"It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself."

In a time where the world is becoming personalized, when the mobile phone, the burger, the telephone, everything has its own personal identity, how should we perceive ourselves and how should we perceive others?

Paul Polman, the Unilever CEO, put this really well when he said, "The issues we face today are so big and so challenging, it becomes quite clear we can't do it alone, and so there is a certain humility in knowing you have to invite people in."

And he said, "You know, I'm not the kind of guy to rat people out, but some things just cross the line.

All over the world, no matter what our cultures are, we think men should be strong, assertive, aggressive, have voice; we think women should speak when spoken to, help others.

Men are still socialized to believe that they have to be breadwinners, that to derive their self-worth from how high they can climb over other men on a career ladder.

We have been taught to love other people as an important value, but I think loving our own selves hasn't been considered to be an issue worth talking about.

She looked at me with the weary eyes of someone who had experienced enough dogmatism to last a lifetime, and said, "I'm tired of hating people."

The officers also tried to create a personal bond between themselves and the informant, and to be honest, the example of the Stasi shows that it's not so difficult to win someone in order to betray others.

If you have more consideration for others, you will make sure that you remedy inequality, that you bring some kind of well-being within society, in education, at the workplace.

And if you have more consideration for others, you are not going to ransack that planet that we have and at the current rate, we don't have three planets to continue that way.

We don't trash the environment or court devastating accidents or expose others to the possibility of cancer, because we decided those things were expensive, destructive, not in our best interest.

I would look through my viewfinder and see three elderly figures, and it became impossible to deny that regardless of age, we were each in pursuit of filling the proverbial hole through other people.

Why? Because in compassion, when we feel with the other, we dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and we put another person there. And once we get rid of ego, then we're ready to see the Divine.

Obsessions can manifest as fears of contamination and illness, worries about harming others, or preoccupations with numbers, patterns, morality, or sexual identity.

Tonight, just on our service, 785, 000 people in 191 countries will either stay in a stranger's home or welcome one into theirs.

Believing in something should not come at the cost of your family and friends, and if someone tells you to sacrifice your relationships or morality for the greater good, they're most likely exploiting you for their own.

Either you lift people up by respecting them, making them feel valued, appreciated and heard, or you hold people down by making them feel small, insulted, disregarded or excluded.

But if that's true, why do some people, like the stranger who rescued me, do selfless things, like helping other people at enormous risk and cost to themselves?

We started to place our trust into black box systems of authority, things like legal contracts and regulation and insurance, and less trust directly in other people.

So givers spend a lot of time trying to help other people and improve the team, and then, unfortunately, they suffer along the way.

We constantly shame people for not fitting into a box, but the reality is, I think we shame others because it prevents them from seeing that we don't fit inside our boxes, either.

Being someone else in the land of escapism doesn't exactly give us numbers that we can gauge, but it's like a real lost form of magic which exists but can't be measured.

They call people fools, idiots, monsters, or a whole bunch of things I've been told I'm not allowed to say during this TED Talk.

You are inducers of hope, embracers of strangers, eradicators of hopelessness, you are physicians, and peacemakers.

But we do know that people have been eating each other, volunteering themselves to be eaten, and accusing others of eating people for millennia.

Even that though. Another confession: Once in a book on pre-war Poland, a studio portrait, an absolute angel, an absolute angel with tormented, tormenting eyes.

Sometimes, people have the ideation, the plan, the means and the timing to hurt themselves or someone else, and we can't deescalate.

(Laughter) And secondly and lastly, W.H. Auden, one of my favorite poets, who said, "We are here on earth to help others.

He asked them to give a message, and they each read in their own language a central affirmation, and that was some version of the golden rule: "As you would that others would do unto you, do also unto them."

A Good Samaritan is not simply one whose heart is touched in an immediate act of care and charity, but one who provides a system of sustained care -- I like that, 'a system of sustained care ' -- in the inn, take care.

Metaphorical thinking is essential to how we understand ourselves and others, how we communicate, learn, discover and invent.

I try to make people more resilient, more self-confident, more able to have skills to compete in the marketplace so that they don't have to blame the other, the other that they've never met.