Compassion Quotes

For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion. ~ Middlemarch by George Eliot It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. ~ The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells "Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who've never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you've felt what it means to love as you and I know it--the total passion for the total height--you're incapable of anything less." ~ The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. ~ The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity. ~ Adam Bede by George Eliot These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people--amongst whom your life is passed--that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire--for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience. ~ Adam Bede by George Eliot More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us. ~ The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot He spoke wistfully of a sudden leaving, a breaking of old ties, a flight into a strange world, ending in this dreary valley, and Ettie listened, her dark eyes gleaming with pity and with sympathy - those two qualities which may turn so rapidly and so naturally to love. ~ The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Strange indeed is human nature. Here were these men, to whom murder was familiar, who again and again had struck down the father of the family, some man against whom they had no personal feeling, without one thought of compunction or of compassion for his weeping wife or helpless children, and yet the tender or pathetic in music could move them to tears. ~ The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world? ~ Great Expectations by Charles Dickens