Quotes about Kindness

Shallow understanding accompanies shallow compassion. Great understanding goes with great compassion.

Understanding is a gift. The other person may feel understood for the first time. Understanding is the other name of love. If you don't understand, you can't love. If you don't understand your son, you can't love him. If you don't understand your mother, you can't love her. To offer understanding means to offer love. Without understanding, the more we love, the more we make ourselves and others suffer.

You think the other person in your life is going to be there forever, but that is not true. That person is impermanent, just like you. So if you can do something to make that person happy, you should do it right away. Anything you can do or say to make him or her happy—say it or do it now. It's now or never.

We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love. We must look deeply in order to see and understand the needs, aspirations, and suffering of the person we love. This is the ground of real love. You cannot resist loving another person when you really understand him or her.

Compassion doesn't mean that you have to love that person who's so difficult. But if you stop and look deeper, you'll see that person's difficulties. If you can accept him, then you can love him.

Love, understanding, courage, and acceptance are expressions of the life of Jesus.

When you begin to see that your enemy is suffering, that is the beginning of insight. When you see in yourself the wish that the other person stop suffering, that is a sign of real love.

To love is, first of all, to accept ourselves as we are.

With understanding and compassion, you will be able to heal the wounds in your heart, and the wounds in the world.

Deep listening is the kind of listening that can help relieve the suffering of another person. You can call it compassionate listening. You listen with only one purpose: to help him or her to empty his heart.

Every man should keep a fair-sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friends.

We are commanded to seek out those who are lost. We are to be our brother's keeper.