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Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life QUOTES

Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life QUOTES

1 " [T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68) "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

2 " If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. (95) "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

3 " Humiliate your enemy is dangerous. "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

4 " Saint Augustine … insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity. "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

5 " Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect. "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

6 " As we develop our compassionate mind, we should feel an increasing sense of responsibility for the suffering of others and form a resolve to do everything we can to free them from their pain. "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

7 " Compassion dervies from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning "to suffer, undergo or experience." So "compassion" means "to endure [something] with another person," to put ourselves in somebody else's shoes, to feel her pain as though it were our own, and to enter generously into his point of view. That is why our hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. Compassion can be defined, therefore, as an attitude of principled, consistent altruism. "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

8 " We have a duty to get to know one another, and to cultivate a concern and responsibility for all our neighbors in the global village. "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

9 " Remember that we can become twinned with an enemy and come to resemble him. Our hatred may become an alter ego, a part of our identity. "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

10 " And before you embark on an argument or a debate, ask yourself honestly if you are ready to change your mind. "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

11 " With this new empathetic understanding of the context, we will find that we can imagine ourselves, in similar circumstances, feeling the same. "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

12 " Our Master’s Way,” explained one of his pupils, “is nothing but this: doing-your-best-for-others (zhong) and consideration (shu).”3 "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

13 " Remember that in a threatening environment, the human brain becomes permanently organized for aggression. "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

14 " our version of the same event is also likely to be a reflection upon our own situation and suffering rather than a dispassionate and wholly factual account. We "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

15 " Enmity shapes our consciousness and identity. "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

16 " The people we hate haunt us; they inhabit our minds in a negative way as we brood in a deviant form of meditation on their bad qualities. The enemy thus becomes our twin, a shadow self whom we come to resemble. "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

17 " the anonymous Chinese author we know as Laozi pointed out that no matter how good his intentions, violence always recoils upon the perpetrator. "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

18 " In fact, the causes of conflict are usually greed, envy, and ambition, but in an effort to sanitize them, these self-serving emotions have often been cloaked in religious rhetoric. "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

19 " Everything that goes up must come down: that is a law of life, so to strengthen your enemy by yielding to him would actually hasten his decline. The "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

20 " The good leader in war is not warlike The good fighter is not impetuous; The best conqueror of the enemy is he who never takes the offensive. The man who gets the most out of men is the one who treats them with humility.3 Tyrants "

― Karen Armstrong , Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life