“Respect pain. If we could truly imagine pain we don't feel, we would not survive a day, so we don't imagine it, we can't, and that indispensable glitch in the human machine is also ironically what lets us inflict pain on others at little cost to a good night's sleep.”

“People don't know. We don't know ourselves so we tell ourselves what we really know is other people. We could say the depth of pain we feel for the lovers who've left us is because we knew them so well.”

“Pain is only pain after all; it lets us know we survived." - Captain Roke”

“It's the discomforting end of humankind's bargain with consciousness. We empathize with other beings and imagine we feel their pain. Either the empathy binds us to the mechanics of live, or we shut the empathy off. ”

“Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.”

“What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.”