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Quote by Neel Burton

“Poor feeling hijacks thinking for self-deception: to hide harsh truths, avoid action, evade responsibility, and, as the existentialists might put it, flee from freedom. Thus, poor feeling is a kind of moral failing, indeed, the deepest kind, and virtue principally consists in correcting and refining our emotions and the values that they reflect. To feel the right thing is to do the right thing, without any particular need for conscious thought or effort.”

Quote by Neel Burton

Work

Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions

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Author

Neel Burton
Neel Burton

Neel Burton is an expert in an unknown field, born on June 3, 1978. His biography and contributions are not yet clear, and more information is needed. more

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“Self-deception and vanity are grievous sin. The ego is the cause of all human suffering. We suffer from life only when we fail to examine the cause of our sorrow. Letting go of destructive illusions and freeing oneself from egotism of self-pity enables a person to sense the rich intertexture of their inner world, which is the only facet of reality that we exercise exclusive dominion and control.”

“Perhaps the strangest thing about this illusion of control is not that it happens but that it seems to confer many of the psychological benefits of genuine control. In fact, the one group of people who seem generally immune to this illusion are the clinically depressed, who tend to estimate accurately the degree to which they can control events in most situation.”

“Every culture that’s ever existed has operated under the illusion that it understood 95% of reality and that the other 5% would be delivered in the next 18 months, and from Egypt forward they’ve been running around believing they had a perfect grip on things and yet we look back at every society that preceded us with great smugness at how naive they all were. Well, it never occurs to us, then, that maybe we’re whistling in the dark too! That the universe is stranger than you CAN suppose, and that that openness that that perception imparts is a great joy, a great blessing, because then you can live your life not in service to some fascistic metaphor but in service to the living mystery: the fact that you’re not going to understand it; it is not going to yield to logic; or magic; or any other technique that’s been developed…”