Sermon quotes on compassion
Henry Ward Beecher
Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.
George Washington Carver
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.
Daniel Goleman
Compassion begins with attention.
Washington Irving
There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
Joanna Macy
Compassion literally means to feel with, to suffer with. Everyone is capable of compassion, and yet everyone tends to avoid it because it’s uncomfortable. And the avoidance produces psychic numbing – resistance to experiencing our pain for the world and other beings.
Henri Nouwen
Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.
Henri Nouwen
Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.
You are the Beloved: Daily Meditations for Spiritual Living, Hachette UK, 2017.
Francis Schaeffer
Biblical orthodoxy without compassion is surely the ugliest thing in the world.
Albert Schweitzer
The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.
Albert Schweitzer
Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.
Lee Strobel
Often it is hard. So hard, in fact, that Jesus’ decree to love and pray for our opponents is regarded as one of the most breathtaking and gut-wrenching challenges of his entire Sermon on the Mount, a speech renowned for its outrageous claims. There was no record of any other spiritual leader ever having articulated such a clear-cut, unambiguous command for people to express compassion to those who are actively working against their best interests.
Thomas Watson
Christians, you who are vessels of election – were by nature as wicked as others – but God had compassion on you and plucked you as brands out of the fire! He stopped you in your course of sinning – when you were marching to hell! He turned you back to Him by sincere repentance. Oh, here is the banner of love displayed over you!”
John Wooden
You can’t live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.
Richard Baxter
We must feel toward our people as a father toward his children; yea, the most tender love of a mother must not surpass ours. We must even travail in birth, till Christ be formed in them. They should see that we care for no outward thing, neither liberty, nor honor, nor life, in comparison to their salvation… When the people see that you truly love them, they will hear anything from you…Oh therefore, see that you feel a tender love for your people in your hearts, and let them perceive it in your speech and conduct. Let them see that you spend and are spent for their sakes.
Samuel Chadwick
Compassion costs. It is easy enough to argue, criticize and condemn, but redemption is costly, and comfort draws from the deep. Brains can argue, but It takes heart to comfort.
Mother Theresa
Alia Joy
We often become offensive to respectable types when we enter into other people’s suffering and brokenness, or divulge our own.
Glorious Weakness: Discovering God in All We Lack, Baker Books, 2019.
Henri Nouwen
Compassion is born when we discover in the center of our own existence not only that God is God and man is man, but also that our neighbor is really our fellow man.
Donald Gray
Jesus reveals in an exceptionally human life what it is to live a divine life, a compassionate life.
Jesus: The Way to Freedom, St. Mary’s College Press, 1979, 70.
Gregory Boyle
Compassion is always, at its most authentic, about a shift from the cramped world of self-preoccupation into a more expansive place of fellowship.
Tattoos on the Heart, p.77.
Wendell Berry
Since her first grief had brought her fully to birth and wakefulness in this world, an unstinting compassion had moved in her, like a live stream flowing deep underground, by which she knew herself and others and the world.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Compassion must become the core and even the nature of authority.
The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society, Image, 1979.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
As we feel the pain of our own losses, our grieving hearts open our inner eye to a world in which losses are suffered far beyond our own little world of family, friends, and colleagues. It is the world of prisoners, refugees, AIDS patients, starving children, and the countless human beings living in constant fear. Then the pain of our crying hearts connects us with the moaning and groaning of a suffering humanity. Then our mourning becomes larger than ourselves.
With Burning Hearts, Orbis Books, 1999, p.28.
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