Surely it's better to love others, however messy and imperfect the involvement, than to allow one's capacity for love to harden.

Compassion is the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar.

Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day.

The hajj is one of the five essential practices of Islam; when they make the pilgrimage to Mecca, Muslims ritually act out the central principles of their faith.

Compassion is not feeling sorry for others. It's not soft. It requires an intellectual effort.

Compassion is aptly summed up in the Golden Rule, which asks us to look into our own 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.

It's quite common for a Sufi mystic to cry in ecstasy that he's neither a Jew, a Christian, nor a Muslim. He is at home equally in a synagogue, a mosque, a temple, or a church because when one's glimpsed the divine, one's left these man-made distinctions behind.