Compassion is not sympathy. Compassion is mercy. It is a commitment to take responsibility for the suffering of others.

Awareness of the sacred in life is what holds our world together, and the lack of awareness of the sacred is what is tearing it apart.

Prophets are those who take life as it is and expand it. They refuse to shrink a vision of tomorrow to the boundaries of yesterday.

If anything diminishes a person, it is the cancer of constant complaining.

Imagination begins when it' s raining too hard to go out and play and you become really absorbed in something you would never have thought of doing had the sun come out as usual. In which case, thank God for the rain.

I celebrate myself," the poet Walt Whitman wrote. The thought is so delicious it is almost obscene. Imagine the joy that would come with celebrating the self — our achievements, our experiences, our existence. Imagine what it would be like to look into the mirror and say, as God taught us, "That's good.

Compassion makes no distinction between friends and enemies, neighbors and outsiders, compatriots and foreigners. Compassion is the gate to human community.