“Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.”Frederick Buechner

For me compassion is the impulse to relieve suffering, because we have also felt that suffering.  Grief, loss, pain are common to most of us if we live long enough. However I have a neice who literally cries when she sees a family member being hurt. She is only two.