Quotes About Emotions

To be mature is, we're told, to move beyond possessiveness. Jealousy is for babies. The mature person knows that no one owns anyone.

He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from only having one perspective to play with.

Loneliness is a tax you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind.

We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us.

Melancholy isn't always a disorder that needs to be cured. It can be a species of intelligent grief which arises when we come face-to-face with the certainty that disappointment is written into the script from the start.

We do our sulking lovers the greatest possible favor when we are able to regard their tantrums as we would those of an infant. We are so alive to the idea that it's patronizing to be thought of as younger than we are; we forget that it is also, at times, the greatest privilege for someone to look beyond our adult self in order to engage with—and forgive—the disappointed, furious, inarticulate child within.

Our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time, and the weather.

Books should be full of stuff you could never say to people in public.

Alice cold make no sense of the despair into which she had fallen. She had always held that happiness should be defined as an absence of pain rather than the presence of pleasure. So why, with a decent job, good health, and a roof over her head, did she regularly and so childishly collapse into moist sobs?

Love reveals its insanity by its refusal to acknowledge the inherent NORMALITY of the loved one

Loneliness makes us more capable of true intimacy if ever better opportunities do come along. We might be isolated for now, but we'll be capable of far closer, more interesting bonds with anyone we do eventually locate. 

We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse, or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a lightbulb.

No one properly gets, or can fully sympathize with, anyone else.

We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness...

Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma. It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love.

We aren't overwhelmed by anger whenever we are frustrated; only when we first believed ourselves entitled to a particular satisfaction and then did not receive it.

Rejection hurts so much because we take it as a damning judgement passed not merely on our physical appeal but on our entire selves, and by extension (at this stage we're crying into our pillow, as something by Bach or Leonard Cohen plays on the stereo) on our very right to exist. 2.

When we suspect that we are appropriate targets for hurt, it does not take much for us to believe that someone or something is out to hurt us

For Proust, an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit.

Maturity' really means: being very unsurprised by, and calm around, pain and disappointment.

The business of repatriating emotions emerges as one of the most delicate and necessary tasks of love. To accept the risks of transference is to prioritize sympathy and understanding over irritation and judgment. Two people can come to see that sudden bursts of anxiety or hostility may not always be directly caused by them, and so should not always be met with fury or wounded pride. Bristling and condemnation can give way to compassion. By

Then, in a further challenge to reality and because of the way she felt towards them, Chloe would (with the grin of a six-year-old child facing the power of its hostile impulses) tell her parents she could kill them by shutting her eyes and never thinking of them again - a plan which no doubt elicit a profoundly unphilosophical response from the parents.

Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous.

At the heart of the pain created by sexual rejection is our habit of interpreting it as a moral judgement, when it might more accurately be categorized as a mere accident. We can start to break free from this torture by recognizing that the evenings that don't work out are really just a minor species of bad luck. The