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"You can't love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can't be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that's not what I mean). Show me the tyrants who have been great lovers."
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"When someone is vicious toward you they are giving you a glimpse of the pain they carry in themselves."

"If my mind was in your body going through the same circumstances. I would act differently, and likewise. Judging in nature is separation."

"Some people are highly empathic, some people are telempathic, or telepathic, some are clairempathic, while others are claircognizant, clairvoyant, clairaliant, clairaudient, clairgustant, clairsentient; and a very few are all of the above. The great amount of confusion and inner strife that accompanies one or more of these conditions, can be calmed and soothed first by acceptance, second by the humility to be okay with the fact that you are stuck with it forever, and third by honing these conditions to their best possible uses and most polished states."

"Other people feel love when we listen without judging and accept them without demanding change. We all desperately require these basic needs. When we can do this for another, we are indeed that person's angel."

"Don't criticize them, they are just what we would be under similar circumstances."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes

"Remember the botched brothel-visit in L'Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory."

"Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised."

"A pier is a disappointed bridge, yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel."

"Pride makes us long for a solution to things " a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear."

"When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up."

"Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn t all it s cracked up to be."

"To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."

"Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience."

"Throw off your grief,' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away."
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