Quotes About Emotions

If you like somebody, they look better to you. This is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks much better than anyone else thinks that they do.

The serial killer Gary Gilmore summed up the attitude of someone without moral feelings: "I was always capable of murder.… I can become totally devoid of feelings of others, unemotional. I know I'm doing something grossly fucking wrong. I can still go ahead and do it.

Another force that can make pain valuable is its power to focus the mind. Whatever the negatives of physical pain—or of emotions such as horror and disgust—they sure are attention grabbers.

pain can relieve anxiety by distracting you from your consciousness.

Empathy makes good people better, then, because kind people don't like suffering, and empathy makes this suffering salient. If you made a sadist more empathic, it would just lead to a happier sadist, and if I were indifferent to the baby's suffering, her crying would be nothing more than an annoyance.

Carlyle was upset because the economists were against slavery. He argued for the reintroduction of slavery in the West Indies and was annoyed that the economists railed against it. Think about this when you're tempted to scorn economists and the cool approach they take to human affairs, and when you hear people equating strong feelings with goodness and cold reason with nastiness. In the real world, as we've seen, the truth is usually the opposite.

Being a good person likely is more related to distanced feelings of compassion and kindness, along with intelligence, self-control, and a sense of justice. Being a bad person has more to do with a lack of regard for others and an inability to control one's appetites.

The idea I'll explore is that the act of feeling what you think others are feeling—whatever one chooses to call this—is different from being compassionate, from being kind, and most of all, from being good. From a moral standpoint, we're better off without it.

It's not that empathy itself automatically leads to kindness. Rather, empathy has to connect to kindness that already exists.

Empathy is the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does.

But in general, it's just false that negative emotional experiences have a purging effect.

Of all dead psychological theories, catharsis is the deadest.

As usual in psychology, the negative is more powerful than the positive.

the conclusion is even stronger—it's not merely that there exist some people who are both happy and have lives with meaning. It's that there is a correlation: happy people are more likely to say that their lives are meaningful, and people who say that their lives are meaningful are more likely to say that they're happy.

turns out that one can screw up being happy by trying to be happy—or at least by trying to be happy in the wrong way.

The problems we face as a society and as individuals are rarely due to lack of empathy. Actually, they are often due to too much of it.

The literary critic Helen Vendler writes that "treating fictions as moral pep-pills or moral emetics is repugnant to anyone who realizes the complex psychological and moral motives of a work of art.

How is this possible? The answer lies in the human capacity to interpret and respond to experiences. We can be made to feel happy, sad, angry, ashamed, or amused by events in the world, but we can also be made to feel happy, sad, angry, ashamed, or amused by our responses to events in the world.

anger is usually a response to perceived injustice, and so angry experiences are often negative ones.

Part of the answer is that Sandy Hook was a single event. The murders in Chicago are more of a steady background noise. We're constituted so that novel and unusual events catch our attention and trigger our emotional responses.

We are not built to be happy. Evolution doesn't want us to be in constant bliss any more than it wants us to be pain-free. Pain is information about what's wrong and an inducement to make things better. Sadness and loneliness and shame play similar roles.

Consider the effects of money. When it comes to experienced happiness, more money makes you happier. This makes sense. Money can buy you positive experiences and can make your life better in all sorts of ways. More to the point, being poor makes everything worse—as the authors put it, "Low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone.

In a similar study, people were asked to write about a past event that made them feel "most guilty," and then were asked to manipulate a shock machine to either increase or decrease a set amount of shock they were receiving. Again the guilty group gave themselves more shock than a control group, and the stronger the shock they gave, the more their guilt went away.

Seeing the world through the eyes of others is essential to many acts of kindness. For me to respond to your worries and alleviate your fears, I need to understand your thoughts, even if I don't share them. (I might soothe a child who is terrified of a small dog, even if I'm not frightened in the slightest.)