Teju Cole Quotes

Everything was a song. Every conversation, every personal hurt, every observance of people in stress, happiness and love... if you could feel it, I could feel it. And I could write a song about it.

We may thank God that we can feel pain and know sadness, for these are the human sentiments that constitute our glory as well as our grief.

Ever since I was a child, I would start crying seeing anyone in pain.

I'm a sensitive guy; I respond to things that make my eyes well up a little bit, or make me root for people. I find the human condition interesting.

I'm a very sensitive person by nature. Things move me very easily, like music or videos on Facebook, and I feel for people.

I realized that a great deal of life is exactly and precisely about being able to feel pain: my own and other people's.

The true artform is being a human being.

When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone’s pain, it become compassion.

All living beings have experience of pleasure and pain, and we are among them. What makes human beings different is that we have a powerful intelligence and a much greater ability to achieve happiness and avoid suffering. Real happiness and friendship come not from money or even knowledge, but from warm-heartednes s. Once we recognize this we will be more inclined to cultivate it.

I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.

With growing awareness, you can see where you're caught or where you suffer or where you create suffering. You can then turn toward the difficulties that arise in your life with compassion, bow, and say, these too are part of human incarnation.

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion.

I think we learn some of the greatest lessons in life from animals, whether it's love, suffering, or the value of silence.

When we rejoice in beautiful scenery, great art, and great music, it is but the flexing of instincts acquired in another place and another time.

At sixteen, the adolescent knows about suffering because he himself has suffered, but he barely knows that other beings also suffer.

Pain is a gift. Humanity, without pain, would know neither fear nor pity.

seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space

Imagine you are walking in the woods and you see a small dog sitting by a tree. As you approach it, it suddenly lunges at you, teeth bared. You are frightened and angry. But then you notice that one of its legs is caught in a trap. Immediately your mood shifts from anger to concern: You see that the dog's aggression is coming from a place of vulnerability and pain. This applies to all of us. When we behave in hurtful ways, it is because we are caught in some kind of trap. The more we look through the eyes of wisdom at ourselves and one another, the more we cultivate a compassionate heart.

My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

The brain is only three pounds of blood, dream, and electricity, and yet from that mortal stew come Beethoven's sonatas. Dizzie Gillespie's jazz. Audrey Hepburn's wish to spend the last month of her life in Somalia, saving children.

Nothing regarding man is ever inhuman. That's why I make films, not iceboxes.

If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there.

It is important not to allow ourselves to be put off by the magnitude of others' suffering. The misery of millions is not a cause for pity. Rather it is a cause for compassion.

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

In some mysterious way, once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal.