Alan Paton Quotes

I help tons of people through their sobriety and getting help, but not because I have lived it but because I love them, care about them, and want them to live their best lives possible. If I can help anyone through that, then that it is my honor.

There's another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. [...] For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That's what hate does.

There are only two roads that lead to something like human happiness. They are marked by the words . . . love and achievement. . . . Inorder to be happy oneself it is necessary to make at least one other person happy. . . . The secret of human happiness is not inself-seeking but in self-forgetting.

I feel like the vast majority of the world's problems would disappear if suddenly everyone on the planet were relatively self-aware and capable of honest self-love and compassion.

You are the people who are shaping a better world. One of the secrets of inner peace is the practice of compassion.

A guy said to me one time, something really profound, and it's so simple. It's that depression lies. It's a liar and you have to shut it down. There is nothing that alleviates it more than going out and doing something for someone else. It's almost like instant healing. Get away from yourself. People can't even get out of bed and it gets really severe. I've never been at that stage. Everyone goes through low and high and low and high and some people are blessed to be created on an even keel all the way through - but not me.

All of us are better when we're loved.

I have an everyday religion that works for me. Love yourself first, and everything else falls into line.

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.

I hope it's enabling me to deal with another human being who's more important to me than I am.

I have learned more about love, selflessness and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did in the cutthroat, competitive world in which I spent my life.

People talk about love and it seems like a cliche but it's a real thing - the more love we spread around the world the more it's going to change lives.

Developing our capacity for compassion makes it possible for us to help others in a more skillful and effective way. And compassion helps us as well.

With all the things I've been through, the No. 1 thing that I've learned is that we're supposed to help people through this world.

If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it.

I love mankind; it's people I can't stand.

You can't not be changed by the experience of seeing extreme poverty. You start to want to think about ways in which you can make the world better.

Just the service aspect of running a nonprofit is so gratifying because it takes the attention off yourself. I'm not an acting monk or anything. I'm not, like, the most well-adjusted actor. But it's really designed to focus on yourself, or it can be. So it's good to have something else to focus on that reminds you that it's not always about you.

Happiness is when you love who you are and you are able to accept yourself and others.

Your own soul is nourished when you are kind; it is destroyed when you are cruel.

There would be no supporting life were we to feel quite as poignantly for others as we do for ourselves.

We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others.

Cancer is a growth hormone for empathy, and empathy makes us useful to each other in ways we were not, could not have been, before.

If we all helped one person, wouldn't the world be an unbelievable place?

I'm lucky that I've never been bullied personally. There are always going to be kids who are mean and say stuff, but the people that matter to you - the people you love, like your parents, your siblings, and your friends - those are the people you should listen to.