Almost nobody believes anymore that infants are insensate blobs. It seems both mad and evil to deny experience and feeling to a laughing, gurgling creature.
Paul BloomRead
Enjoying fiction requires a shift in selfhood. You give up your own identity and try on the identities of other people, adopting their perspectives so as to share their experiences. This allows us to enjoy fictional events that would shock and sadden us in real life.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Fiction allows us to escape our own identity and empathize with others' experiences.
This quote by Paul Bloom emphasizes the transformative nature of engaging with fiction. It suggests that immersing ourselves in fictional narratives allows us to leave behind our personal identities and adopt those of the characters, enabling us to explore a vast array of emotions and experiences that we might not encounter in our everyday lives. By doing so, we can appreciate complex narratives and events that, if they occurred in reality, may be too distressing to process.
Themes
FictionIdentityEmpathyExperiencePerspective
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a literature class to discuss the power of storytelling.
More from Paul Bloom
All quotes →Maybe one of the most heartening findings from the psychology of pleasure is there's more to looking good than your physical appearance. If you like somebody, they look better to you. This is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks much better than anyone else thinks that they do.
Paul BloomRead
If you look within the United States, religion seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societies do very well - better, in many ways, than devout ones.
Paul BloomRead
I want to convince you that humans are, to some extent, natural born essentialists. What I mean by this is we don't just respond to things as we see them or feel them or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is.
Paul BloomRead
We benefit, intellectually and personally, from the interplay between different selves, from the balance between long-term contemplation and short-term impulse. We should be wary about tipping the scales too far. The community of selves shouldn't be a democracy, but it shouldn't be a dictatorship, either.
Paul BloomRead
A sympathetic parent might see the spark of consciousness in a baby's large eyes and eagerly accept the popular claim that babies are wonderful learners, but it is hard to avoid the impression that they begin as ignorant as bread loaves.
Paul BloomRead
Similar quotes
There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.There are not more than five primary colors, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen.There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations of them yield more flavors than can ever be tasted.
Sun TzuRead
All of the films that I've made are about the country I live in and grew up in... And I think if you're going to put an artist's eye to it, you're going to put a critical eye to it. I've always been interested in the gray area that exists between the black and white, or the red and blue, and that's where complexity lies.
Robert RedfordRead
I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.
Lawrence FerlinghettiRead
Every time I write these words they become a taboo,_x000D_ _x000D_ Making sure my punctuation curve, every letter here's true,_x000D_ _x000D_ Living my life in the margin, and that metaphor was proof.
Kendrick LamarRead
I'm known as a light artist. But rather than be someone who depicted light, or painted light in some way, I wanted to have the work be light.
James TurrellRead
I didn't want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write.
Leonard CohenRead