Empathy

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. It is our default setting, hardwired into our boards at birth.

You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human without wealth, without domination over others, without reckless arrogance, without fear of others unlike you.

What most of us recognized in South Africa, at the very last moment, was just how much we needed one another. We realized that violent confrontation promised only destruction and a long life of shared misery.

When we experience our fear, when we say the words 'I am scared,' we have the choice to acknowledge that being scared is not who we are. It is not our identity. And while there is a part of us that is scared, there's also a part of us that isn't scared.

We need our fear in order to find our love. They go together. Yin and Yang.

To be a good doctor, a good researcher, is to be one who can listen, assimilate and diagnose information from without, but can also listen and hear what is being said from within themselves.

It's not a cause, that's an emergency. And when the disease gets out of control because most of the population lives on less than one dollar a day — that's not a cause, that's an emergency.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

When you teach, you learn that you are the other. That the distance between us is not as great as we fear.

Love is the only thing that the more you give away, the more you have.

Where do the mermaids stand? Answer that question, and you could build a school, a nation, or a whole world on it.

Who is my neighbor? My neighbor is all mankind.