Quotes About Emotions

It is only at the reflective level that consciousness and the highest levels of feeling, emotions, and cognition reside. It is only here that the full impact of both thought and emotions are experienced. At the lower visceral and behavioral levels, there is only affect, but without interpretation or consciousness. Interpretation, understanding, and reasoning come from the reflective level.

In the 1980s, in writing The Design of Everyday Things, I didn't take emotions into account. I addressed utility and usability, function and form, all in a logical, dispassionate way—even though I am infuriated by poorly designed objects. But now I've changed. Why? In part because of new scientific advances in our understanding of the brain and of how emotion and cognition are thoroughly intertwined.

Emotions, we now know, change the way the human mind solves problems—the emotional system changes how the cognitive system operates. So, if aesthetics would change our emotional state, that would explain the mystery.

The psychologist Alice Isen and her colleagues have shown that being happy broadens the thought processes and facilitates creative thinking.

attractive things make people feel good, which in turn makes them think more creatively. How does that make something easier to use? Simple, by making it easier for people to find solutions to the problems they encounter.

Attractive things do work better—their attractiveness produces positive emotions, causing mental processes to be more creative, more tolerant of minor difficulties. The three levels of processing lead to three corresponding forms of design: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. Each plays a critical role in human behavior, each an equally critical role in the design, marketing, and use of products.

Great designers produce pleasurable experiences.

Three Levels of Processing: Visceral, Behavioral, and Reflective. Visceral and behavioral levels are subconscious and the home of basic emotions. The reflective level is where conscious thought and decision-making reside, as well as the highest level of emotions.

The daughters are tired of kissing each other, although some are not.

Love, which is a kind of permission to come closer than ordinary norms of good behavior might usually sanction. - Back rubs. - Which enables us to see each other without clothes on, for example, in lust and shame. - Examining perfections, imperfections. - Which allows us to say wounding things to each other which would not be kosher under the ordinary rules of civilized discourse.

When a long-desired baby is born, what joy! More happiness than we find in sex, more than we take in success, revenge, or wealth. But should the same infant die, would you measure the horror on the same rule? Grief weighs down the seesaw, joy cannot budget it.

What the novelist is doing, though, is not causing readers to feel as the novelist does, or as his characters do, but rather inducing for each reader a unique emotional journey through a story.

We're clear. We're vague. We hate. We love. We feel passionately about our shoes yet shrug off disasters on TV. We are finely tuned sensors of right and wrong, and horrible examples for our kids. We are walking contradictions. We are encyclopedias of the heart.

How many novels have moved you to tears, rage, and a resolution to live differently?

When readers feel strongly, their hearts are open. Your stories can not only reach them for a moment, but they can change them forever. I don't care about what you write, how you write it, your choices in publishing, or what you want out of your career. What I want is to feel deeply as I read your work. I want to feel connected to you and your characters in the way I do to the most memorable classics and the most stunning new titles I'll read this year.

What is actually happening inside readers as they read? Each reader has a unique emotional response to a story. It's unpredictable, but it's real. Readers read under the influence of their own temperaments, histories, biases, morality, likes, dislikes, and peeves. They make judgments that don't agree with yours. So how can a writer predict, never mind control, what readers feel? Psychological

I don't know if there's a healthier way for two people to stay in love than to stop using each other to resolve their unfulfilled longings and, instead, start holding each other closely as they experience them.

We don't know how much we are capable of loving until the people we love are being taken away, until a beautiful story is ending.

I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy's notion of his father.

They never tell you when you get born a control freak it will cost you a healthy love life. But it's true. You can't control somebody and have intimacy with them at the same time. They may stay because they fear you, but true love casts out fear.

the words alone, lonely, and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language...those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.

It's funny what happens to you when part of your heart gets born inside somebody else.

If love is conditional, it's just some sort of manipulation masquerading as love.

alone, lonely, and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language... Those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.