Compassion is not a social facade. Compassion is not a sham designed to mask our essential self–centeredness. Compassion is the emotion that links us to those outside ourselves. It is the capacity for outreach. It enables us, it drives us, to go beyond ourselves to the beating pulse of the rest of the world. Compassion, then, is a dimension of what it means to be fully human.
Or the sower sowing in the fields, or the harvester harvesting,
I saw there, too, O life and death, your analogies;
(Life, life is the tillage, and Death is the harvest according.)