Quotes About Sensitivity

Love: To feel with one's whole self the existence of another being.

The opposite of love is indifference to the genuine needs of others.

I thought, briefly, that I would never feel as intensely connected to the world, to another human being, as I did at that moment.

I frowned at the list. "So… I'll go back and tell the Traynors that I'm going to get their suicidal quadriplegic son drunk, spend their money on strippers and lap dancers, and then trundle him off to the Disability Olympics—

I felt everything more intensely, saw everything as if a filter had been removed.

it was as if I had lost a layer of skin—I woke up laughing, or crying.

Especially when he is plainly unable to move, and is saying, gently, 'Clark. Please. Just come over here. Please,

to feel properly awkward, I felt Will

Congratulations,' I said, indicating her belly. I wanted to say something else, but I could never work out whether it was appropriate to say a heavily pregnant woman was 'large', 'not large', 'neat', 'blooming', or any of the other euphemisms people seemed to use to disguise what they wanted to say, which was essentially along the lines of Bloody hell.

You beat a horse and you can break it all right. You can make it submit. But it'll never forget. And it sure as hell won't care for you. So if I wouldn't do it to a horse, I could never work out why I should do it to a human.

The only question that nobody ever asks is: What breaks your heart? I think that should be asked of all "artists."...So, what breaks your heart?

It was all by design, as he said later. Angry fighters don't think clearly. They don't stick to their plans. They get frustrated, sloppy. Clay knew that Liston was sensitive about his image, that he yearned for respect, and so Clay worked to deny him that respect. By labeling Liston an ugly bear, Clay was tweaking his opponent's most sensitive nerve and perhaps using racism to do it

The desire not to use disparaging terms for other groups can have its comic side, and is often dismissed as a product of 'political correctness'. But the concern behind it is part of the growth of one of our central moral resources.

People don't adopt their ideologies at random, or by soaking up whatever ideas are around them. People whose genes gave them brains that get a special pleasure from novelty, variety, and diversity, while simultaneously being less sensitive to signs of threat, are predisposed (but not predestined) to become liberals.

Yes, genes explain far more about us than anyone had realized, but the genes themselves often turn out to be sensitive to environmental conditions. And yes, each person has a characteristic level of happiness, but it now looks as though it's not so much a set point as a potential range or probability distribution.

Avoiding triggers

Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder. Leon Cass

but they were the only group that frequently ignored their own feelings of disgust and said that an action that bothered them was nonetheless morally permissible. And they were the only group in which a majority (73 percent) were able to tolerate the chicken story.

I'd long thought that a surfeit of sensitivity could be a killing thing, too much insight malignant in its own right. The best survivors—there are studies that show it—are those blessed with an inordinate ability to deny. And keep on marching.

I'd long thought that a surfeit of sensitivity could be a killing thing, too much insight malignant in its own right. The best survivors--there are studies that show it--are those blessed with an inordinate ability to deny. And keep on marching.

But at school, I found myself confronted with cruel, aggressive children, many of whom had lost their fathers in the war, or were beaten and neglected by fathers who had returned from the trenches brutalized and half mad. They avenged themselves, at school, for this lack of love at home by turning viciously against other children who were frailer and more sensitive. They

Nerves were on hair triggers, and if my virgin aunt had stepped out from behind those crates with a puppy in one hand and a baby in the other my guys would have capped her.

No] social principle in the world is more foolish and dangerous than the rapidly rising notion that hurtful words and ideas are a form of violence or torture (e.g., "harassment") and that their perpetrators should be treated accordingly. That notion leads to the criminalization of criticism and the empowerment of authorities to regulate it. The new sensitivity is the old authoritarianism in disguise, and it is just as noxious.

George,' I croaked, 'are you okay?' 'No. Someone's buttocks are flattening my foot.' I shifted my position irritably.