“The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them.”
Fourth Lecture, p. 70.
The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution (1950)
Context: People who think they can control their negative emotions and manifest them when they want to, simply deceive themselves. Negative emotions depend on identification; if identification is destroyed in some particular case, they disappear. The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them. I think that, for an ordinary mechanical man, the most difficult thing to realise is that his own and other people's negative emotions, have no value whatever and do not contain anything noble, anything beautiful or anything strong. In reality negative emotions contain nothing but weakness and very often the beginning of hysteria, insanity or crime. The only good thing about them is that, being quite useless and artificially created by imagination and identification, they can be destroyed without any loss. And this is the only chance of escape that man has.
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P. D. Ouspensky 41
Russian esotericist 1878–1947Related quotes
Fourth Lecture, p. 70.
The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution (1950)
Context: People who think they can control their negative emotions and manifest them when they want to, simply deceive themselves. Negative emotions depend on identification; if identification is destroyed in some particular case, they disappear. The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them. I think that, for an ordinary mechanical man, the most difficult thing to realise is that his own and other people's negative emotions, have no value whatever and do not contain anything noble, anything beautiful or anything strong. In reality negative emotions contain nothing but weakness and very often the beginning of hysteria, insanity or crime. The only good thing about them is that, being quite useless and artificially created by imagination and identification, they can be destroyed without any loss. And this is the only chance of escape that man has.
like the Soviet mole that they allowed to operate within British war intelligence — that was all true. … We condensed the timeline, essentially. The process of breaking the code was enormously complicated in real life. So one of things we wanted to do was open up Turing's story to the audience and make a film about these complicated topics, but at the same time create a narrative that the audience understands, without insulting their intelligence. But the on a broad conceptual level, everything is true.
As quoted in "Interview: Morten Tyldum, Graham Moore of The Imitation Game" by PatrickMcD at Hollywood Chicago (11 December 2014)
“He has the strangest expression on his face—the emotive equivalent of 404”
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Source: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (2012), Chapter 12 “The Founder’s Puzzle” (p. 96)
"James Clarence Mangan" (1902) http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~ehrlich/382/MANGAN1, a lecture on Mangan delivered at the Literary and Historical Society, University College, Dublin (1 February 1902) and printed in the college magazine St. Stephen's
Context: Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory.
Source: Living Beyond Your Feelings: Controlling Emotions So They Don't Control You
“It's emotional warfare telling the people we love, the most, the truth about ourselves.”
MTV Unplugged 2.0, By: Lauryn Hill (2002)
Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul