J. K. Rowling Quotes

"Most of us tend to belittle all suffering except our own," said Mary. "I think it's fear. We don't want to come too near in case we're sucked in and have to share it".

Much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people.

Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels-the biggest sin is to be blind to others problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.

Well, I think that if you sincerely try to imagine what life is like for another person - not in a mocking way, not in a satirical way, but in a sincere, compassionate way - I don't think that's exploitive.

I don't think you have to have experienced things to understand them.

As one can see when the eyes are open, so one can understand when the heart is open.

Open your minds, my friends. We all fear what we do not understand.

We must quit thinking we know everything, and quit placing "knowledge" over kindness and compassion.

We feel and weigh soon enough what we suffer from others: but how much others suffer from us, of this we take no heed.

I don't think too much about the future. Not because I'm hiding my head in the sand but because I figured out that whatever the future was going to be, the thing I had to do was to quiet my mind and open my heart and do what I could to end suffering.

I take what people feel and think, especially when it's different from, very seriously, and I find it liberating.

Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.

The hardest heart and the grossest ignorance must disappear before the rising sun of suffering without anger and without malice.

What do you know of my heart? What do you know of anything but your own suffering?

How easy it is to deny the pain of someone else's suffering.

It is only out of ignorance that people are cruel, because they really don't think it will come back.

Do you know, André, I sometimes think that you have no heart.' 'Presumably because I sometimes betray intelligence.

Suffering is part and parcel of extensive intelligence and a feeling heart.

I call on you not to hate, because hate does not leave space for a person to be fair and it makes you blind and closes all doors of thinking.

You men have none of you any hearts.' 'If we have not hearts, we have eyes; and they give us torment enough.

My ultimare goal is, without illusion and without sentimentality, merely by telling the truth as I see it, to break your heart. If I can break your heart and cause your awareness to expand to include another person's experience, even a fictional person's experience, and to inhabit for a moment their sorrow and suffering, then I think it expands us as people.

Lack of understanding of the true nature of happiness, it seems to me, is the principal reason why people inflict sufferings on others. They think either that the other's pain may somehow be a cause of happiness for themselves or that their own happiness is more important, regardless of what pain it may cause. But this is shortsighted. No one truly benefits from causing harm to another sentient being. . . . . In the long run causing others misery and infringing their rights to peace and happiness result in anxiety, fear, and suspicion within oneself.

No emergency excuses you from exercising tolerance.

There is really no way we can know the heart, the intentions, or the circumstances of someone who might say or do something we find reason to criticize. Thus the commandment: 'Judge not.'

That only shows you have no heart,’ she said. But her eyes said that she knew he had a heart, and that was why she was afraid of him