David Sasaki

“As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“There is something improbably about the silence in the [subway] carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation's economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies.”
― Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

“do do-gooders understand that it is flawed humans, weak humans, ordinary humans, whom we love?”
― Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help

“the moral narcissist’s extreme humility masked a dreadful pride. Ordinary people could accept that they had faults; the moral narcissist could not.”
― Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help