Emotions

"The Piglet was sitting on the ground at the door of his house blowing happily at a dandelion, and wondering whether it would be this year, next year, sometime or never, and was trying to remember what it was, and hoping it wasn't anything nice..."

"The core and the surface Are essentially the same Words making them seem different Only to express appearance. If name be needed, wonder names them both: From wonder into wonder existence opens."

"That kind of deep attention that we pay as children is something that I cherish, that I think we all can cherish and reclaim, because attention is that doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity. And it worries me greatly that today’s children can recognize 100 corporate logos and fewer than 10 plants."

"May the people marvel admiringly, and may Utu witness it in joy."

"A man is a small thing and the night is very large and full of wonders."

"If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in."

"If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years."

"In these troubled times it is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility."

"Wonder is the basis of worship."

"A life of love is one of continual growth, where the doors and windows of experience are always open to the wonder and magic that life offers. To love is to risk living fully."

"Krishna asserts that generosity (dana) and compassion (daya) are qualities that arise 'from me alone'."

"One day, as he was playing golf, he thought that it is more difficult to pretend that you do have feelings when you don’t than to pretend you don’t have feelings when you do."

"There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love."

"Life cannot move forward just by being drenched in emotions."

"When emotion brings us ghosts from the past, only logic can root us in the present."

"The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts: the less you know the hotter you get."

"Just because you have the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn't mean we all have."

"...hunting of a beast, inventing of an instrument, laying down the foundations of a new system of economy, setting up a new form or government, kindling a war, or making peace. All these activities of man depend upon his intellectual ability. Emotions creeping in cannot but spoil them."

"Western psychologists accuse religion of repressing the vital energy of man and rendering his life quite miserable as a result of the sense of guilt which especially obsesses the religious people and makes them imagine that all their actions are sinful and can only be expiated through abstention from enjoying the pleasures of life. Those psychologists add that Europe lived in the darkness of ignorance as long as it adhered to its religion but once it freed itself from the fetters of religion, its emotions were liberated and accordingly it achieved wonders in the field of production."

"Anything that touches my heart holds the potential to inspire me, as it enables me to delve into my emotions and forge connections with others through shared experiences."

"People who think they can control their negative emotions and manifest them when they want to, simply deceive themselves. Negative emotions depend on identification; if identification is destroyed in some particular case, they disappear. The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them."

"What does the average teacher of psychology mean when he glibly rattles the words "fear", "rage", "anger", and "sex-emotion"? Almost any literary light of the Victorian era, if asked to define these words, would have answered, readily enough : "They are names for emotions possessing distinctive conscious qualities, experienced by everybody, every day. These easily recognized, primitive emotions constitute the very backbone of literature." I submit that the backbone of literature has been transplanted intact into, psychology, where it has proved pitifully inadequate. The whole structure of our recently christened "science", in consequence, remains spineless in its attempted descriptions of human behaviour. Most teachers of psychology, it would seem, are still unable to define these time-worn emotional terms with greater exactness or scientific meaning than that employed by literary men of the last century. Nor can the average teacher be blamed. Theorists and researchers upon whom the teacher must depend for his scientific, concepts have written many hundreds of thousands of words on the subject of emotions, without attempting definite, psycho-neural descriptions of a single basic, or primary emotion. On the other hand, nearly all writers seem to accept the old, undefined literary names of various "emotions" without question ; each writer then giving these terms such connotation as they may happen to hold for him, individually."

""I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me." After a pause full of intense thought on my part, I asked: "But if one hasn't always emotion. What then?" "Do not paint," he quickly answered. "When I came in here to work this morning I had no emotion, so I took a horseback ride. When I returned I felt like painting, and had all the emotion I wanted."

"I'm not actually sure if guilt is an emotion. In fact, that was - at the very beginning of this process, we realized, man, we really don't know very much about the subject. So we better do some research, and we started looking around online. We found some scientists think that there are basically three emotions. Others went up to 27. Others had 16. Some were in the middle. So we were kind of left with no definitive answer to our basic question - how many are there? Dr. Paul Ekman, who worked in San Francisco - still does - which is where Pixar Animation Studios is - he had, early in his career, identified six. That felt like a nice, manageable number of guys to design and write for. It was anger, fear, sadness, disgust, joy and surprise. And as I was sort of doodling, I was thinking, surprise and fear - probably fairly similar, so let's just lose surprise. And that left us with five."

"Dolphins read each other’s emotions by sonar and it’s the inside of the body, the configuration of the viscera, that lets dolphins know whether the dolphin they are meeting is tense or happy. Their emotions are much more connected with the insides of each other’s bodies. We don’t have that. It’s like denying 90% of what we are physically, not knowing it."

"You know, the objective of all of the acting classes really was for you to show how you feel, and not to be clever and not to show all the tricks you could do a lot of people came there with some experience and a lot of times they would bring whatever tricks they had, to be entertaining to the classes. The teachers wanted to strip all those away, and say, "No, could you be emotionally honest onstage?" The first stage of emotional honesty, or at least the resistance to being emotionally honest, is to be angry. When anger doesn't work, you try crying. But those are all just defense mechanisms to shut off how you actually feel about everything. We all build these sort of walls to keep ourselves from showing our true emotions, because they can be seen as weaknesses."

"EMOTION, n. A prostrating disease caused by a determination of the heart to the head. It is sometimes accompanied by a copious discharge of hydrated chloride of sodium from the eyes."

"“You humans have emotions,” Seeker said slowly, “but more often emotions have you.”"

"Feelings are a very difficult business. So outsource them."

"One’s emotions are one’s own; to suggest that others should imitate them is to impose on the personal integrity of others."

"I was never fit to say a word to a sinner, except when I had a broken heart myself."

"When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity."

"Compassion is when you see that someone needs help and you wanna help 'em."

"I could see their woe and sadness, and I pledged to ease their pain; their suffering would not be in vain."

"It is not sufficient to have compassion only for those who are cute."

"The lion who lives a life of compassion will receive it."

"To become wholly compassionate requires us to open our eyes and hearts, to behold the pain and exploitation our culture obscures, to arouse deadened emotions, and to rise above our egos."

"There never was any heart truly great and generous that was not also tender and compassionate."

"In the just and generous heart, the humble and the weak inspire compassion, and call for pity and forbearance."

"Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace."

"Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on no man's rights; he will rather have regard for every one, forgive every one, help every one as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness. … In former times the English plays used to finish with a petition for the King. The old Indian dramas close with these words: "May all living beings be delivered from pain." Tastes differ; but in my opinion there is no more beautiful prayer than this."

"We all, thank goodness, feel a natural spark of sympathy for the sufferings of others. We need to catch that spark and fan it into a fire of rational and universal compassion."

"The heart of an Arhat is like the heart of Cosmos. The heart of an Arhat is like the fire of the Sun. Eternity and the motion of Cosmos fill the heart of the Arhat. Maitreya is coming, radiant with all fires. His Heart flames with compassion for destitute humanity."

"A selfish person condemns himself to dreadful loneliness and complete oblivion. Happiness is in giving love; and happier is the one who loves rather than the one who is loved. When this truth is realized, all happiness will materialize. Therefore, learn how to love, become accustomed to love everything beautiful, and develop active compassion toward everything that is not yet perfect. Be kind and polite to your subordinates..."

"Go to the center of your inner being. Radiate peace in every direction. A compassionate heart radiates rays of beauty that removes the clouds of million hearts."

"Responding to evil A superior being does not render evil for evil, this is the maxim one should observe; the ornament of virtuous persons is their conduct. (...) A noble soul will ever exercise compassion even towards those who enjoy injuring others."

"And then being among those who believed and advised one another to patience and advised one another to compassion."

"I dread to think of a society devoid of love, compassion and humanity."

"Compassion is when you care enough to help someone with their problem and take time to find out what's bothering 'em."

"Intense suffering may be a private, internal phenomenon, often hidden from the gaze or awareness of others, but it is the most viscerally overwhelming experience there is, pleading desperately for relief. There is nothing else that has greater urgency than preventing or relieving intense suffering – of human beings and, indeed, of any sentient beings capable of suffering. It is the single most important goal of a compassionate society."