The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
When the suffering of another creature causes you to feel pain, do not submit to the initial desire to flee from the suffering one, but on the contrary, come closer, as close as you can to her who suffers, and try to help her.
As long as there are slaughter houses there will always be battlefields.
The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.
Something very beautiful happens to people when their world’s fallen apart: a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor.
If it is true that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, isn’t it also true a society is only as healthy as its sickest citizen and only as wealthy as its most deprived?
Love until it hurts. Real love is always painful and hurts: then it is real and pure.
As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our world, none of us can truly rest.
Compassionate listening is to help the other side suffer less. If we realize that other people are the same people as we are, we are no longer angry at them.
If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.
When you look deeply into your anger, you will see that the person you call your enemy is also suffering. As soon as you see that, the capacity of accepting and having compassion for them is there.
I was never crippled until I lost hope.
If through a broken heart God can bring His purposes to pass in the world, then thank Him for breaking your heart.
Trust yourself in God’s hands. Maintain your relationship to Jesus Christ by the patience of faith. ‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.’
It is spiritual poverty, not material lack, that lies at the core of all human suffering.
Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.
Each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ.
The art of life is to stay wide open and be vulnerable, yet at the same time to sit with the mystery and the awe and with the unbearable pain – to just be with it all.
Within the spiritual journey you understand that suffering becomes something that has been given to you to show you where your mind is still stuck. It’s a vehicle to help you go to work. That’s why it’s called grace.
Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings.