Compassion Inspiration for your Scrapbook LOs

In case you missed it, or want to keep working on your COMPASSION, here is the Scrapbooking from the Inside Out Inspiration for February 2009 - the Compassion Kit. Please keep uploading your LOs - we'd love to see them here!

We're in the process of uploading the March Inspiration for SPIRIT! Check in often to see what we're got to share by clicking here: INSPIRATION

Journaling Prompts:

Compassion for Ourselves: So often it's easier to have compassion for others and give them the benefit of the doubt than to give ourselves a break. How harsh are you with yourself when you make a misstep? Can you accept your own faults or forgive your mistakes? Do you find yourself giving others more leeway then you give yourself? How has your treatment of yourself changed as you've matured? How helpful are others in your life at helping you be more kind to yourself?

Judgement vs. Compassion: It can sometimes be hard to look the other way and let go of our built-in judgements. How generous are you toward others when they make mistakes? Especially when they make the same mistake over and over again? Do you see yourself as more judgemental, or more compassionate?

Kindness Toward Animals: There's a trend toward vegetarianism and veganism these days, for health reasons, to reduce animal suffering and to reduce our carbon footprint. What role do animals play in your life, for companionship or otherwise? Do you see a connection between how we as a culture treat animals and how we treat eachother?

Music

Quotes
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion. The Dalai Lama

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 the strong -- because someday you will have been all of these. George Washington Carver

Compassion is the basis of all morality. Arthur Schopenhauer

The measure of a country's greatness is its ability to retain compassion in times of crisis. Thurgood Marshall

Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace. Albert Schweitzer

If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow man. Saint Francis of Assisi

Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too. Frederick Buechner

The human spirit is not dead. It lives on in secret.....It has come to believe that compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind. Albert Schweitzer

It is the enemy who can truly teach us to practice the virtues of compassion and tolerance. Dalai Lama

One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion. Simone de Beauvoir

Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation. Henry Ward Beecher

It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding. Erma Bombeck

Teach this triple truth to all: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things which renew humanity. Buddha

Have compassion for all beings, rich and poor alike; each has their suffering. Some suffer too much, others too little. Buddha

The dew of compassion is a tear. Lord Byron

Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities of men. Confucius

Pets have more love and compassion in them than most humans. Robert Wagner

I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures. Lao Tzu

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights. Desmond Tutu

A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair. Abraham Joshua Heschel

The major block to compassion is the judgment in our minds. Judgment is the mind's primary tool of separation. Diane Berke

I would rather feel compassion than know the meaning of it. Thomas Aquinas

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. Ralph Waldo Emerson

The purpose of human life is to serve and show compassion and the will to help others. Albert Schweitzer

I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics. Albert Schweitzer

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government. Thomas Jefferson

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much a heart can hold. Zelda Fitzgerald

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough. Franklin D. Roosevelt

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand. Baruch Spinoza

If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give. George MacDonald

If you light a lamp for somebody, it will also brighten your path. Buddhist Saying

If there is any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not deter or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again. William Penn

Our task must be to free ourselves...by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty. Albert Einstein

I always prefer to believe the best of everybody, it saves so much trouble. Rudyard Kipling

If you haven't any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble. Bob Hope

Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true. Robert Brault

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. Mark Twain

The most important trip you may take in life is meeting people halfway. Henry Boye

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people. Abraham Joshua Heschel

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late. Ralph Waldo Emerson

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another. Thomas Merton

Each of us in our own way can try to spread compassion into people’s hearts. Western civilizations these days place great importance on filling the human 'brain' with knowledge, but no one seems to care about filling the human 'heart' with compassion. This is what the real role of religion is. Dalai Lama

By compassion we make others' misery our own, and so, by relieving them, we relieve ourselves also. Thomas Browne, Sr

In separateness lies the world's great misery, in compassion lies the world's true strength. Buddha

It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope. Ursula K. Le Guin

The chemist who can extract from his heart's elements compassion, respect, longing, patience, regret, surprise, and forgiveness and compound them into one can create that atom which is called love. Khalil Gibran

For me music is a vehicle to bring our pain to the surface, getting it back to that humble and tender spot where, with luck, it can lose its anger and become compassion again. Paula Cole

Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless. Eric Hoffer

Compassion is the desire that moves the individual self to widen the scope of its self-concern to embrace the whole of the universal self. Arnold Toynbee

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos. Milan Kundera

Compassion is not religious business, it is human business, it is not luxury, it is essential for our own peace and mental stability, it is essential for human survival. Dalai Lama

True benevolence, or compassion, extends itself through the whole of existence and sympathizes with the distress of every creature capable of sensation. Joseph Addison

Links
A Guide to Cultivating Compassion in Your Life, With 7 Practices
Self CompassionSpiritual Practices: Compassion
Seeds of Compassion
Compassion Beyond Borders: Funding the education of impoverished girls and illiterate women in Latin America, South Asia and East Africa
Century of Compassion: Making compassion the guiding principle of the 21st century