Compassionate people ask for what they need. They say no when they need to, and when they say yes, they mean it. They're compassionate because their boundaries keep them out of resentment.

The ultimate outcome of our ­actions cannot be known. But despite our limited awareness, I believe we must always act with compassion.

What is compassion? Compassionate are those who can put themselves in other people’s shoes.

Through compassion it is possible to recognize that the craving for love that people feel resides also in our own hearts, that the cruelty the world knows all too well is also rooted in our own impulses. Through compassion we also sense our hope for forgiveness in our friends' eyes and our hatred in their bitter mouths. When they kill, we know that we could have done it; when they give life, we know that we can do the same. For a compassionate person nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying.

How can one be compassionate if you belong to any religion, follow any guru, believe in something, believe in your scriptures, and so on, attached to a conclusion? When you accept your guru, you have come to a conclusion, or when you strongly believe in god or in a saviour, this or that, can there be compassion? You may do social work, help the poor out of pity, out of sympathy, out of charity, but is all that love and compassion?

We should free ourselves from the narrowness of being related only to those familiar to us, either by the fact that they are blood relations or, in a larger sense, that we eat the same food, speak the same language, and have the same “ common sense.” Knowing men in the sense of compassionate and empathetic knowledge requires that we get rid of the narrowing ties of a given society, race or culture and penetrate to the depth of that human reality in which we are all nothing but human. True compassion and knowledge of man has been largely underrated as a revolutionary factor in the development of man, just as art has been. It is a noteworthy phenomenon that in the development of capitalism and its ethics, compassion (or mercy) ceases to be a virtue.

I’m a very compassionate person (with a very high IQ) with strong common sense.

Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.

If you approach others with the thought of compassion, that will automatically reduce fear and allow an openness with other people. It creates a positive, friendly atmosphere. With that attitude, you can approach a relationship in which you, yourself, initially create the possibility of receiving affection or a positive response from the other person. And with that attitude, even if the other person is unfriendly or doesn't respond to you in a positive way, then at least you've approached the person with a feeling of openness that gives you a certain flexibility and the freedom to change your approach as needed.

It is compassion rather than the principle of justice which can guard us against being unjust to our fellow men.

It is compassion rather than the principle of justice which can guard us against being unjust to our fellow men.

It is not enough to be compassionate, we must act.

with too much information, we do nothing.

We need better establishment to allow interrelationships to protect us from too many contacts, but to allow us for those contacts which we do engage in to be more meaningful for our own lives, and for, meaningful to others in a compassionate sense of each of us being involved in helping the other to fulfill his role. We’ll have many more roles, and this is where the notion of compassion comes in, in helping, each of us helping others to fulfill their programs for development. And so, we’re at this peculiar stage where you’re highly optimistic, at the same time highly pessimistic, and you wish to throw your weight, intellectual weight, to moving towards the optimistic side, to opening up continuing evolution.