putting ourselves in someone else's shoes

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and
understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other
people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is
morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or
control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose
to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never
troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they
are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can
close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them
personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I
do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in
narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings
its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters.
They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real
monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we
collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor
down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not
then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve
inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every
day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with
the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by
existing.

- Excerpt from J.K. Rowling's commencement speech for Harvard
Grabbed from: Ma'am Lynette Carpio