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"If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink within their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those who feel compassion for all beings must be boundless. They are not separate, not alone, not lonely, not vulnerable in the same way as those of us stranded in the islands of ourselves, but they are vulnerable in other ways. Still, that sense of the dangers of feeling for others is so compelling that many withdraw, and develop elaborate stories to justify withdrawal, and then forget that they have shrunk. Most of us do, one way or another."
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"He held out a shaky and worn hand and she met it with one of her young and inexperienced ones."
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Personal Development

"We have to help the one who has fallen, we should not question 'why did you fall?"
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Personal Development

"He sometimes wondered if she had become involved with him just so that she could cry in someone's arms. Maybe she can't cry alone, and that's why she needs me."
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Personal Development

"An open heart has greater power than a clenched fist."
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Personal Development

"When you learn to kill animals, you are unconsciously teaching cruelty to other creations."
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Personal Development

"Before hurting an animal, feel her pain and see her tears. Then question your conscience."
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Personal Development

"You don't do kind deeds expecting kindness in return. You don't do kind deeds because you deem the recipient worthy. You do kind deeds because it's who you are, and because you understand the powerful difference your gentle hand makes in this dreary world."
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Personal Development

"Wisdom without Christ brings bitterness, with Christ it brings compassion."
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Personal Development

"Approaching others with a loving heart enables you to be more caring, compassionate, and empathetic. What's not to love about that?"
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Personal Development

"Have compassion for people as long as you are one of them too."
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Personal Development
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"Part of what makes roads, trails and paths so unique as built structures is that they cannot be perceived as a whole all at once by a sedentary onlooker. They unfold in time as one travels along them, just as a story does as one listens or reads, and a hairpin turn is like a plot twist, a steep ascent a building of suspense to the view at the summit, a fork in the road an introduction of a new storyline, arrival the end of the story. Just as writing allows one to read the words of someone who is absent, so roads make it possible to trace the route of the absent. Roads are a record of those who have gone before and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there."
Exploration


"The revolution that counts is the one that takes place in the imagination; many kinds of change issue forth thereafter, some gradual and subtle, some dramatic and conflict-ridden--which is to say that revolution doesn't necessarily look like revolution."
Revolution


"In contemporary parlance, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed."
Society


"The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women - of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human."
Feminism


"I'd wrestled against the inner voice of my mother, the voice of caution, of duty, of fear of the unknown, the voice that said the world was dangerous and safety was always the first measure and that often confused pleasure with danger, the mother who had, when I'd moved to the city, sent me clippings about young women who were raped and murdered there, who elaborated on obscure perils and injuries that had never happened to her all her life, and who feared mistakes even when the consequences were minor. Why go to Paradise when the dishes aren't done? What if the dirty dishes clamor more loudly than Paradise?"
Psychology


"Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of."
Health


"Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished."
Justice


"But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already a loss."
Courage


"Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible."
Philosophy


"This is a paradise of rising to the occasion that points out by contrast how the rest of the time most of us fall down from the heights of possibility, down into diminished selves and dismal societies. Many now do not even hope for a better society, but they recognize it when they encounter it, and that discovery shines out even through the namelessness of their experience. Others recognize it, grasp it, and make something of it, and long-term social and political transformations, both good and bad, arise from the wreckage. The door to this ear's potential paradises is in hell."
Society
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