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Emotions Quotes

Browse 3107 quotes about Emotions.

Emotions Quotes

“We'll find that practicing metta changes our behavior at every level. Of course we can only do our own personal practice of metta, just as other people must do their own practice. And when we do so our mental patterns change over time. These thoughts are transformed into our speech and actions, which in turn affect other people.”

EmotionsMoodQuality Of Life
Book:Loving-Kindness in Plain English: The Practice of Metta
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“Seating himself crosslegged on a bale of straw, he formed the image of a flame in his mind and fed emotion into it, hate, fear, everything, every scrap, until it seemed that he floated in emptiness. After years of practice, achieving ko'di, the oneness, needed less than a heartbeat. Thought and even his own body seemed distant, but in this state he was more aware than usual, becoming one with the bale beneath him, the stable, the scabbarded sword folded behind him. He could 'feel' the horses, cropping at their mangers, and flies buzzing in the corners. They were all part of him. Especially the sword. This time, though, it was only the emotionless void that he sought.”

EmotionsOnenessVoidStableStateHorsesSwordDistantEmotionlessScabbard
Book:New Spring
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“I used the role of fight-or-flight in human survival as an excuse to justify my addiction to depression and anxiety; I saw them as survival traits, believing that I would perish without them. However, the key here is that fight-or-flight is an automatic physiological reaction, making it often more dependent on instinct, not initiative. When a person starts getting stressed, or when their fight-or-flight response is activated, they don’t carefully evaluate whether or not this is something worth getting anxious about; they just get anxious automatically. Having their brains become numb, their hearts palpitate, and their adrenaline course their veins just happens automatically; you don’t intentionally control that. That is what makes the woman so blank and emotionless—it is her, or my, strict and rigid dependency on fight-or-flight! By being so deeply contingent on an automatic instinct, I had little time for true introspection. It is like the instinct controlled me, instead of the other way around.”

EmotionsMental HealthIntrospectionEmotional IntelligenceFight Or Flight
Book:For the Intellect
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“Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer. Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant. So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals. What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others.”

LoveLifeEmotionsStory
Book:Take My Advice: Letters to the Next Generation from People Who Know a Thing or Two
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“Навіть якщо сьогодні нам здається, що сенсу немає, то в майбутньому, коли ми відбудовуватимемо Україну, ми віднайдемо його. Я дуже сподіваюся, що головними в наших емоціях тоді буде емоція любові й бажання навіть у напівзруйнованій країні вирощувати квіти.”

LifeWarEmotionsUkraineUkraine War
Book:Емоційні гойдалки війни. Роздуми психотерапевта про війну
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“Anger is a means to achieve a goal. When I first read this sentence, it hit me like a ton of bricks. But at the same time, I felt that it went hand-in-hand with an idea I've grown to realize about anger. I've recognized that it is an emotion that can be utilized and transmuted into alchemy.”

PhilosophyWisdomEmotionsAngerGoalsAlchemyAlchemistAnger ManagementTransmutation
Book:Esotericism With an Unconventional Soul: Exploring Philosophy, Spirituality, Science, and Mysticism
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“Yes, it's important to feel your way through life and to completely embrace these various emotions; including anger. But we cannot dismiss the underlying goal. So what do I mean by this? Well, exerting anger negatively is usually a cover-up for what's really happening deep down inside.”

WisdomEmotionsAngerGoalsGuidanceAlchemyAnger Management
Book:Esotericism With an Unconventional Soul: Exploring Philosophy, Spirituality, Science, and Mysticism
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“You are the magician with alchemical powers and this comes with the ability to control, transmute, and maneuver elements. Basically what I'm saying is that you are the master over your anger, your life, the way you go about these goals with your emotions, and what you create with them.”

WisdomCreationElementsEmotionsAngerMasteryMagicianAlchemyTransmutationAlchemical Wisdom
Book:Esotericism With an Unconventional Soul: Exploring Philosophy, Spirituality, Science, and Mysticism
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“There's something disarmingly, devastatingly self-confident about Jack. About the way he laid out all these facts without hesitating, as though owning his feelings is first and second nature. I study the glint of the lamp hitting his golden hair and wonder why this man would even bother thinking of me. He's figured out my entire game. I came to him empty-handed.”

LoveFeelingsRomanceRelationshipsPsychologyEmotions
Book:Love, Theoretically
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“We are not individually much cleverer than the average animal, a heron or a mole, but the knack of our species lies in our capacity to transmit our accumulated knowledge down the generations. The slowest among us can, in a few hours, pick up ideas that it took a few rare geniuses a lifetime to acquire. Yet what is distinctive is just how selective we are about the topics we deem it possible to educate ourselves in. Our energies are overwhelmingly directed towards material, scientific and technical subjects – and away from psychological and emotional ones. Much anxiety surrounds the question of how good the next generation will be at maths; very little around their abilities at marriage or kindness. We devote inordinate hours to learning about tectonic plates and cloud formations, and relatively few fathoming shame and rage. The assumption is that emotional insight might be either unnecessary or in essence unteachable, lying beyond reason or method, an unreproducible phenomenon best abandoned to individual instinct and intuition. We are left to find our own path around our unfeasibly complicated minds – a move as striking (and as wise) as suggesting that each generation should rediscover the laws of physics by themselves.”

LifePsychologyEmotionsInsight
Book:The School of Life: An Emotional Education
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“The Wallace-Ali relationship reflects the great mythic “hero’s journey.” Wallace might be seen as the Mentor/Wise Old Man, Ali as the naïve young hero who grows as the story evolves.”

AwarenessEmotionsInsightHelpBirdsReflectiveRawPerceptionsChallengingAide
Book:"Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion
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“People with strong feelings and of nervous temperament, for which one is no more responsible than for the colour of one's eyes, have things to fight against and to put up with, unknown to those of quiet equable dispositions, who are free from violent emotions, and have consequently no feeling of nerves -- still less, of irritable nerves. If I did not control mine they would be dreadful....One can overcome a great deal -- but -alter- one's self one cannot.... [Princess Alice, in a letter dated 24 September 1874]”

EmotionsNervesPersonal ChangeDispositions
Book:Princess Alice: Queen Victoria's Forgotten Daughter
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