People can only hurt you if you let them. Worrying about what other people say or think about you means that you let them. Live your life the way you feel is right and do not worry about what other people say. Do not let them hurt you. You cannot control what people think of you.

Hurt people can become hurtful,

Whenever someone helps or hinders you, or praises or criticizes you, remember that they see you only through the lens of their own impressions. If they act or speak from a warped perspective, they hurt themselves — not you. For if someone mistakes truth for falsehood, the truth is not harmed, but only the person deceived. Keeping this in mind, gently turn away any insult or injury. “It seems right to them, though they are mistaken.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

D’you know what happens when you hurt people?’ Ammu said. ‘When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.

if we don’t direct our own thoughts, we’ll fall under the influence of those who would condition us to behave in the way they desire.

I learned another thing from the hurt my cousin gave me - never to give that kind of hurt to anyone else. My revenge was to change a bad feeling into a good one. If I'm working with you and I sense you're feeling a little insecure, I try to make you feel great. That's how I get rid of my old hurt. If I don't do that, my hurt grows and makes me mean and vengeful. But if hurt can change to kindness - that's something Mama showed me - the world becomes a little less cruel.

There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.

We all hurt other people, especially those we love...civilized people were the ones who had learned to hurt according to rules.

It's wrong to hurt even bad people. Because they don't know any better, and because bad people sometimes become good.

Reactionaries...just feeling urgent and compulsive is enough to hurt us. Someone does something, so we must do something back Someone says something, so we must say something back. Someone feels a certain way, so we must feel a certain way. WE JUMP INTO THE FIRST FEELING THAT COMES OUR WAY AND THEN WALLOW IT.

if someone says they’re hurt by your actions, you must believe they’re hurt; you can’t decide for them whether or not they felt hurt in the first place.

What he wasn't so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans wass that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in a belief that hed been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood.

Because I questioned myself and my sanity and what I was doing wrong in this situation. Because of course I feared that I might be overreacting, overemotional, oversensitive, weak, playing victim, crying wolf, blowing things out of proportion, making things up. Because generations of women have heard that they’re irrational, melodramatic, neurotic, hysterical, hormonal, psycho, fragile, and bossy. Because girls are coached out of the womb to be nonconfrontational, solicitous, deferential, demure, nurturing, to be tuned in to others, and to shrink and shut up. Because speaking up for myself was not how I learned English. Because I’m fluent in Apology, in Question Mark, in Giggle, in Bowing Down, in Self-Sacrifice. Because slightly more than half of the population is regularly told that what happens doesn’t or that it isn’t the big deal we’re making it into. Because your mothers, sisters, and daughters are routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied, harassed, threatened, punished, propositioned, and groped, and challenged on what they say. Because when a woman challenges a man, then the facts are automatically in dispute, as is the speaker, and the speaker’s license to speak. Because as women we are told to view and value ourselves in terms of how men view and value us, which is to say, for our sexuality and agreeability. Because it was drilled in until it turned subconscious and became unbearable need: don’t make it about you; put yourself second or last; disregard your feelings but not another’s; disbelieve your perceptions whenever the opportunity presents itself; run and rerun everything by yourself before verbalizing it — put it in perspective, interrogate it: Do you sound nuts? Does this make you look bad? Are you holding his interest? Are you being considerate? Fair? Sweet? Because stifling trauma is just good manners. Because when others serially talk down to you, a