top of page
.png){kind=small}
"If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink within their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those who feel compassion for all beings must be boundless. They are not separate, not alone, not lonely, not vulnerable in the same way as those of us stranded in the islands of ourselves, but they are vulnerable in other ways. Still, that sense of the dangers of feeling for others is so compelling that many withdraw, and develop elaborate stories to justify withdrawal, and then forget that they have shrunk. Most of us do, one way or another."
Standard
Customized
More
"People who suffer the most often inflict the most pain onto others. Compassion can be found through understanding this. When someone is internally suffering, sometimes the only reality they know is that of pain and thus their only knowledge is how to be a victim or an abuser. That's all they are able to communicate. Holding onto the thorn of resentment does not help them or you, but fostering compassion and forgiveness will."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I can be tolerant of traffic jams and disorganization, faulty technology, miserable weather, and bland foods. People, however, require more than the cold, grudging favor of being tolerated. They require love."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I only care about the helped less, and the helpless, not the helpfest or the hellfest."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Even though men and women are different in our thinking, we all share the need and desire for compassion, compliments, and companionship."
Author Name
Personal Development
"In the New Testament our enemies are those who harbour hostility against us, not those against whom we cherish hostility, for Jesus refuses to reckon with such a possibility. The Christian must treat his enemy as a brother, and requite his hostility with love. His behaviour must be determined not by the way others treat him, but by the treatment he himself receives from Jesus; it has only one source, and that is the will of Jesus."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone's soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Hearts everywhere bear scars of one form of hurt or the other, and it is necessary to keep this in mind when trying to understand why a person is the way he or she is."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognize the physical, material, and psychological suffering of others, to put ourselves "inside the skin of the other."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I don't call it "Life Insurance," I call it "Love Insurance." We buy it because we want to leave a legacy for those we love."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Empathy is the sunlight to the vampire of culture."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"I was being cured of soldiering on endlessly: my job was now to be still, which had become almost easy at last."
Healing
"We write history with our feet and with our presece and our collective voice and vision. And yet, of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant remain asleep."
Activism
"In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay."
Transformation
"You may be told that the legal decisions lead the changes, that judges and lawmakers lead the culture in those theaters called courtrooms, but they only ratify change. They are almost never where change begins, only where it ends up, for most changes travel from the edges to the center."
Transformation
"I feel often that we don't have the right language to talk about emotions in disasters. Everyone is on edge, of course, but it also pulls people away from a lot of trivial anxieties and past and future concerns and gratuitous preoccupations that we have, and refocuses us in a very intense way."
Awareness
"Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the other, since it awaits a universal utopia. Joy sneaks in anyway, abundance cascades forth uninvited...Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection."
Joy
"I've learned that a certain amount of self-doubt is a good tool for correcting, understanding, listening, and progressing - though too much is paralyzing and total self-confidence produces arrogant idiots. There's a happy medium between these poles to which the genders have been pushed, a warm equatorial belt of give and take where we should all meet."
Balance
"The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt."
Art
"The radical geographer Iain Boal had prophesied, "The longing for a better world will need to arise at the imagined meeting place of many movements of resistance, as many as there are sites of closure and exclusion. The resistance will be as transnational capitalism."
Activism
"Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection."
Activism
bottom of page