“The more busy you are with the improvement of your inner life, the more active you become in social life, helping other people.”
Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 339)
“Like sympathy, compassion begins with feeling bad for someone. But instead of simply wanting the person’s suffering to go away, compassion involves someone who is willing to suffer alongside that person so that they may overcome their challenges. Sympathy is sending flowers and a card to a friend when a parent dies. Compassion is driving to their house and holding them as they cry. Sympathy is letting a screaming child have that toy they want so they’ll stop screaming. Compassion is letting them cry because you know they will be better off once they understand that they can’t always get what they want. Sympathy is changing your profile picture on social media for whatever the new cause du jour is. Compassion is actually giving time or money to victims, listening to their stories, helping them rebuild their lives.”
Mark Manson
“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 him who suffers, and try to help him.”
Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 214)
“When you create a difference in someone’s life, you not only impact their life, you impact everyone influenced by them throughout their entire lifetime. No act is ever too small. One by one, this is how to make an ocean rise.”
Danielle Doby, I Am Her Tribe
“a hero
is one who heals
their own wounds
and then shows others
how to do the same”
~ Yung Pueblo, Inward (Page 74)
“It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, via Sunbeams (Page 125)