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" What do-gooders lack is not happiness but innocence. They lack that happy blindness that allows most people most, of the time, to shut their minds to what is unbearable. Do-gooders have forced themselves to know, and keep on knowing, that everything they do effects other people. And that sometimes, though not always, their joy is purchased with other peoples’ joy. And remembering that, they open themselves up to an unlimited crushing sense of responsibility. "
― Larissa MacFarquhar , Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help
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" The life of a zealous do-gooder is a kind of human sublime — by which I mean that, although there is a hard beauty in it, the word "beautiful" doesn't capture the ambivalence it stirs up. A beautiful object — a flower, a stream — is pleasing in a gentle way, inspiring a feeling that is like love. A sublime object, such as a mountain or a rough sea, inspires awe, but also dread. Confronting it, you see its formidable nobility, and at the same time you sense uncomfortably that you would not survive in it for long. It is this sense of sublime that I mean to apply to do-gooders: to confront such a life is to feel awe mixed with unease — a sense that you wouldn't survive in that life for long, and might not want to. "
― Larissa MacFarquhar , Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help