Friendship and Friend

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Mark Twain

Behave with others as you would with yourself.
Look upon all the living beings as your bosom friends, for in all of them there resides one soul.
All are but a part of that Universal Soul.

Yajur Veda 40.6

When one sees everyone as one's own body, then attraction is not there, but there is so much love! Enormous love is there, bliss is there, surrender is there, devotion is there. It takes quite a lot of maturity to get to that point. It's worth becoming mature like that in life; you must become like that, otherwise life is not complete.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

I truly believe that compassion provides the basis of human survival, the real value of human life, and without that there is a basic piece missing. A deep sensitivity to other's feelings is an element of love and compassion. 

Dalai Lama

One ought to look on all embodied beings round him, as `souls'. One should be soul-conscious. One should see the imperishable in all beings and ought to see friends and foes alike, without letting hatredness and thought of violence or revenge enter one's mind.

Raja Yogi B K Jagdish Chander

Always set a high value on spontaneous kindness. He whose inclination prompts him to cultivate your friendship of his own accord, will love you more than one whom you have been at pains to attach to you.

Samuel Johnson

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

As the bee collects nectar and departs without injuring the flower, or its colour or scent, so let a sage dwell on his village.

Dhammapada iv.49

There is diminishing of happiness when any thought of envy or hatred creeps in. But when the wise man feels the on coming of such a feeling, he should remember that it portends his fall. Greatness consists in philanthropy, large-heartedness, magnanimity and good-will towards all.

Raja Yogi B K Jagdish Chander

One of the Buddhist techniques for enhancing compassion involves imagining a situation where there is a sentient being suffering -- for instance, like a sheep about to be slaughtered by a butcher. And then try to imagine the suffering that the sheep may be going through and so on. 


Dalai Lama

The root of the matter, if we want a stable world, is a very simple and old-fashioned thing, a thing so simple that I am almost ashamed to mention it for fear of the derisive smile with which the wise cynics will greet my words. The thing I mean is love, Christian love, or compassion.

Bertrand Russell

Happiness is like coke -- something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.

Aldous Huxley


Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.

Henry Ward Beecher