“To be a good human is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame.

“That says something very important about the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertainty, and on a willingness to be exposed.

“It’s based on being more like a plant than a jewel: something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.”

From Martha Nussbaum in Bill Moyer’s World of Ideas.