Quotes from Dacher Keltner

Human beings are wired to care and give and it's probably our best route to happiness.

Money, fame, class, and titles are just symbols, or opportunities, for making a difference. Real power means enhancing the greater good, and your feelings of power will direct you to the exact way you are best equipped to do this.

Chronic threat and stress damage regions of the brain that are involved in planning and the pursuit of goals. The principle is clear: powerlessness undermines the individual's ability to contribute to society (Principle 19). On Kayo Drive, this could be seen in the difficulties kids had sitting still and concentrating, in their bad grades, and in the depressions so common among their parents. Powerlessness robs people of their promise for making a difference in the world.

Life is made up of patterns. Patterns of eating, thirst, sleep, and fight-or-flight are crucial to our individual survival; patterns of courtship, sex, attachment, conflict, play, creativity, family life, and collaboration are crucial to our collective survival. Wisdom is our ability to perceive these patterns and to shape them into coherent chapters within the longer narrative of our lives.

Emotions are signs of our commitment to others; emotions are encoded into our bodies and brains; emotions are our moral gut, the source of our most important moral intuitions.

Being poor produces a way of responding to life circumstances that, while warm and giving, is continually vigilant to threat and chronically stressed in ways that harm a person's mental and physical health.

The power paradox is this: we rise in power and make a difference in the world due to what is best about human nature, but we fall from power due to what is worst. We gain a capacity to make a difference in the world by enhancing the lives of others, but the very experience of having power and privilege leads us to behave, in our worst moments, like impulsive, out-of-control sociopaths.

We can alter an individual's knowledge about the world. Indeed, profound social change often begins in shifts in understanding the world.

It isn't just dictators, power-mad politicians, kings of high finance, and drug-addled rock stars who are vulnerable to abuses of power; the power paradox can undermine the social life of any of us at any moment. Whether we are at work, out with friends, in encounters with strangers, or with our children, the very skills that enable us to gain respect and esteem are corrupted when we are feeling powerful.

Tears, then, arise when we perceive vast things that unite us into community.

Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.

We can find awe, then, in eight wonders of life: moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spirituality and religion, life and death, and epiphany.

Recent research is showing that chronic powerlessness—poverty—stunts brain development in perhaps permanent ways that undermine not only school performance but also the capacity to contribute to society more generally.

Simply being in a context of awe leads to a "small self." We can quiet that nagging voice of the interfering neurotic simply by locating ourselves in contexts of more awe.

Poverty suppresses growth in regions of the brain that empower children to do well in school, handle the greater threats they face on a daily basis, and eventually make a difference in the world.

We are in a period of probing moral reflection. U.S. children rank twentieth of twenty-one industrialized countries in terms of social well-being.

This wonder of life can overtake us almost anytime we move in unison: In more obvious contexts honed by thousands of years of cultural evolution—rituals, ceremonies, pilgrimages, weddings, folk dances, and funerals. In more spontaneous waves of movement at political protests, sports celebrations, concerts, and festivals. And in more subtle, barely perceptible ways in our mundane lives, such as when we're simply out walking with others as part of the rhythm of our day.

is like being surrounded by the sounds from childhood. Hearing your parents talk at dinner. The clinking of silverware on plates and the wood table. It feels like when your mom comes close to say good night as you drift off to sleep. They are the sounds of being surrounded by intimacy. The first years of life. Of being embraced.

Vastness can be physical—for example, when you stand next to a 350-foot-tall tree or hear a singer's voice or electric guitar fill the space of an arena. Vastness can be temporal, as when a laugh or scent transports you back in time to the sounds or aromas of your childhood. Vastness can be semantic, or about ideas, most notably when an epiphany integrates scattered beliefs and unknowns into a coherent thesis about the world.

What most commonly led people around the world to feel awe? Nature? Spiritual practice? Listening to music? In fact, it was other people's courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming.

Around the world, we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty, the first wonder of life in our taxonomy.

A third wonder of life should not surprise. It is nature

Music offered up a fourth wonder of life, transporting people to new dimensions of symbolic meaning in experiences at concerts, listening quietly to a piece of music, chanting in a religious ceremony, or simply singing with others.

We elevate the status of others with compliments, flattery, ingratiating comments, public roasts, awards, and outright praise and adoration. People around the world systematically use the tactics of politeness—hesitations, indirectness, apologies, formalities—when speaking with higher-status individuals. These subtle shifts in phrasing, syntax, and delivery convey the respect that the speaker feels toward the recipient.