Quotes and passages on emotions

The emotion that can break your heart is
sometimes the very one that heals it.

Nicholas Sparks
At First Sight

After many years of training myself, strong emotions are now a trigger for me to look at something. I think that all emotions are triggers for us to grow in our level of consciousness. LeVar Burton

Emotions give life texture and depth, but there's an art to managing our moods. Once we cultivate inner balance we can immerse ourselves fully in every experience without fear of going overboard. When we're conversant with our emotions, we learn to nurture positive feelings and defuse disturbing ones. Joan Duncan Oliver Good Karma

Do not let another day go by where your dedication to other people's opinions is greater than your dedication to your own emotions! Steve Maraboli Life, the Truth, and Being Free

Take any emotion—love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions—if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them—you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, ‘All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.' Morrie Schwartz (quoted by Mitch Albom) Tuesdays With Morrie

We tend to think of the rational as a higher order, but it is the
emotional that marks our lives. One often learns more from ten
days of agony than from ten years of contentment.

Merle Shain

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It is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed
emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like,
and something in our sweetheart that we dislike.

William Butler Yeats

Lacking a shared language, emotions are perhaps our most effective
means of cross-species communication. We can share our emotions,
we can understand the language of feelings, and that's why we form
deep and enduring social bonds with many other
beings. Emotions are the glue that binds.

Marc Bekoff
The Emotional Lives of Animals

How you react emotionally is a choice in any situation.

Judith Orloff

If you keep your emotions locked in a box, then when you want
to open it one day you'll find that they're gone.

M.D. Arnold

Just like children, emotions heal when they are heard and validated.

Jill Bolte Taylor
My Stroke of Insight

It is very difficult to accept in others emotions you cannot accept in yourself.

Nathaniel Branden
Self-Esteem Every Day

But human beings are like that, she thought.
We've replaced nearly all our emotions with fear.

Paulo Coelho

Emotions are like muscles. Most of them go highly unattended,
it's usually the weaker, undefined ones that cause injury to
the rest, and there is most certainly memory response in play.

Erica Goros

If you believe everything you feel is an illusion then you’re delusional.
Your emotion is part you. You’re made with it. Denying it and
thinking it is all your mind, is denying your existence.

Ann Marie Aguilar

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Politicians and others are stuck in a horrible world where being
emotional in any way counts as being unbalanced, and
unable to think clearly. For me, emotions are thought.

Hofesh Shechter

Go through the proper motions each day and you'll soon
begin to feel the corresponding emotions!

George W. Crane

I don't own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am
not afraid of feeling, but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly.
I don't want to drown. My head is my heart's lifebelt.

Jeanette Winterson
Gut Symmetries

It is hard for people to think clearly because their emotional
needs keep getting in the way. The trick is to make
thinking clearly an emotional need.

George Hammond

Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can
be no transforming of darkness into light and of
apathy into movement without emotion.

Carl Jung

Emotions are the color of life; we would be drab creatures indeed without
them. But we must control these emotions or they will control us.

John M. Wilson

We would never move forward in the face of negative emotion. There
are many people who would teach you otherwise. They say, you've
got to face fear to get over it. And all they do is desensitize themselves
to the point that they get themselves into situations where they have
no idea what's going on, and the end of them comes rather abruptly. . .
And then everyone calls them brave.

Esther Hicks

If we think about emotion this way--as outside-in, not inside out--it
is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous
amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very
good at expressing emotions and feelings, which means that we
are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us.

Malcolm Gladwell

We have become so "rational" a culture that we have substituted answers
for the kind of understanding that can feel the consequences of those
answers. Lester Bangs put it this way: "The only questions worth asking
today are whether humans are going to have any emotions tomorrow,
and what the quality of life will be if the answer is no."

Joan Chittister
Seeing with Our Souls

It's as bad to have too little emotion as it is to have too much.
The person without emotion is the person without compassion.
Compassion comes from the heart, not the head.

A few weeks ago, one of the senior managers in my group told me about a very difficult critique session he'd had with one of his women employees. He had hired her, with great expectations of an outstanding performance. Instead, she had not adjusted well to her new job, and her performance was lackluster. An appraisal and perhaps a "caring confrontation" were in order.

When he told her she was not doing the job well enough, she began to cry. She knew, she said, she was letting him down, and her own disappointment in herself embarrassed her. Thus she cried.

"What did you do?" I asked.

"What could I do? I felt terrible. I cried too," he said, and I couldn't help thinking about the big-time management consultant and his box of Kleenex.

In my view, that manager demonstrated two things: He cared enough about the work that he was willing to confront someone he had a special interest in, and he cared enough about her to be hurt that she was upset. But let me make something clear: I'm not talking about management for and by the wimps. In fact, I am talking about the most difficult management there is, a management without emotional hiding places.

You just can no longer be the tough guy, and you also can't come on as the impassive, ice-water-in-the-veins "cool head." On the other hand, the kindly parent who listens-and-understands- but-does-nothing approach also won't work. No, in every situation, you must lead with your real self, because if you're going to be on the leading edge of management, you sometimes must be on the emotional edge as well.

James Autry

Even though you experience positive emotions as exquisitely subtle and
brief, such moments can ignite powerful forces of growth in your life.
They do this first by opening you up: your outlook quite literally expands
as you come under the influence of any of several positive emotions.
With this momentarily broadened, more encompassing mind-set, you
become more flexible, attuned to others, creative, and wise. Over time,
you also become more resourceful. In fact, my research and that of
others shows that positive emotions can set off upward spirals in your
life, self-sustaining trajectories of growth that lift you up to become
a better version of yourself.

Barbara Frederickson
Love 2.0

Our life is not free from sorrow and suffering. Even the happiest person in
the world experiences sadness, disappointment, anger, and grief. The
difference between happy and unhappy people is not whether they
experience painful emotions—everyone does—but how they approach
these emotions and how they interpret their experiences. People who
are unhappy tend to believe that painful emotions are here to stay—which,
of course, they are more likely to if this is their expectation. By contrast,
happy people know that painful emotions—like all emotions—are temporary,
and this expectation tends to liberate them from their unpleasant experience.
When we choose to perceive painful experiences as they truly are—as
temporary and fleeting—then we allow them to take their natural course.
Just as these emotions arrived naturally, so they will naturally depart.

Tal Ben-Shahar
Choose the Life You Want

Negative emotions will challenge your grit every step of the way.
While it’s impossible not to feel your emotions, it’s completely under
your power to manage them effectively and to keep yourself in a
position of control. When you let your emotions overtake your ability
to think clearly, it’s easy to lose your resolve.

Travis Bradberry

How do I change?
If I feel depressed I will sing.
If I feel sad I will laugh.
If I feel ill I will double my labor.
If I feel fear I will plunge ahead.
If I feel inferior I will wear new garments.
If I feel uncertain I will raise my voice.
If I feel poverty I will think of wealth to come.
If I feel incompetent I will think of past success.
If I feel insignificant I will remember my goals.
Today I will be the master of my emotions.

Og Mandino

In the march toward Truth, anger, selfishness, hatred, naturally give way,
for otherwise Truth would be impossible to attain. A person who is swayed
by negative emotions may have good enough intentions, may be truthful
in word, but he or she will never find the Truth.

Mohandas Gandhi

Most relate to the world by their emotions, which means they know
only the unreality of illusion--this world of emotion is the world of
duality, of love and hate, of joy and sorrow. All emotions are relative
to themselves, and last only as long as the supporting thought is maintained.

A Spiritual Warrior

We become our own enemy when we are thrown out of balance
by anger, hatred, grief, or any other intense emotion.
We are for the time being obsessed by something alien.

Paramananda

All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is
impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.

Rainer Maria Rilke

When you feel yourself in the grip of an emotion such as jealousy
or anger or sorrow, detach yourself from it. Take a step back.
When you do that, you can allow the emotion to run through you
without causing negative thoughts or actions.

Gary Zukav

We are all human beings. We have emotions. Men and women just
express them differently. That is the difference between us. Women
want to talk about their emotions, whereas men want to
privately deal with them and think them through.

John Gray

Emotions are more intense forms of feelings. The feeling of sadness
may build into grief, the feeling of irritation can become a fierce rage.
The distinguishing characteristic of emotion is that it dominates
our attention and cannot be ignored, while a feeling
can remain in the background of awareness.

John Wetwood

By starving emotions, we become humorless, rigid, and stereotyped;
by repressing them we become literal, reformatory and holier-than-thou;
encouraged, they perfume life; discouraged, they poison it.

Joseph Collins

We cannot selectively numb emotions. When we numb the painful
emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.

Brené Brown