“Worse yet, human nature was allowed no outlet in the motional life of the enslaved. There was no acceptable place for the range of human emotions. If you were angry, you had to swallow your rage. If you were afraid, you had to pretend as if you were calm. If your mother and brother had died a month apart, you had to go to work without tears, without a break, without comfort.”
Source: Never Caught, the Story of Ona Judge: George and Martha Washington's Courageous Slave Who Dared to Run Away; Young Readers Edition
“Emotions are observable and measurable, reflected in bodily changes and actions. Since human bodies are the same across the globe, emotions are by and large universal, including what happens to us when we fall in love, have fun, or get mad. That is why we never feel emotionally disconnected even in a country where we don’t speak the language. Feelings, on the other hand, are private experiences, varying from place to place and from person to person. What one person experiences as pain, another may feel as pleasure. There is no simple one-to-one mapping between emotions and feelings. Every language has its own concepts to describe subjective states, and people bring different backgrounds and experiences to how they feel and why.”
Source: Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves
“Une myriade d'extases. Sidère-moi, je dis au monde. Excite-moi, éblouis-moi, étourdis-moi, que ça ne s'arrête jamais.”
Source: Fault Lines
“He was either the most Zen person I knew, or he was going to implode one day soon.”
Source: At the Edge of the Universe
“Sex, hate, attraction, dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin, too much intertwined.”
Source: In Limbo
“Every feeling wants to be felt in such a way that doesn’t reject its value.”
Source: New Skin: A collection of poems and short stories
“Several studies have found that people are less likely to persist on difficult or unsolvable problems if they have already exerted self-control on a prior task, such as attempting to control their thoughts or emotions or resisting the temptation to eat chocolates and cookies. Some recent evidence suggests that the capacity for self-control is enhanced by positive emotions, and there is evidence that people in good moods persist longer (and perform better) at solving tasks.”
Source: Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification
“Desires and emotions as such are involuntary; they are not subject to direct and immediate volitional control; they are the automatic result of subconscious integrations. (...) It is impossible to compute the magnitude of the disaster, the wreckage of human lives, produced by the belief that desires and emotions can be commanded in and out of existence by an act of will.”
Source: The Disowned Self
“From C. R. Rogers’s (1961) perspective, the problems of inauthenticity arise not because a person hides his real emotional reactions from others (as may sometimes be appropriate) but because he hides them from himself.”
Source: Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification
“Women are emotional creatures. You have to listen to them to figure out what they are saying. Show your wife steadfast loyalty.”