emotions

"The have a saying: “The misfortune of others tastes like honey.” The speak of joie maligne, a diabolical delight in other people’s suffering. ... There has never really been a word for these grubby delights in English. In the 1500s, someone attempted to introduce “epicaricacy” from the , but it didn’t catch on. There could only be one conclusion: as a in the asserted in 1926, “There is no English word for schadenfreude because there is no such feeling here.” He was wrong, of course. I’m British, and enjoying other people’s mishaps and misery feels as much part of my culture as s and talking about the weather."

"Life is mainly grief and labour. Two things get you through. Chortling when it hits your neighbour, Whingeing when it's you."

"Religion, as far as I could see, was chiefly concerned with “getting into Heaven.” A stockpile of prayers and could ensure my entry ticket into paradise, but I also resorted to the gaining of s, the wearing of , and the practice of attending on the first Friday of every month. If you managed five consecutive first Fridays, you were promised that you would not die without receiving the last rites and having the chance to confess all to a priest. This type of piety seems no more religious than paying into a retirement annuity to secure a comfortable retirement in the hereafter. It is obsessed with self. Religion is supposed to be about the loss of the ego, not about its eternal survival in optimum conditions. It can also feed an attitude of exclusivity. I sometimes think that if some arrived in Heaven and found everybody there, they would be furious: Heaven wouldn’t be Heaven if the elect are deprived of the Schadenfreude of peering over the celestial parapets to watch the excluded unfortunates roasting below."

"People who identify strongly with their s frequently experience pleasure when they observe threatening members’ misfortunes: a phenomenon termed intergroup Schadenfreude. Though people are generally averse to harming others, they may learn to overcome this aversion via the consistent pairing of subjective pleasure with out-group pain, thereby lowering the barrier to participating in collective violence. In studies, intergroup Schadenfreude is associated with engagement of (VS), a brain region involved in . In these experiments, VS activity predicts increased harm and decreased help toward competitive out-group members. Experiencing this pleasure-pain association in intergroup contexts is particularly pernicious because it can generalize to people who are merely affiliated with a threatening out-group, but have done nothing to provoke harm."

"All the letters make fine reading, but I was particularly struck by your complaint (letter 2, page 27) of a persistent heavy feeling in the chest that can only be relieved by sighing. Ralph, this is a clue. You are not just in love, you are limerent. This is a brand-new word made up by a University of Bridgeport psychologist, Dorothy Tennov, in her new book on romance, Love and Limerence. If you haven’t guessed it already, limerence is the ultimate, near obsessional form of romantic love. Now pay attention to this, Ralph. Here are the telltale signs of limerence: pressure in the chest (literally "heartache"), an acute longing for reciprocation, fear of rejection, drastic mood swings, the growth of passion through adversity, and intrusive thinking about the LO, or "limerent object.""

"Most of Tennov's research came from thousands of personal accounts of those who had fallen in love. She discovered that many who considered themselves "madly in love" had similar descriptions of their emotions and actions. She chose the label limerence to describe an intense longing and desire for another person that is much stronger than a simple infatuation, but not the same as a long-lived love that could last a life-time. Limerence is often overpowering, and in intense cases will cause a person to be obsessed with the one they've fallen for."

"Turns out, I am mentally ill. Aspects of my current brain chemistry resemble that of a person with obsessive-compulsive disorder. I haven't started turning the light switches on and off or urgently avoiding sidewalk cracks. But I have been shopping for beauty products and underwear in a fever. I read cookbooks now. I spend an embarrassing amount of time looking at myself naked. My classic symptoms—involuntary preoccupation, mood swings, emotional sensitivity, enhanced sensual awareness—are what tip the diagnosis. I am limerent."

"Limerence is also fairly common to see in media geared toward young adults. Both Snape, who has an unhealthy lifelong fixation on Lily Potter in the Harry Potter franchise, and Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, who become obsessed with each other before they’ve even spoken to one another in Twilight, are struggling with limerence."

"Writers have been philosophizing, moralizing, and eulogizing on the subject of "erotic," "passionate," "romantic" love (i.e., limerence) since Plato (and surely long before that). And more often than not, what is said is enough to make a limerent dissolve into the walls in embarrassment. It can be dangerous to stick your neck out on the subject of love—dangerous to your self-esteem and to your reputation."

"Data collection largely began with the now classic dissection of this madness, found in Love and Limerence, by Dorothy Tennov. Tennov devised approximately two hundred statements about romantic love and asked four hundred men and women at and around the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut, to respond with "true" or "false" reactions. Hundreds of additional individuals answered subsequent versions of her questionnaire. From their responses, as well as their diaries and other personal accounts, Tennov identified a constellation of characteristics common to this condition of "being in love," a state she called "limerence.""

"Tennov (1979) interviewed more than five hundred passionate lovers. Almost all lovers took it for granted that passionate love (which Tennov labels 'limerence') is a bittersweet experience."

"For most people, crushes come and go. But for others, the longing can last years and become addictive. A spark of interest turns into obsessive rumination sustained by a pernicious cocktail of hope and doubt. This is not a crush. This is limerence."

"Reaction to limerence theory depends partly on acquaintance with the evidence for it and partly on personal experience. People who have not experienced limerence are baffled by descriptions of it and are often resistant to the evidence that it exists. To such outside observers, limerence seems pathological. The phenomenon that provides the subject of much romantic poetry and fiction has been called an addiction, an indication of low self-esteem, irrational, neurotic, erotomanic, and delusional. To those without direct experience it seems inconceivable that a sane person could attach so much importance to another individual."

"The English language lacked a noun singular for the state of being love smitten, or having fallen in love, until Dorothy Tennov (1979) coined the term, limerence, to fill the void. It is formally defined as follows: limerence (adjective, limerent): the personal experience of having fallen in love and of being irrationally and fixatedly love stricken or love smitten, irrespective of the degree to which one’s love is requited or unrequited."

"Tennov (1979) used the term limerence to refer to a kind of infatuated, all-absorbing passion — the kind of love that Dante felt for Beatrice, or that Juliet and Romeo felt for each other. Tennov argued that an important feature of limerence is that it should be unrequited, or at least unfulfilled. It consists of a state of intense longing for the other person, in which the individual becomes more or less obsessed by that person and spends much of their time fantasising about them."

"I coined the word "limerence." It was pronounceable and seemed to me and to two students to have a "fitting" sound. To be in the state of limerence is to feel what is usually termed "being in love.""

"Tennov called it limerence — to distinguish it from other concepts of love — and it corresponds with mental states conventionally described as 'being in love' or 'falling in love'. The principal features of limerence are obsession, irrational idealisation, emotional dependency and a deep longing for reciprocation. Typically, limerent individuals pursue inappropriate partners, fail at relationships, and seem unable to learn from their experience."

"There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move."

"O ye that look on Ecstasy The Dancer lone and white, Cover your charmèd eyes, for she Is Death’s own acolyte. She dances on the moonstone floors Against the jewelled peacock doors: The roses flame in her gold hair, The tired sad lids are overfair. All ye that look on Ecstasy The Dancer lone and white, Cover your dreaming eyes, lest she— (Oh! softly, strangely!)—float you through These doors all bronze and green and blue Into the Bourg of Night."

"Ellinor the Cooke, an Indian Negro woman, attended mee, for she being a Christian drudge, had more liberty to visit mee, than the slavish Infidell: who certainly (under God) prolonged then my languishing life, conveighing me for foure weekes space, once a day some lesse or more nourishment, and in her pocket a bottle glasse of Wine. Being no wayes semblable to the soule betraying teares of her Crocodilean sex which the Spanish Proverbe prettily avoucheth: las mugeres, engannan a los hombres, dellas lastimandoles, con sus lagrimas fingidas; dellas hallagandoles, con Palabras lesongeras: to wit, Women deceave men, some of them, grieving them with their fayned teares, and other fawning on them with flattering words."

"LEPIDUS: What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?MARK ANTONY: It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with it own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.LEPIDUS: What colour is it of?MARK ANTONY: Of its own colour too.LEPIDUS: ’Tis a strange serpent.MARK ANTONY: ’Tis so, and the tears of it are wet."

"AENEAS: What shall lost Aeneas do? How, Royal Fair, shall I impart The God's decree, and tell you we must part?DIDO: Thus on the fatal Banks of Nile, Weeps the deceitful crocodile Thus hypocrites, that murder act, Make Heaven and Gods the authors of the Fact."

"QUEEN MARGARET: Free lords, cold snow melts with the sun's hot beams. Henry my lord is cold in great affairs, Too full of foolish pity, and Gloucester's show Beguiles him as the mournful crocodile With sorrow snares relenting passengers, Or as the snake roll'd in a flowering bank, With shining chequer'd slough, doth sting a child That for the beauty thinks it excellent."

"As when a wearie traveller that strayes By muddy shore of broad seven-mouthed Nile, Unweeting of the perillous wandring wayes, Doth meete a cruell craftie Crocodile, Which in false griefe hyding his harmefull guile, Doth weepe full sore, and sheddeth tender teares: The foolish man, that pitties all this while His mournefull plight, is swallowed up unawares, Forgetfull of his owne, that mindes anothers cares."

"OTHELLO: O devil, devil! If that the earth could teem with woman's tears, Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile."

"In that country and by all Inde be great plenty of cockodrills, that is a manner of a long serpent, as I have said before. And in the night they dwell in the water, and on the day upon the land, in rocks and in caves. And they eat no meat in all the winter, but they lie as in a dream, as do the serpents. These serpents slay men, and they eat them weeping; and when they eat they move the over jaw, and not the nether jaw, and they have no tongue."

"Gabriel Drummer: I'll be fine if we'd just move on, sir. CAPT Peyton: I assure you, these are things you do not just move on from."

"But is it necessary to talk about rape? Maybe women don't want it discussed. Maybe victims, no matter how rare or prevalent they were, haven't shared their stories for a reason. It isn't hard to imagine why a woman raped during the Holocaust might stay silent. Irrespective of circumstances, when it comes to sexual victimization, there's fear, shame and concern about being blamed or viewed as "damaged goods." In Yiddish, there's a word, "shanda" (pronounced shonda, like Honda) which means shame or pity -- the sort that, if revealed, might cast one's family or even the entire Jewish people in a bad light. Especially for older generations, it's considered a shanda to talk about certain things. Rape, molestation or sexual relations that kept women alive, whether they were forced or chosen, would be among the stories many might say would be better kept to oneself. Add to this, survivor guilt: the anguish many carried of having lived while millions perished. Still alive, some might wonder, what right would a raped survivor have to complain?"

"In 1966, Gary and Seberg visited the memorial of the Warsaw ghetto, in the city where he’d lived as a child for several years before moving to France. This confrontation with the trauma of history — a horror he narrowly avoided — was overwhelming. Gary hallucinated the arm of a hidden Jew emerging from a sewer grill shaking its fist, and fainted from the shock. When he came to, some combination of survivor’s guilt and righteous anger was conceived, taking shape in The Dance of Genghis Cohn (1967) — a breathtakingly original, hilarious, and complex exploration of Gary as a man, an author, and a Jew. Genghis (né Moishe) Cohn, a comedian from Berlin imprisoned in Auschwitz, exposes his bare bottom to Schatz, the SS officer who kills him, and instructs him to “Kush mire in toques.” (Opines Cohn’s ghost: “There have undoubtedly been more worthy and noble last words in history than ‘Kiss my ass,’ but I have never made any claim to greatness and, besides, I’m quite pleased with my effort…”)."

"The following ten characteristics are frequently observed in Holocaust survivors who apply for psychiatric treatment at AMCHA: (1) Massive repression, numbing of responsiveness, amnesia, alexithymia; (2) Intrusive memories, Holocaust-related associations, “shattered assumptions”; (3) Anhedonia, suicidal ideation, depression, chronic state of mourning; (4) Survivor guilt; (5) Sleep disturbances and nightmares; (6) Problems with anger regulation and in dealing with interpersonal conflicts; (7) Excessive worries, anxieties, catastrophic expectancy, fear of renewed persecution; (8) Suspiciousness, paranoia, isolation from the community, lack of trust, loneliness; (9) Utilization of survival strategies “from there”; and (10) Low threshold for stress in difficult situations."

"Peter Friedkin: No, Dennis. Listen, it's going to happen to us too if we don't do something about it. Dennis Lapman: Yeah, I understand. Listen, it's called survivor's guilt. Peter Friedkin: No. No, guilt doesn't kill you. Dennis Lapman: Obviously you've never met my in-laws."

"The phone crazies own the days; when the stars come out, that's us. We're like vampires. We've been banished to the night. Up close we know each other because we can still talk; at a little distance we can be pretty sure of each other by the packs we wear and the guns more and more of us carry; but at a distance, the one sure sign is the waving flashlight beam. Three days ago we not only ruled the earth, we had survivor's guilt about all the other species we'd wiped out in our climb to the nirvana of round-the-clock cable news and microwave popcorn. Now we're the Flashlight People."

"This moment in time... anywhere you turn people are talking about how bad things are, how terrible it is...everybody is meeting hysteria with more hysteria... and it’s getting worse... We’re not supposed to match it or even get locked into resisting or pushing against it. We’re supposed to see this moment in time for what it is. We’re supposed to see through it and then transcend it. That is how you overcome hysteria."

"... throughout the centuries doctors have sought to find other names for hysteria in men. As [French psychiatrist Lucien] Israel explains, "The hysteria diagnosis became for a man . . . the real injury, a sign of weakness, a castration in a word. To say to a man 'you are hysterical' became under these conditions a form of saying to him 'You are not a man.'""

"... the word itself has become so generically linked with the feminine in popular understanding that we need to specify male hysteria the way we specify women writers, whereas to say female hysteria sounds redundant."

"... hysteria has been constructed as a perjorative term for femininity in a duality that relegated the more honorable masculine form to another category."

"Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination... Alarm is one thing, and hysteria is another. Hysteria impels people to destroy the very thing they are struggling to preserve."

"... "hysteria," it appears, is .. an epithet with which men have stigmatized women across the ages."

"The other great advantage of the seasons, both earthly and liturgical, is that they circle slowly round quite independently of one’s own moods and thus become a corrective and offer perspective. I may be feeling glum, but Easter reminds me of resurrection anyway, I may be swayed by some splurge of Christmas consumerism but Advent reminds me that all I really need is the savior who is coming and for whose advent I should prepare. So the seasons, like all the old liturgical patterns, like the practice of reading scripture, can set us free from the tyranny of our own mood swings. In that sense they are always a blessing."

"Delight comes to one who is miserable. Misery to one filled with delight. As a bhikkhu undelighted, untroubled: That's how you should know me, friend. After a long time at last I see A brahmin who is fully quenched, A bhikkhu undelighted, untroubled. Who has crossed over attachment to the world."

"Any bodhisattvas whose thoughts are at present concentrated and directed toward the buddhas of the ten quarters, will, if they possess mental concentration, achieve all the exalted practices of a bodhisattva. What is mental concentration? Through compliance with the conditions for reflection on the Buddha, having one’s thoughts directed toward the Buddha; having thoughts that are not disturbed, thereby obtaining wisdom; not giving up energy; joining together with good friends in the practice of emptiness; eliminating sleepiness; not congregating; avoiding bad friends; drawing close to good friends; having energy that is not disorderly; in eating, knowing when one has had enough; not craving robes; not begrudging one’s own life; being solitary and avoiding one’s relatives; keeping away from one’s home village; practicing equanimity, mastering the attitudes of compassion and rejoicing, and the practice of circumspection."

"Aequo animo poenam, qui meruere, ferunt. (They bear punishment with equanimity who have earned it.)"

"And rather than make the book unwieldy I have eschewed notes—reluctantly when some obscure passage or allusion seemed to ask for a timely word; with more equanimity when the temptation was to criticize or 'appreciate.' For the function of the anthologist includes criticizing in silence."

"Some find they can practice effectively by bringing attention to the arising of like, dislike and indifference in their meditation practice and daily life. Others are able to use the power of loving kindness, compassion, equanimity, or devotion to change the way they experience things. And still others develop or naturally have enough capacity in awareness that they experience attraction as delight, aversion as clarity, and indifference as non-thought."

"The 'taking love' leads to feelings of attachment, jealousy, anger, and childish self-absorption, while the 'giving love,' intrinsic in the tenets of Buddhism, encompasses the whole enjoyable realm of love, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity."

"We age inevitably: The old joys fade and are gone: And at last comes equanimity and the flame burning clear."

"My country has been influenced by the core Buddhist values of non-violence, loving kindness, compassion, equanimity and mindfulness. With this sense of direction, our Government has committed itself "Towards a new Sri Lanka", guided by a vision of peace, where every Sri Lankan citizen may live with dignity and self-respect, in freedom and without fear, free of want, and where every child may enjoy childhood and grow up with hope and expectation."

"I replace melancholy by courage, doubt by certainty, despair by hope, malice by good, complaints by duty, scepticism by faith, sophisms by cool equanimity and pride by modesty."

"Remember that good times and bad times will be part of your life equally, and you have to learn to handle both with equanimity. Make the most of life's opportunities and learn from every opportunity, and challenge that life brings along"

"A day will come when the idea that for the sake of food the people of the past raised and massacred living beings and with complete equanimity displayed their flesh in bits and pieces in shop windows, will no doubt inspire the same revulsion that the cannibalistic meals of the Americans, Oceanians, or Africans inspired in the travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."