"Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared"
About this Quote
Rowling presents imagination as a double engine: it powers the making of new realities and, more profoundly, the moral leap into the realities of others. The first part is familiar and celebrated, the spark behind technology, art, and social reforms. The second part is her deeper claim: imagination lets us enter lives we have not lived, to feel the weight of experiences distant from our own, and to act with compassion rather than indifference. That shift from invention to empathy reframes imagination not as escapism but as an ethical faculty, a discipline of attention to the suffering and dignity of strangers.
The context enriches the claim. Speaking at Harvard in 2008, after completing the Harry Potter series, Rowling reflected on her work at Amnesty International. She read testimonies from prisoners of conscience and the families of the disappeared, and she watched colleagues translate the words of people whose pain she had not personally known. Those encounters depended on an exercised imagination: to hear a letter and feel its stakes, to sit with the fear of someone you may never meet, to stand in solidarity because you have pictured, however imperfectly, their world. She warned that many choose not to imagine, because empathy can hurt and obligate; the refusal of imagination becomes a refuge for cruelty or complacency.
The claim also casts her own storytelling in a new light. Fiction is training for this kind of moral projection. By following characters across dividing lines of class, species, blood status, or power, readers practice the movement from self to other. That practice has civic consequences. A society surrenders something vital when it treats imagination as a luxury. Innovation without empathy can harden into manipulation or exploitation. The highest use of imagination is not merely to build what has never been, but to bind what already is: to connect across difference, to recognize shared vulnerability, and to act as if someone else’s fate could have been our own.
The context enriches the claim. Speaking at Harvard in 2008, after completing the Harry Potter series, Rowling reflected on her work at Amnesty International. She read testimonies from prisoners of conscience and the families of the disappeared, and she watched colleagues translate the words of people whose pain she had not personally known. Those encounters depended on an exercised imagination: to hear a letter and feel its stakes, to sit with the fear of someone you may never meet, to stand in solidarity because you have pictured, however imperfectly, their world. She warned that many choose not to imagine, because empathy can hurt and obligate; the refusal of imagination becomes a refuge for cruelty or complacency.
The claim also casts her own storytelling in a new light. Fiction is training for this kind of moral projection. By following characters across dividing lines of class, species, blood status, or power, readers practice the movement from self to other. That practice has civic consequences. A society surrenders something vital when it treats imagination as a luxury. Innovation without empathy can harden into manipulation or exploitation. The highest use of imagination is not merely to build what has never been, but to bind what already is: to connect across difference, to recognize shared vulnerability, and to act as if someone else’s fate could have been our own.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Speech: 'The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination' (Harvard Commencement Address), J. K. Rowling, Harvard University, June 5, 2008 — transcript contains the cited passage about imagination and empathy. |
More Quotes by K. Rowling
Add to List
