Donald Hall Quotes

The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted - you will find out at once how to arrange it all.

I believe we have a higher responsibility to each other.

The really important kind of freedom involves...being able truly to care about other people...

Accustomed long to contemplating love and compassion I have forgotten all difference between myself and others

The only way for us to help ourselves is to help others and to listen to each other's stories.

Those who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.

Love places someone else in the centre of your being and your own self is blurred.

To help all created things, that is the measure of all our responsibility; to be helped by all, that is the measure of our hope.

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.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

Are we truly being our sisters' keepers? Initially, that dog-eat-dog mentality within us may bark and say that we aren't responsible for other people, but if that was truly the case, then why are we even here? We have so much to offer and give to this world.

At the end of the day, that's our sole purpose and our sole reason for existing, is to love somebody else.

Showing young children in these communities, that there are outlets for their feelings, that there is room in a space for their stories to be told, and that they will be applauded - and it's not about ego, it's about connection: that their pain is everybody else's pain.

Because a human being is endowed with empathy, he violates the natural order if he does not reach out to those who need care. Responding to this empathy, one is in harmony with the order of things, with dharma; otherwise, one is not.

Love starts when we push aside our ego and make room for someone else.

Community is first of all a quality of the heart. It grows from the spiritual knowledge that we are alive not for ourselves but for one another.

You will begin to succeed with your life when the pains and problems of others matter to you.

I'll give you an exact definition. When the happiness of another person becomes as essential to yourself as your own, then the state of love exists.

I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.

Compassion is our deepest nature. It arises from our interconnection with all things.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

Being able to step outside of yourself in order to help someone else is why we're all here, it's what we should all be doing if we can.

I would say that the thrust of my life has been initially about getting free, and then realizing that my freedom is not independent of everybody else. Then I am arriving at that circle where one works on oneself as a gift to other people so that one doesn't create more suffering. I help people as a work on myself and I work on myself to help people.

Why should my love be powerless to help another?

To love is to take delight in happiness of another, or, what amounts to the same thing, it is to account another's happiness as one's own.