one by one.
Goldie Hawn
Positive compassion quotes
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Mark Twain
Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
Leo Buscaglia
Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.
Alexander Pope
To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I feel that compassionate thought is the most precious thing there is. It is something that only we human beings can develop.
Dalai Lama
Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life’s search for love and wisdom.
Rumi
A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees.
Amelia Earhart
The chemist who can extract from his heart’s elements compassion, respect, longing, patience, regret, surprise, and forgiveness and compound them into one can create that atom which is called love.
Khalil Gibran
In compassion lies the world’s true strength.
Gautama Buddha
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Spiritual compassion quotes
And one of His signs is that He created for you spouses from among yourselves so that you may find comfort in them. And He has placed between you compassion and mercy. Surely in this are signs for people who reflect.
Ar-Rum 30:21
You may call God love, you may call God goodness. But the best name for God is compassion.
Meister Eckhart
The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.
Thomas Merton
Man may dismiss compassion from his heart, but God never will.
William Cowper
A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.
Francis of Assisi
God’s dream is that you and I and all of us will realize that we are family, that we are made for togetherness, for goodness, and for compassion.
Desmond Tutu
When one has love for God, one doesn’t feel any physical attraction to wife, children, relatives and friends. One retains only compassion for them.
Ramakrishna
You desire that which exceeds my humble powers, but I trust in the compassion and mercy of the All–powerful God.
Saint Stephen
God created us for love, for union, for forgiveness and compassion and, yet, that has not been our storyline. That has not been our history.
Richard Rohr
Love and compassion quotes
As we grow in our consciousness, there will be more compassion and more love, and then the barriers between people, between religions, between nations will begin to fall. Yes, we have to beat down the separateness.
Ram Dass
All religions try to benefit people, with the same basic message of the need for love and compassion, for justice and honesty, for contentment.
Dalai Lama
At the end of the day, love and compassion will win.
Terry Waite
Love and compassion don’t at all have to make us weak, or lead us to losing discernment and vision. We just have to learn how to find them. And see, in truth, what they bring us.
Sharon Salzberg
Frequently people think compassion and love are merely sentimental. No! They are very demanding. If you are going to be compassionate, be prepared for action.
Desmond Tutu
Mindfulness is about love and loving life. When you cultivate this love, it gives you clarity and compassion for life, and your actions happen in accordance with that.
Jon Kabat–Zinn
Look at the world with the vision of peace, love, and compassion. Then the whole world will appear loving and peaceful.
Sathya Sai Baba
I believe we’re all put on this planet for a purpose, and we all have a different purpose… When you connect with that love and that compassion, that’s when everything unfolds.
Ellen DeGeneres
No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim.
Boris Pasternak
Wealth is the progressive realization of worthy goals, the ability to love and have compassion, meaningful and caring relationships.
Deepak Chopra
Compassion quotes for students
It’s hard to practice compassion when we’re struggling with our authenticity or when our own worthiness is off–balance.
Brene Brown
My strength needs no victims. My strength is my compassion.
Patrik Baboumian
Compassion is loving others enough to say or do what is appropriate from an empowered heart without attachment to the outcome.
Gary Zukav
It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Education teaches us compassion and kindness, connection to others.
Jill Biden
The failure to invest in youth reflects a lack of compassion and a colossal failure of common sense.
Coretta Scott King
Great teachers emanate out of knowledge, passion and compassion.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
Here are the values that I stand for: honesty, equality, kindness, compassion, treating people the way you want to be treated and helping those in need. To me, those are traditional values.
Ellen DeGeneres
Let us fill our hearts with our own compassion – towards ourselves and towards all living beings.
Thich Nhat Hanh
True compassion means not only feeling another’s pain but also being moved to help relieve it.
Daniel Goleman
Compassion quotes for work
Depression taught me the importance of compassion and hard work, and that you can overcome enormous obstacles.
Rob Delaney
Compassion, together with contractual responsibility for one’s workforce, is a mark of a top employer.
Frans van Houten
Learning to endure times of disappointment, suffering, and sorrow is part of our on–the–job training. These experiences, while often difficult to bear at the time, are precisely the kinds of experiences that stretch our understanding, build our character, and increase our compassion for others.
Joseph B. Wirthlin
It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
Albert Camus
Be sensitive to the plight of others. You have to know about the tragedies as well as the triumphs, the failures as well as the success.
Jim Rohn
If you have the chance to be exposed to a loving, understanding environment where the seed of compassion, loving kindness, can be watered every day, then you become a more loving person.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Respect all manner of men regardless of their station in life. Compassion is one of the greatest virtues.
Anthony Carmona
Enlightened leadership is spiritual if we understand spirituality not as some kind of religious dogma or ideology but as the domain of awareness where we experience values like truth, goodness, beauty, love and compassion, and also intuition, creativity, insight and focused attention.
Deepak Chopra
Compassion knows that choosing the higher road in any situation is the most loving option for you.
Debbie Ford
When people have compassion, friendship, and unity, they speak and think in a constructive way to ensure national independence and prosperity.
Bhumibol Adulyadej
Compassion for animals quotes
The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit.
Albert Einstein
It is much easier to show compassion to animals. They are never wicked.
Haile Selassie
Until one has loved an animal a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.
Anatole France
It ill becomes us to invoke in our daily prayers the blessings of God, the Compassionate, if we in turn will not practice elementary compassion toward our fellow creatures.
Mahatma Gandhi
As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people. Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
True benevolence or compassion, extends itself through the whole of existence and sympathizes with the distress of every creature capable of sensation.
Joseph Addison
Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not die, so do other creatures.
Dalai Lama
I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.
Abraham Lincoln
All creatures tread across the rubble of ruined civilizations. The trick is to keep moving. No animal ever goes about dispensing shallow compassion.
Rita Mae Brown
I’m not an activist; I don’t look for controversy. I’m not a political person, but I’m a person with compassion. I care passionately about equal rights. I care about human rights. I care about animal rights.
Ellen DeGeneres
Compassion quotes short
Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
Thomas Merton
The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.
Meryl Streep
Compassion begins with attention.
Daniel Goleman
Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
Dalai Lama
You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our compassion and acts of selflessness take us to the deeper truths.
Mata Amritanandamayi
Make no judgements where you have no compassion.
Anne McCaffrey
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
Mother Teresa
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.
Frederick Douglass
Compassion is an action word with no boundaries.
Prince
Quotes about compassion
Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.
Henri Nouwen
Sometimes we are separated by differences, and sometimes we are united by common ideals of respect and compassion.
Paul Watson
An attitude of compassion does not mean looking down on someone, pitying them in their misery. Compassion is based on respect. We discuss life as equals, learn from each other and strive together to improve our lives.
Daisaku Ikeda
Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities of men.
Confucius
Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.
Frederick Buechner
Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.
George Saunders
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.
Milan Kundera
The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others.
Anton Chekhov
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
We are each made for goodness, love and compassion. Our lives are transformed as much as the world is when we live with these truths.
Desmond Tutu
Final thoughts
These compassion quotes remind the capacity of human hearts to radiate kindness, empathy, and understanding. They inspire us to uncovering its ability to bridge gaps, heal wounds, and unite us in our shared experience of life.
In the pages of these quotes, we have discovered that compassion is a powerful force that has the potential to transform lives. So, let these compassion quotes close to your heart, inspiring you to mend broken spirits and uplift the human condition.
As we move forward, let us carry the essence of these compassion quotes with us. In moments of doubt or uncertainty, may these quotes encourage us to nurture the flame of kindness within ourselves and others.
It has been our pleasure to present to you this collection of compassion quotes. Hope these words have resonated with you, touching your heart and inspiring a renewed appreciation for the beauty of compassion in our lives.
Thank you for joining us on this journey into the heart of compassion quotes. Let compassion be your guiding star as you navigate the complexities of our world, making it a better place, one compassionate act at a time.