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A space to encourage the practice of compassion in our daily lives, offering artwork and words of wisdom from varied sources to contemplate and share
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 There is, and will forever continue to be, a river of kindness, flowing solely from the good deeds of others. ~ Linda Poindexter |  There is no exercise better for the heart than reaching down and lifting people up. ~ John Holmes |
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 Something deep in the human soul seems to depend on the presence of kindness; something instinctive in us expects it, and once we sense it we are able to trust and open ourselves. ~ John O'Donohue |  We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. ~ Charlie Chaplin |
 A cup of kindness and a pot of tea, share this simple joy with me. |  Kindness is a magical spell—performed by enlightened beings—meant to enchant hearts and lift weary souls that they might fly. ~Richelle Goodrich |
 Kindness that catches us by surprise brings out the best in our natures. ~ Bob Kerrey |  Kindness is ever the begetter of kindness. ~ Sophocles |
 Life is short, and we never have enough time for gladdening the hearts of those who travel the way with us. Be swift to love! Make haste to be kind. ~ Henri Amiel |  How beautiful a day can be when kindness touches it. ~ George Elliston |
 If we all do one random act of kindness daily, we just might set the world in the right direction. ~ Martin Kornfield |  When you find yourself in need of spiritual nourishment, it is in the opportunities to serve others that you will find the abundance you seek. ~ Steve Maraboli |
 Rise with a hopeful and loving attitude, seek compassion and kindness, pray, meditate, exercise. ~ Quetzal |  Be not forgetful to entertain strangers for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. ~ Hebrews 13:2 |
 He that planteth a tree is a servant of God, he provideth a kindness for many generations, and faces that he hath not seen shall bless him. ~ Henry Van Dyke |  In music, in the sea, in a flower, in a leaf, in an act of kindness… I see what people call God in all these things. ~ Pablo Casals |
 Acts of compassion are eternal; They live forever shining their rays throughout the universe. ~ Chogyam Trungpa |  Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend. ~ Albert Camus |
 Remember that when you leave this earth, you can take nothing you have received…only what you have given. ~ Saint Francis |  Nothing but good comes to him who loves others as he loves himself. ~ Tao Te Ching |
 I vow to live fully in each moment and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh |  What greater gift than the love of a cat. ~ Charles Dickens |
 The true miracle is not walking on water or walking in air, but simply walking on this earth. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh |  What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains. ~ Albert Pike |
 Nothing carries more potential for change than individual acts of human kindness. ~ Jamie Winship |  I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance. ~ Pablo Casals |
 Kindness is the light that dissolves all walls between souls, families, and nations. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda |  Love is the bridge between you and everything. ~ Rumi |
 Don't be afraid to view the world from another perspective, no matter how strange and mysterious. |  The good you do today will often be forgotten. Do good anyway. ~ Mother Teresa |
 In true love, you attain freedom. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh |  Radiate your loving kindness to every living being without discrimination. ~ Buddha |
 The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others. ~ Albert Schweitzer |  Great opportunities to help others seldom come, but small ones surround us every day. ~ Sally Koch |
 Goodness is uneventful. It does not flash, it glows. ~ David Grayson |  Radiate boundless love towards the entire world — above, below, and across — unhindered, without ill will, without enmity. ~ Buddha |
 Life is as rich as you are kind. ~ Unknown |  When you dig another out of their troubles, you find a place to bury your own. ~ Unknown |
 Friends are kind to one another's dreams. ~ Henry David Thoreau |  Compassion begins with attention. ~ Daniel Goleman |
 The kindest word in all the world is the unkind word, unsaid. ~ Unknown |  There is a nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness. ~ John Connolly |
 "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." ~ William Shakespeare |  Simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures. ~ Lao Tzu |
 Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors. ~Andrew Boyd |  Perhaps you will forget tomorrow the kind words you say today, but the recipient may cherish them over a lifetime. ~ Dale Carnegie |
 Look at the world with the vision of peace, love, and compassion. Then the whole world will appear loving and peaceful. ~ Sri Sathya Sai Baba |  You must give to the river the kindness you would give to any brother. ~ Chief Seattle |
 Make it a practice to judge persons and things in the most favorable light at all times and in all circumstances. ~Saint Vincent de Paul |  Hold dear and true friends close to your heart; it matters not where you find them, only that you treat them with love and respect always. ~ L.M. Fields |
 Soul grows in communion. Word by word, story by story, for better or worse, we build our world. From true conversation - speaking and listening - communication deepens into compassion and creates community. ~ Sam Keen |  Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty. ~ Ann Herbert |
 By ethical conduct toward all creatures, we enter into a spiritual relationship with the universe.~Albert Schweitzer |  Let your words pass through three gates: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? ~Sufi saying |
 What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other? ~George Eliot |  Our compassion and acts of selflessness take us to the deeper truths. ~Amma |
 There is no small act of kindness. Every compassionate act makes large the world. ~Mary Anne Radmacher |  The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention. ~Oscar Wilde |
 Love begins at home. ~Mother Teresa |  We attract abundance when we ask from a compassionate heart.~Jonathan Lockwood Huie |
 Life's most persistent and urgent question is, What are you doing for others? ~Martin Luther King, Jr. |  One movement toward light becomes a clear signpost on a long road. ~Mary Anne Radmacher |
 Your acts of kindness are iridescent wings of divine love, which linger and continue to uplift others long after your sharing. ~Rumi |  A warm smile is the universal language of kindness. - William Arthur Ward |
 It ill becomes us to invoke in our daily prayers the blessings of God, the Compassionate, if we in turn will not practice elementary compassion towards our fellow creatures. ~Mohandas Gandhi |  You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson |
 No road is long with good company. - Turkish Proverb |  What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness? -Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
 The garden of kindness never fades. - Greek Proverb |  Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves. - James Matthew Barrie |
 Compassion isn't some kind of self-improvement project or ideal that we're trying to live up to. Having compassion starts and ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves, all those imperfections that we don't even want to look at. Pema Chodron |  I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels. - Pearl S. Buck |
 Fear grows out of the things we think; it lives in our minds. Compassion grows out of the things we are, and lives in our hearts. - Barbara Garrison |  When you do things from your soul you feel a river moving in you, a joy. - Rumi |
 Genuine kindness is no ordinary act, but a gift of rare beauty. - Sylvia Rossetti |  So many gods, so many creeds, so many paths that wind and wind while just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs.- Ella Wheeler Wilcox |
 Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty. - Albert Einstein |  May I become at all times, both now and forever A protector for those without protection A guide for those who have lost their way A ship for those with oceans to cross A bridge for those with rivers to cross A sanctuary for those in danger A lamp for those without light A place of refuge for those who lack shelter And a servant to all in need. - Buddhist Prayer of Peace |
 A kind word can unlock an iron door. - Turkish Proverb |  When your fear touches someone's pain, it becomes pity; when your love touches someone's pain, it becomes compassion. - Stephen Levine |
 Compassion does not arise from ideals of perfection but from a recognition and concern for our own fallibility. - Rob Preece |  Everything is material for the seed of happiness, if you look into it with inquisitiveness and curiosity. The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment. There always is the potential to create an environment of blame — or one that is conducive to loving-kindness. ~Pema Chodron |
 To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground. - Stephen Covey |  All beings seek for happiness; so let your compassion extend itself to all. - Mahavamsa |
 The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe. - Joanna Macy |  Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution. - Khalil Gibran |
 If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete. - Jack Kornfield |  Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong. -Lao Tzu |
 To expand our compassion we can apply our imagination to everyday’s situations. Sometimes when the wind blows I imagine that my compassion mixes with the wind and is carried in every direction to touch all sentient beings. Sometimes when I see beautiful clouds in the sky I imagine that they carry my compassion and that all beings over whom the clouds hover also experience the feeling of compassion. --17th Karmapa |  A mind committed to compassion is like an overflowing reservoir -- a constant source of energy, determination and kindness. - Dalai Lama |
 What our society today needs more than anything is the spirit of empathy—the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of those who are facing hardship and suffering, to understand and share what they are going through. When the spirit of compassion becomes the bedrock of society, and is embodied by society’s leaders, the future will be bright with hope. --Daisaku Ikeda |  Do not overlook any good actions, thinking they are of no benefit; even tiny drops of water in the end will fill a huge vessel. - Buddha |
 No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. -- Aesop |  Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. -- Buddha |
 Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character; and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man. ~Arthur Schopenhauer |  The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers. - Thich Nhat Hanh |
 To rejoice in another's prosperity, is to give content to your own lot: to mitigate another's grief, is to alleviate or dispel your own. - Thomas Edwards |  Our human compassion binds us one to the other - not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future. - Nelson Mandela |
 I truly believe that compassion provides the basis of human survival. - Dalai Lama |  Meditation is the flower and compassion is its fragrance. - Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh |
 Compassion is a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity. - Pema Chodron |  Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies. - Aristotle |
 To love our enemy is impossible. The moment we understand our enemy, we feel compassion towards him/her, and he/she is no longer our enemy. - Thich Nhat Hanh |  Until he extends the circle of compassion to all living creatures, man himself will not find peace. - Albert Schweitzer |
 A kind word is like a spring day. - Russian Proverb |  Choose being kind over being right, and you'll be right every time. ~Richard Carlson |
 A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives roses. - Chinese Proverb |  We rise by lifting others. - Robert Ingersoll |
 The joy of brightening other lives, bearing each others' burdens, easing other's loads and supplanting empty hearts and lives with generous gifts becomes for us the magic of Christmas - W.C. Jones |  A kind word can warm three months of winter. - Japanese Proverb |
 Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting their own battle. -Plato |  Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend. - Albert Camus |
 Remember there's no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end. - Scott Adams |  If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it. Write it on the sand on the water's edge. - Napoleon Hill |
 Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God's kindness: kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile. - Mother Teresa |  True compassion does not come from wanting to help those less fortunate than ourselves but from realizing our kinship with all beings. ~ Pema Chodron |
 Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses. ~ Confucius |  It is when you give of yourself that you truly give. ~ Khalil Gibran |
 Kindness is a bottomless fountain - not a river running outward. ~ Will Glennon |  To receive everything, one must open one's hands and give.~ Taisen Deshimaru |
 What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black. ~ Robert F. Kennedy |  Compassion brings us to a stop, and for a moment we rise above ourselves. ~ Mason Cooley |
 I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics. ~ Albert Schweitzer |  Love the world, in an ever widening circle of kindness, and keep loving until the day when love conquers all hatred and no one and no thing is excluded from love's tender embrace. ~ Kemmy Nola |
 I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion – and where it isn't, that's where my work lies. ~ Ram Dass |  Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love. ~Mother Teresa |
 Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. |  The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world. ~ Dr. Paul Farmer |
 When you no longer perceive the world as hostile, there is no more fear, and when there is no more fear, you think, speak and act differently. Love and compassion arise, and they affect the world. ~Eckhart Tolle |  Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.~Theodore Isaac Rubin |
 Speak to all people as though they are the wisest, gentlest, most beautiful beings on Earth; for what they believe, they become. ~Heather K. O'Hara |  Having a soft heart in a cruel world is courage, not weakness. ~Katherine Henson |
 When we show our respect for other living things, they respond with respect for us. ~ Native American Proverb, Arapaho |  How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these. ~George Washington Carver |
 The kindness I have longest remembered has been of this sort, the sort unsaid; so far behind the speaker's lips that almost it already lay in my heart. It did not have far to go to be communicated. ~Henry David Thoreau |  When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace. ~Dalai Lama |
 A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees. ~Amelia Earhart |  Let us not fail to scatter along our pathway the seeds of kindness and sympathy. Some of them will doubtless perish; but if one only lives, it will perfume our steps and rejoice our eyes. ~Madame Swetchine |
 There is within each one of us a potential for goodness beyond our imagining; for giving which seeks no reward; for listening without judgment; for loving unconditionally. ― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross |  Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate. ~Albert Schweitzer |
 See the light in others, and treat them as if that is all you see. ~Dr. Wayne Dyer |  I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. ~Maya Angelou |
 Love is the light, kindness is the medium through which its rays are equably diffused. ~Thirty Thousand Thoughts |  A kind and compassionate act is often its own reward. ~William John Bennett |
 It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson |  Those who are free of resentful thoughts surely find peace. ~Buddha |
 I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. I will not refuse to do the something I can do. ~ Helen Keller |  If one lights a fire for others, one will brighten one’s own way. ~Nichiren Daishonin |
 The soul that perpetually overflows with kindness and sympathy will always be cheerful. ~Parke Godwin |  Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind. ~Albert Schweitzer |
 Fashion your life as a garland of beautiful deeds. ~ Buddha |  He who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love. ~ St. Basil |
 Do a deed of simple kindness; though its end you may not see, it may reach, like widening ripples, down a long eternity. ~ Joseph Norris |  Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it. ~Epictetus |
 He who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own. - Confucius |  Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened. -Anatole France |
 Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. ~George Sand |  Nothing can make our lives, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness. ~Leo Tolstoy |
 To share often and much…to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson |  If there is any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not deter or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again. ~ William Penn |
 So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain. ~Helen Keller |  When you are kind to others, it not only changes you, it changes the world. ~ Harold Kushner |
 The best portion of a good man's life: his little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love. ~William Wordsworth |  Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless. - Mother Teresa |
 Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. - Pema Chodron |
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