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"Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it's home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, "Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self," but empathy, solidarity, allegiance--the nerves that run out into the world--expand the self beyond its physical bounds."
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"Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it's home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, "Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self," but empathy, solidarity, allegiance--the nerves that run out into the world--expand the self beyond its physical bounds."
Empathy
"It's tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after."
Ethics
"Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it."
Despair
"Vengeance and forgiveness are about reconciling the accounts, but accounting is an ugly description of the tangled ways we're connected. I sometimes think everything comes out even in the end, but an end that arches beyond the horizon, beyond our capacity to perceive or measure, and that in many cases those who trespass against you do so out of a misery that means the punishment preceded and even precipitated the crime. Maybe that's acceptance."
Forgiveness
"No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more."
Discovery
"Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the other, since it awaits a universal utopia. Joy sneaks in anyway, abundance cascades forth uninvited...Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection."
Joy
"That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word 'lost' comes from the old Norse 'los' meaning the disbanding of an army, I worry now that people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private life conspire to make it so. A recent article about the return of wildlife to suburbia described snow-covered yards in which the footprints of animals are abundant and those of children are entirely absent. Children seldom roam, even in the safest places, I wonder what will come of placing this generation under house arrest."
Discovery
"The naively cynical measure a piece of legislation, a victory, a milestone not against the past or the limits of the possible, but against their ideas of perfection..."
Philosophy
"The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way."
Freedom
"You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly."
Creation
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"When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them."
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Personal Development
"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."
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Personal Development
"Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true."
Author Name
Personal Development
"One of the greatest gifts we receive from dogs is the tenderness they evoke in us. The disappointments of life, the injustices, the battering events that are beyond our control, and the betrayals we endure, from those we befriended and loved, can make us cynical and turn our hearts into flint " on which only the matches of anger and bitterness can be struck into flame. By their delight in being with us, the reliable sunniness of their disposition, the joy they bring to playtime, the curiosity with which they embrace each new experience, dogs can melt cynicism,and sweeten the bitter heart."
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Personal Development
"Hatred is prevalent on this earth because it requires no real effort, unlike the investment it takes to genuinely understand a person."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Why must you know the details of my troubles to have compassion? Is it not enough to show compassion simply because you know that everyone has troubles?"
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Personal Development
"They are the humans, who are uniquely adorned with the priceless characteristic of empathizing. They are the humans who shed tears full of purity and piety, when they see even a complete stranger in pain and misery. They are the humans who come together to save a kid in the neighborhood when he is trapped under the wreckage of his fallen home, regardless of caste, creed and religion."
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Personal Development
"We must be able to love other people or forever endure the stain of disgraceful loneliness. By recognizing and expressing empathy for other people, we come to accept our own fallibility."
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Personal Development
"Sympathy is imagining the pain. Empathy is having suffered through it first."
Author Name
Personal Development
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