Quote by Ba Jin: “Only when one has suffered, can one truly understand the suffering of others.”

This highlights the idea that personal experience with hardship deepens one's capacity for empathy. Having endured pain allows a person to genuinely grasp and connect with the struggles faced by other people.

Living through wartime and political turmoil, Ba Jin consistently empathized with the common people's plight, advocating for social justice and understanding.

Chinese novelist and anarchist thinker of the twentieth century, best known for his semi-autobiographical trilogy Family, Spring, and Autumn, which documented the collapse of traditional Confucian family structures in modern China. Born Li Yaotang in Chengdu in 1904, he adopted the pen name Ba Jin partly as a tribute to the anarchist philosophers Bakunin and Kropotkin. He received the Magsaysay Award in 1990.