Matthew Fox Quotes

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.

Whatever impatience we may feel towards our neighbor, and whatever indignation our race may rouse in us, we are chained one to another, and, companions in labour and misfortune, have everything to lose by mutual recrimination and reproach. Let us be silent as to each other's weakness, helpful, tolerant, many, tender towards each other! Or, if we cannot feel tenderness, may we at least feel pity!

If you learn how to forgive others for not being strong, then people can learn how to forgive you for your own issues.

What a powerful thing to know: That one's own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other.

Love and compassion don't at all have to make us weak, or lead us to losing discernment and vision. We just have to learn how to find them. And see, in truth, what they bring us.

When we have nothing to cling to as our own and cease thinking of ourselves as people who must defend privileges, we can open ourselves freely to others with the faithful expectation that our strength will manifest itself in our shared weakness.

Well, I think when we can turn to the person sitting next to us and really see them with kindness and see ourselves reflected back - when there's some dignity and compassion traveling back and forth.

When you listen to other women's stories you begin to understand your own better and you begin to find ways back through and with each other.

The thing that inspires me most is empathizing with people's flaws and seeing how they deal with them. That sort of connection you feel with someone when you realize that maybe even the negative things that they've said or done are because of insecurities or injuries they've endured.

We must begin to make what I call 'conscious choices', and to really recognize that we are the same. It's from that place in my heart that I write my songs.

The opportunity for brotherhood presents itself every time you meet a human being.

I don't think anyone, no matter what, can find perfect happiness until they understand exactly who they are and how every little thing they do can affect the world around them. I think perfect happiness would be a world where everyone is constantly striving to understand everyone else.

People could empathize with other people who had gone through the same experience as they had.

We're so complex; we're mysteries to ourselves; we're difficult to each other. And then storytelling reminds us we're all the same.

Often, little situations trigger enormous reactions. Be there, present for it. Your partner will find it easier to see it in you, and you will find it easier to see it in them.

I want everyone to know what they deserve in relationships: that they can demand equality and kindness. Because everyone will have a relationship at some point in their life. It's what we all do, every day, and we need to know how to do it.

That's always what I've tried to do. I've tried to communicate. But at the end of the day, it's still for you to understand something. Understand that the world is bigger than you.

The delicate and infirm go for sympathy, not to the well and buoyant, but to those who have suffered like themselves.

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals.

My answer is: Recognize yourself in others

If I diminish you, I diminish myself

Remember that you are all people and that all people are you.

Just remember, Someone is on your side (our side) Someone else is not While we're seeing our side Maybe we forgot: they are not alone. No one is alone.

Never let a person's weakness get in the way of their strength.

Clem (Clementa Pinckney) understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves, in each other.