Quotes about emotion
page 9

“The great defect, for Chamfort, consisted in the public’s reluctance to submit its thinking to the rigors of rational examination, and its tendency to rely instead on intuition, emotion, and custom. “One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority,” the Frenchman observed, adding that what is flatteringly called common sense is usually little more than common nonsense, suffering as it does from simplification and illogicality, prejudice and shallowness: “The most absurd customs and the most ridiculous ceremonies are everywhere excused by an appeal to the phrase, but that’s the tradition.””

Alain de Botton book Status Anxiety

Source: Status Anxiety (2004), pp. 116-117.

Idea, Thinking, Sense, Suffering

“Objects enter into each other... Chardin [French classical still-life painter] was the first to have glimpsed that and rendered the atmosphere of objects... Notice how a light transversal plane straddling the bridge of your nose makes the values more evident to the eye... Well, he noticed that before we did... He neglected nothing. He also perceived that whole encounter in the atmosphere of the tiniest particles, the fine dust of emotion that surrounds objects..”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 220 in: 'What he told me – III. The Studio'

Life, Light

“The public's continuing ambivalence about cultural matters is all the more striking given that the political conversation on these issues has for 30 years been dominated by an aggressive, radical right-wing insurgency that has achieved an influence far out of proportion to its numbers. Its potent secret weapon has been the guilt and anxiety about desire that inform the character of Americans regardless of ideology; appealing to those largely unconscious emotions, the right has disarmed, intimidated, paralyzed its opposition.”

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist

"Escape from Freedom" http://journalism.nyu.edu/faculty/files/willis-tomfrank.pdf, Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination, Vol 1, No 2 (2006)

Secret

“There is no denying the powerful emotions appeals to ethnicity can arouse. We need to develop linkages that will subdue or weaken such appeals. This will lie in deepening relationships across ethnic boundaries. It cannot be forced but must be encouraged by all in any position to do so. Because we need to expand and strengthen the interethnic connections which already subsist to mitigate the siren calls of ethnicity when they are made.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Speech to the Lautoka Rotary Club (Centenary Dinner), 12 March 2005 http://www.fiji.gov.fj/publish/printer_4326.shtml.

Lie

“"This law of the release of tension through illusory valuation gains new significance, full of infinite consequences, for the ressentiment attitude. To its very core, the mind of ressentiment man is filled with envy, the impulse to detract, malice, and secret vindictiveness. These affects have become fixed attitudes, detached from all determinate objects. Independently of his will, this man's attention will be instinctively drawn by all events which can set these affects in motion. The ressentiment attitude even plays a role in the formation of perceptions, expectations, and memories. It automatically selects those aspects of experience which can justify the factual application of this pattern of feeling. Therefore such phenomena as joy, splendor, power, happiness, fortune, and strength magically attract the man of ressentiment. He cannot pass by, he has to look at them, whether he “wants” to or not. But at the same time he wants to avert his eyes, for he is tormented by the craving to possess them and knows that his desire is vain. The first result of this inner process is a characteristic falsification of the world view. Regardless of what he observes, his world has a peculiar structure of emotional stress. The more the impulse to turn away from those positive values prevails, the more he turns without transition to their negative opposites, on which he concentrates increasingly. He has an urge to scold, to depreciate, to belittle whatever he can. Thus he involuntarily “slanders” life and the world in order to justify his inner pattern of value experience.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Life, Happiness, Secret, World

“The statement of ideas in a poem may have to do with logic. More profoundly, it may be identified with the emotional progression of the poem, in terms of the music and images, so that the poem is alive throughout.
Another, more fundamental statement in poetry, is made through the images themselves — those declarations, evocative, exact, and musical, which move through time and are the actions of a poem.”

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) poet and political activist

Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 31

Music, Idea, Time

“But he was a quick study. An autodidact. Anything that was technical, that was logical, that ran according to rules, Peter could figure out. And knew it. Didn’t bother to ask for help. So much quicker to work it out on his own than suffer through someone’s well-meaning efforts to educate him—and to forge an emotional connection with him in so doing. There was something, somewhere, that he could do better than most people.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Thanksgiving (prologue)
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

People, Education, Effort, Study

“It is a very helpful insight to say we are vehicles for our DNA, we are hosts for DNA parasites which are our genes. Those are insights which help us to understand an aspect of life. But it's emotive to say, that's all there is to it, we might as well give up going to Shakespeare plays and give up listening to music and things, because that's got nothing to do with it. That's an entirely different subject.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

An Interview by Sheena McDonald (1995)

Life, Music, Understanding, Help

“.. can you [contemporary painters] ever get close, even vaguely, to the solidity, the transparency, the lyric strength of colour, to the clarity, the mystery, the emotion of any of the paintings of Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Botticelli, Dürer, Holbein or of young Raphael? Friends, have you ever realized that with the oil colours used today this is absolutely impossible?... In the museums of Europe I have observed the work of the Flemish painters at length – those earlier, later as well as contemporary to the [brothers] Van Eycks – and I am convinced that the above mentioned brothers were not the discoverers of oil paint in its true sense, as is held today, but that what they did was introduce oil in emulsion with other substances, especially live and fossil resins, into so-called oil tempera emulsion, which was already known in the Flanders, to enable them through the use of veiling to give a greater finish, cleanliness and strength of colour to their painting.
'These oils which are their tempera' said Vasari, speaking of the Flemish [painters] in his Life of Antonello; and without doubt he was alluding to Flemish oil tempera emulsion, but it is sure, absolutely sure, that.... we are dealing with.... a tempera based mixture (egg, glue, resin, tempera etc) in which oil was only used as a means of unity and for the finish of the painting.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from De Chirico's text 'Pro tempera oratio', c. 1920; from 'PRO TEMPERA ORATIO' http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/475-480Metafisica5_6.pdf, p. 475 <br class="br">1920s and later

Life, Sense, Painting

“He must have decided (to retire) during the course of the day. He spoke to me during tea time and said that he has decided to call it quits. It`s the end of an era. A lot of players in the team, I cannot tell you the names, were in tears when he told them his decision. It was an emotional moment for the team and me. He was an extraordinary cricketer, a great role model, not only for the youngsters but also for the future generations.”

Anil Kumble (1970) Former Indian cricketer

By Krishnamachari Srikanth.
Kumble Calls it a Day: Quotes... For and By Kumble...

Decision, Tear, Time, Future

“The distinction between central and peripheral claims is applicable to many aspects of human sexuality. Consider, for instance, the emotion of jealousy. Evolutionary psychologists place a strong emphasis on sex differences in this domain. The standard claim is that men are more worried by a partner’s sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity, whereas women are more worried by a partner’s emotional infidelity… [However] the overwhelming trend is that most men and most women are extremely upset by both sexual and emotional infidelity. This suggests that the central EP claim regarding jealousy should be “Human beings evolved to experience jealousy in romantic relationships” rather than “Men and women evolved different patterns of jealousy.” The latter statement is true but should be considered a qualification to the former: a peripheral rather than a central claim. To stress the sex difference alone would be like observing that male elephants are bigger than females while steadfastly neglecting to mention that all adult elephants are large compared to most terrestrial animals. It would almost certainly foster an inaccurate view.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

(pp. 266-267)
The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013)

Women, Men, Jealousy, Sex

“The language of the game is interesting. You can think of the pauses as caesuras, breaks between the lines. As a poem the game is composed of a number of short lines representing the pitches. The number of lines per batter form a stanza. Then there is a space. Sometimes the stanzas become breathless, rushing full paragraphs that build rapidly on each other until the poem-inning explodes. The poem lives for this sudden blossoming out of prosodic regularity. Should someone make a computer analysis of baseball prosody, I believe that they would come up with something close to the prosody of some great American lyrical epic, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, let’s say, or Doc Williams’s Patterson…. The game is definitely an epic … formed of many lyrical moments dependent on silences for their effectiveness. An unfolding story punctuated by brief emotional swellings.”

Andrei Codrescu (1946) American writer

“A Kind of Love,” The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed (1993).

Game, Thinking, Silence, Grass

“I don't consider In Distrust of Merits a poem. It's just a burst of feelings. It's emotion recorded, a 'haphazard form ' a protest.”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

Interview with Grace Shulman. Quarterly Review of Literature 1969

Feeling

“Choosing what we think rather than reacting to our emotions.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

Thinking

“The spiritual and emotional aspects of art are perhaps their most important qualities.”

Daniel Levitin book The World in Six Songs

The World in Six Songs (2008)

Art

“[The Constructive idea.. ] has revealed a universal law that the elements of a visual art such as lines, colours, shapes, possess their own forces of expression independent of any association with the external aspects of the world; that their life and action are self-conditioned psychological phenomena rooted in human nature; that those elements are not chosen by convention by any utilitarian or other reason as words and figures are, they are not merely abstract signs, but they are immediately and organically bound up with human emotions. The revelation of this fundamental law has opened up a vast field in art giving the possibility of expression to those human impulses and emotions which have been neglected.”

Naum Gabo (1890–1977) Russian sculptor

Naum Gabo (1937) 'Editorial', p. 7 as cited in: W. Rotzler (1989) Constructive Concepts - A History of Constructive Art from Cubism to the Present, Rizzoli.
1936 - 1977, Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art, 1937

Life, World, Law, Art

“Beauty is the highest of all these occult influences,
the quality of appearances that thru' the sense
wakeneth spiritual emotion in the mind of man.”

Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930) British writer

Book II, lines 842-844.
The Testament of Beauty (1929-1930)

Beauty, Sense, Appearance

“It is in the world of words, amid the dull but perhaps necessary detail of every-day events—that quotations come with a warmth and a welcome upon memory, and like Milton's fish, "Show to the sun their wav'd coats dropt with gold." …In the dry and laboring essay, amid the windings of many words and the accumulation of antecedents, we hail their sudden and familiar appearances as patches of Nature's green to repose on by the way; their "dulcet and harmonious breath" animates a train of associations that dwell in the most sylvan haunts of emotion and sentiment; to their fountains of "loosened silver" we turn for a refreshing and a pleasant abstraction.”

Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804–1845) British author and journalist

"Quotations".
Sketches from Life (1846)

World, Way, Nature, Fish

“On reflection, moral judgment in the arts appears rather as a tribute to their power to influence emotion and possibly conduct. And reflecting further on what some critics do today, one sees that a good many have merely shifted the ground of their moralism, transferring their impulse of righteousness to politics and social issues.”

Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) Historian

"What Critics Are Good For" (1988), p. 69
The Culture We Deserve (1989)

Art, Appearance

“Margarete saw, and disapproved, and understood. It was perfectly natural that Youth, being given a new and revolutionary truth, should embrace it too eagerly, should defend it too loudly, should proclaim it in the extremest terms and without regard for the sensibilities of others. Natural, too, that Age, vested as it was in things as they had always been, should reject the truth as unsettling and dangerous. In the ace of such strong emotions, the only sane thing to do therefore was to embrace the truth circumspectly, to hide one’s new allegiance from one’s elders.”

Michael Swanwick book Jack Faust

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 10, “The Sermon” (pp. 165-166)

Truth, Youth, Age, Nature

“The great artist liberates the emotions and recreates the sheer wonder of childhood without surrendering the development of the intellect.”

Walter Kaufmann (1921–1980) American philosopher

Source: From Shakespeare to Existentialism (1959), p. 258

Childhood

“When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept — the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 6

Faith, Reality, Memory

“What's the dominant emotion associated with purity? Anger. The most aggressive people are the ones who insist on being utterly pure. It's responsible for countless wars at all levels of society. Far better to have no aspiration, no hope and relate to things just as they are.”

Ken McLeod (1948) Canadian lama

Heart Sutra Workshop http://www.unfetteredmind.org/heart-sutra-commentary-3#sect13. Unfettered Mind http://www.unfetteredmind.org. (2008-09-13) (Topic: Life)

War, People, Hope, Anger

“One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic

"Affirmations: As for Imagism", The New Age, January 1915

“The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty; he is conscious of the fact that the emotion of beauty is cosmic, universal. This conscious recognition has for its corollary an abstract plasticism, for man adheres only to what is universal.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

1910's, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality', 1919

Beauty, Universe

“Don't lose patience. Wait on the Lord… He knows what is best for you. Obey His Instruction Book and 'trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding' (Proverbs 3:5). Don't trust your judgements or your emotions.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

God doesn't believe in atheists (2002)

Books, Understanding, Waiting, Heart

“Policies should take account of the emotional dimensions of human behaviour rather than assuming rational action.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Emotional amoral egoism (2008), p.203

“I grant you that the artist does not see Nature as she appears to the vulgar, because his emotion reveals to him the hidden truths beneath appearances.
But, after all, the only principle in Art is to copy what you see. Dealers in esthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal. There is no recipe for improving nature.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. I. Realism in Art, p. 33

Truth, Art, Nature, Appearance

“Anymore, no one's mind is their own. You can't concentrate. You can't think. There's always some noise worming in. Singers shouting. Dead people laughing. Actors crying. All these little doses of emotion. Someone's always spraying the air with their mood.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 3

People, Mood, Thinking, Cry

“It’s easy to laugh at someone like celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay who swears and shouts in his kitchen, but to ensure a successful life you must avoid making others sad, unhappy or fearful. To do this, you have to learn to keep your emotions in check.”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, 100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living (2016) https://books.google.ae/books?idnu0lCwAAQBAJ&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIMjAE

Life, Sadness, Fear, Learning

“A watch is much more than a list of functionality and features… the bottom line is this is fashion, this is image, this something that is on our skin that we want to wear, and it’s not just another electronic gadget that becomes obsolete…. there is an emotional character to it.”

Philippe Kahn (1952) Entrepreneur, camera phone creator

The Growth Show podcast, April 15th, 2015, regarding why some smartwatches to date have failed https://soundcloud.com/the-growth-show/apple-watch-special.

Fashion

“Pay attention only to the form; emotion will come spontaneously to inhabit it. A perfect dwelling always finds an inhabitant. The artist’s business is to build the dwelling; as for the inhabitant, it is up to the reader to provide him.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

“Characters,” p. 299
Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality (1964)

Business, Perfection

“There are the many daily examples of taboo speech, usually profanities or obscenities, that express such emotions as hatred, antagonism, frustration, and surprise. The most common utterances consist of single words or short phrases (though lengthy sequences may”

David Crystal (1941) British linguist and writer

Source: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 1987, p. 61

“I longed for activity, instead of an even flow of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to renounce self for the sake of my love. I was conscious of a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life. I had bouts of depression, which I tried to hide, as something to be ashamed of…My mind, even my senses were occupied, but there was another feeling – the feeling of youth and a craving for activity – which found no scope in our quiet life…So time went by, the snow piled higher and higher round the house, and there we remained together, always and for ever alone and just the same in each other’s eyes; while somewhere far away amidst glitter and noise multitudes of people thrilled, suffered and rejoiced, without one thought of us and our existence which was ebbing away. Worst of all, I felt that every day that passed riveted another link to the chain of habit which was binding our life into a fixed shape, that our emotions, ceasing to be spontaneous, were being subordinated to the even, passionless flow of time… ‘It’s all very well … ‘ I thought, ‘it’s all very well to do good and lead upright lives, as he says, but we’ll have plenty of time for that later, and there are other things for which the time is now or never.’ I wanted, not what I had got, but a life of challenge; I wanted feeling to guide us in life, and not life to guide us in feeling.”

Leo Tolstoy book Family Happiness

Family Happiness (1859)

Love, Life, People, Youth

“(When asked to reflect on his career) Music is the emotion of the experience. Regarding whether someone knows composers by name, it comes down to how much the music had touched someone that they then care enough to find out who composed it. Myself as an example, I get a dozen or so fan emails every single day, from all over the globe. Most of the time it's new people that are just now figuring out who I am after all their years of playing games I've done, and that I composed some of their favorite game music or just their favorite game in particular. And it never gets old even though I've been reading them and answering them ever since I launched my website www. frankklepacki. com about seven years ago. You can't beat knowing you've had that kind of impact on people on a regular basis. I am always very grateful for it. Some of my fans cared enough to spread the word about my career that they made a full feature article on Wikipedia. That blew me away!”

Frank Klepacki (1974) American musician, video game music composer and sound director

Gameplay magazine

People, Music, Game, Time

“To shoot a grouse exacts something from the thinking man. It requires principle, which like good manners is not old-fashioned and never has been. It is something in your heart and in your head. The perceptive gunner is immersed in the style and charm of his dog’s work and in the shot, but with it all, he is one with what happens to the bird. His shooting is not vindictive, a getting-even because the grouse is so hard to hit. To regret a miss is normal animal response to temporary failure, not to be confused with sentient “the bastard got away.” Emotions are drawn to such thin threads they reach the breaking point, but when finely-honed tensions balance, shooting becomes a spiritual thing between you and the grouse.”

George Bird Evans (1906–1998) American writer

An Affair with Grouse (1982)

Dogs, Fashion, Failure, Bird

“Most women’s ideal is to not be sexual until nine conditions are met: physical attraction; respect; emotional compatibility; intelligence; singleness; success (or potential ); being asked out; being paid for; and the man risking rejection by initiating the first kiss…. Men want sex as long as only one condition is met—physical attraction.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 13.

Women, Men, Sex, Intelligence

“Since all preceding schools of painting have proved that the spirit of beauty does not lie in nature but in the 'I', now that painting in all its various expressions from Giotto to Cézanne has demonstrated that all beauty is in the 'I', that the 'I' is all emotion and that beyond the 'I' nothing can exist because all being exists only in relationship with the 'I', now the time has come to develop from this 'I' a new style. As soon as this 'I' becomes the general, universal 'I' instead of the individualistic or the rationalistic one, the new style will be a general style.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

from his article: 'The new style in painting', in the Dutch journal 'De Avondpost', 2 May 1916
this quote of Van Doesburg is announcing more or less De Stijl movement as a general modern art style
1912 – 1919

Lie, School, Beauty, Nature

“[The art of the novel] does not simply consist in the author's telling a story about the adventures of some other person. On the contrary, it happens because the storyteller's own experience of men and things, whether for good or ill—not only what he has passed through himself, but even events which he has only witnessed or been told of—has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Tale of Genji

Source: Tale of Genji, The Tale of Genji, trans. Arthur Waley, Ch. 25: The Glow-Worm

Men, Art, Passion, Heart

“I am willing to believe that my unobtainable sixty seconds within a sponge or a flatworm might not reveal any mental acuity that I would care to call consciousness. But I am also confident […] that vultures and sloths, as close evolutionary relatives with the same basic set of organs, lie on our side of any meaningful (and necessarily fuzzy) border—and that we are therefore not mistaken when we look them in the eye and see a glimmer of emotional and conceptual affinity.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?" pp. 389–390
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Lie, Confidence

“It is absurd that so much money has been wasted on manipulating public opinion, on simulating emotion. This nation is notorious for its ability to make or fake anything cheaply. “Made-in-China” goods now fill homes around the world. But our giant country has a small problem. We can’t manufacture the happiness of our people.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Happiness Can’t Be Faked, 2008

Money, Happiness, People, World

“Essentally combat is an expression of hostile feelings. But in the large-scale combat that we call war hostile feelings often have become merely hostile intentions. At any rate, there are usually no hostile feelings between individuals. Yet such emotions can never be completely absent from war. Modern wars are seldom fought without hatred between nations; this serves as a more or less substitute for the hatred between individuals. Even when there is no natural hatred and no animosity to start with, the fighting itself will stir up hostile feelings: violence committed on superior orders will stir up the desire for revenge and retaliation against the perpetrator rather than against the powers that ordered the action. It is only human (or animal, if you like), but it is a fact.”

Carl von Clausewitz book On War

On War (1832), Book 2

Hostility, War, Feeling, Revenge

“Until always and forever. Now in 1944. After all the hours lived through. The vectors continue in their original direction. Nothing stops them. With no more knowledge than live emotion. With no other wish than to go on until they meet. Slowly. With great unease, but with the certainty that all is guided by the "golden section". There is cellular arrangement. There is movement. There is light. All centers are the same. Folly doesn’t exist. We are the same as we were and as we will be. Not counting on idiotic destiny.”

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Mexican painter

Quote of Frida Kahlo, from her letter to Diego Rivera (1944), as cited in The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait; ed. Carlos Fuentes & C. Fuentes; Abrams, Harry N. Inc. 2005
1925 - 1945

Knowledge, Light

“But here is my mark, and there is where I'm supposed to look, and believe me, the power and the pleasure and the emotion of this moment is as constant as the speed of light. It will never be diminished, nor will my appreciation.”

Tom Hanks (1956) American actor

67th Academy Award Speech (1995)

Pleasure, Light, Speed

“The appreciation of the merits of art (of the emotions it conveys) depends upon an understanding of the meaning of life, what is seen as good and evil. Good and evil are defined by religions.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)

Life, Religion, Art, Understanding

“He Titian is the least mannered and consequently the most varied of artists. Mannered talents have but one bias, one usage only. They are more apt to follow the impulse of the hand than to control it. Those that are less mannered must be more varied, for they continually respond to genuine emotion.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

5 January 1857 (p. 326)
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)

“Using complex, constructive, noise-producing abstraction, that is, the Futurist Style. Any action developed in space, any emotion felt, will represent for us the intuition of a discovery.”

Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) Italian artist

The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe (1915)

“It's all about soul.
It's all about faith and a deeper devotion.
It's all about soul.
'Cause under the love is a stronger emotion.
She's got to be strong
'Cause so many things getting out of control
Should drive her away.
So why does she stay?
It's all about soul.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

All About Soul.
Song lyrics, River of Dreams (1993)

Love, Faith, Soul, Strong

“If your emotional abilities aren't in hand, if you don't have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can't have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.”

Daniel Goleman (1946) American psychologist & journalist

Daniel Goleman (1995) cited in: John O. Dozier (2010) The Weeping, the Window, the Way. p. 130

“The god is Eros, but he is also Logos, the power of the mind. In witchcraft there is no opposition between the two. The bodily desire for union and the emotional desire for connection are transmuted into the intellectual desire for knowledge, which is also a form of union. Knowledge can be both analytic and synthetic; it can take these apart and look at differences, or form a pattern from unintegrated parts and see the whole.”

Starhawk (1951) American author, activist and Neopagan

Bodhi Tree lecture (1999)

God, Knowledge, Parting

“I think, fundamentally music is something inherently people love and need and relate to, and a lot of what's out right now feels like McDonalds. It's quick-fix. You kind of have a stomachache afterwards. It's not wholly satisfying. And it's fake. I would hope that the music that inspired me, that got me going, that talked to me, felt like it was coming from some place that had some true emotion and true integrity behind it. I think that can reemerge.”

Trent Reznor (1965) American musician

Tribune Interview https://web.archive.org/web/20131216215825/http://www.sltrib.com/themix/ci_3069586 (29 September 2005).

Love, People, Hope, Music

“Money is running their lives, and they refuse to tell the truth about that. Money is in control of their emotions and hence their souls.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

Money, Truth, Soul

“On a fair morning the mountain invited you to get down and roll in its new grass and flowers (your less inhibited horse did just this if you failed to keep a tight rein). Every living thing sang, chirped, and burgeoned. Massive pines and firs, storm-tossed these many months, soaked up the sun in towering dignity. Tassel-eared squirrels, poker-faced but exuding emotion with voice and tail, told you insistently what your already knew full well: that never had there been so rare a day, or so rich a solitude to spend it in.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“Arizona and New Mexico: On Top”, p. 125.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Arizona and New Mexico: On Top," & "Arizona and New Mexico: Thinking Like a Mountain"

Mountain, Flowers, Solitude, Grass

“…1776 is a very significant year. and this is not just because the American Revolution began. Watt's patent of the steam engine… Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations… the failure of the French to reorganize their political system occurred in 1776, and so forth. …The destruction of communities, the destruction of religion and the frustration of emotions were greatly intensified by the Industrial Revolution: railroads, factories, growth of cities, technological revolution in the countryside and in the growing of food and so forth.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Religion, Food, Communication, Failure

“When I saw the plane, I was absolutely astonished! Two emotions crashed over me: surging joy and crazy fear.”

Abby Sunderland (1993) Camera Assistant, Inspirational Speaker and Sailor

Source: Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas (2011), p. 176-177

Fear, Joy

“Blue Velvet contains scenes of such raw emotional energy that it's easy to understand why some critics have hailed it as a masterpiece. A film this painful and wounding has to be given special consideration. And yet those scenes of stark sexual despair are the tipoff to what's wrong with the movie. They're so strong that they deserve to be in a movie that is sincere, honest and true. But Blue Velvet surrounds them with a story that's marred by sophomoric satire and cheap shots. The director is either denying the strength of his material or trying to defuse it by pretending it's all part of a campy in-joke. … What's worse? Slapping somebody around, or standing back and finding the whole thing funny?”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/blue-velvet-1986 of Blue Velvet (19 September 1986) <br class="br">Reviews, One-star reviews

Pain, Understanding, Strong, Parting

“A is for audition sense, knowing what to prepare for auditions and finding your niche; B is for business sense, submitting through Back Stage, reading Ross Reports, allocating funds every week for materials; C is for common sense, knowing how to weed out scam artists and follow your instincts, not your ego D is for driving sense, performing regularly, taking classes, practicing your craft; and E is for exit sense, which, he says, means know when to leave an audition; exit your emotions. Look for and enter the next audition fresh and enthusiastic.”

Carson Grant (1950) American actor

Davis, Leesa, "Who Got the Part: Carson Grant", Backstage, November 9, 2006, p. 18.
About his ABC's audition philosophy printed in 2006 Backstage.

Business, Sense, Reading

“Morally relevant emotions are essential for living in social groups and they provide the basis on which we may construct conceptual frameworks that help guide our actions, but human beings should more accurately be thought of as being endowed with morally relevant capacities rather than innate moral knowledge.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.128

Knowledge, Help

“Wolves don't suffer things like guilt or remorse. They don't have any problems with the amount of discipline that they give to a fellow pack member, because in their world, the family is what matters, not the individual. So when you go in with a pack of wolves, you have to leave your emotions at the gate. When you come back out, it's very difficult to pick those emotions back up again.”

Shaun Ellis (1977) American football player, defensive end

Interview with A Man Among Wolves: Shaun Ellis http://incubator.nationalgeographic.com/inside_ngc/2007/04/interview-with-a-man-among-wolves-shaun-ellis.html, Inside NGS, (2007)

World, Family, Problem, Suffering

“The word, although prevalent in our day, has lost its reasoning value, and has value only as an accessory to images. In turn, the word actually evokes images. But it does not evoke the direct images related to my personal experience. Rather, it calls up images from the newspaper or television. The key words in our modern vocabulary, thanks to propaganda and advertising, are words that relate to visual reproduction. They are stripped of all rational content, so they evoke only visions that whisk us away to some enchanted universe. Saying "fascism," "progress," "science," or "justice" does not suggest any idea or produce any reflection. It only causes a fanfare of images to explode within us: a sort of fireworks of visual commonplaces, which link up very precisely with each other. These related images provide me with practical content: a common truth that is especially easy to swallow because the ready-made images that showed it to me had been digested in advance. Make no mistake here: this is how modern people usually think. We are arriving at a purely emotional stage of thinking.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 210
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

People, Truth, Justice, Idea

“The Turing Test tried to make a distinction between humans and machines. But these days Shadow programs like Edward and Laura can be programmed to say "I love you" or imitate other emotions. If a machine wanted to act like a human, then it had to deny the truth. Lying, not love, is the fundamental indication of humanity.”

John Twelve Hawks book Spark

Spark (2014)

Love, Truth, Lying

“No, I have not been able to reconcile them. It is, perhaps, because of the conflict of the different approvals the different persona demand. The political personality survives in no small measure on approval of others. The creative personality needs an emotional seal. The ethical one ordains the approval of one’s conscience. I have not been able to integrate them.”

V. P. Singh (1931–2008) Indian politician

On his coming to terms with different roles.
The Lonely Punter: V.P.Singh

Personality

“She enjoys extremes, but in life her emotions are always in check.”

Katie Melua (1984) British singer-songwriter

Mike Batt
[Ariel Leve, The hitman and her, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-2430807,00.html, The Sunday Times Magazine, 2006-11-05]
About

Life

“The Peters Principles: Enthusiasm. Emotion. Excellence. Energy. Excitement. Service. Growth. Creativity. Imagination. Vitality. Joy. Surprise. Independence. Spirit. Community. Limitless human potential. Diversity. Profit. Innovation. Design. Quality. Entrepreneurialism. Wow.”

Tom Peters (1942) American writer on business management practices

November 21, 2011.
Tom Peters Daily, Weekly Quote

Imagination, Communication, Joy

“We insist that our concept of perspective is the total antitheses of all static perspective. It is dynamic and chaotic in application, producing in the mind of the observer a veritable mass of plastic emotions.”

Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) Italian painter

this quote of Carrá attacks one of the core principles of Cubism
1910's
Source: 'Piani plastici come espanzione sferica nello spazio', Carrà, March 1913

“Let's face it. The bottom line of every E3 is simple: what's hot and what's not. Here's our take. What's hot is the feel of the game, the look is secondary. What's hot is the next leap, not just a small step. It's hot if it's disruptive, it's not if it's predictable. The future of our industry is inclusion, not exclusion. It's about the heat of emotion, not the chill of technology. We know that the future is right here. Wii and the DS represent the same thing: risk.”

Reggie Fils-Aimé (1961) American businessman

On Wii <br class="br">Source: E3 2006 Closing statements, YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zP8fiNFT4Q

Feeling, Game, Future

“We must come to terms with the fact that the foods we've grown accustomed to—that have even helped to create the concept of our ethnic identity—may actually be feeding the machine of neocolonialism; that we remain enslaved to a system that thrives on our addictions and mental, physical, and emotional illnesses.”

A. Breeze Harper (1976) African-American critical race feminist and writer

“Social Justice Beliefs and Addiction to Uncompassionate Consumption,” in Sistah Vegan (Lantern Books, 2010), p. 39 https://books.google.it/books?id=JlRK0tfulkwC&pg=PA39.

Food, Help

“… any one who has noticed may have observed that the weeping of grown up persons produces a sensation of awe on the mind of a child. Accustomed to associate the idea of superiority with that of their elders, they cannot understand their giving way to the same emotions as themselves.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Traits and Trials of Early Life (1836)

Way, Idea, Understanding, Personality

“For all the advances of modern societies, traditional tribal communities may have better served the essential needs of people for emotional support, nutrition, and exercise than does contemporary society. We don’t need to return to the ways of our ancestors, but we do need to learn from them.”

David Korten (1937) writer, sustainability advocate

People, Way, Exercises, Communication

“The root of the problem is that domesticated animals have inherited from their wild ancestors many physical, emotional and social needs that are redundant in human farms. Farmers routinely ignore these needs without paying any economic price. They lock animals in tiny cages, mutilate their horns and tails, separate mothers from offspring, and selectively breed monstrosities.”

Yuval Noah Harari (1976) Israeli historian

Introduction to Animal Liberation

Problem, Animals

“The Apollonian and Dionysian, two great western principles, govern sexual personae in life and art. My theory is this: Dionysus is identification, Apollo objectification. Dionysus is the empathic, the sympathetic, emotion transporting us into other people, other palaces, other times. Apollo is the hard, cold separation of western personality and categorical thought. Dionysus is energy, ecstasy, hysteria, promiscuity, emotionalism -- heedless indiscriminateness of idea or practice. Apollo is obsessiveness, voyeurism, idolatry, fascism -- frigidity and aggression of the eye, petrification of objects. … The quarrel between Apollo and Dionysus is the quarrel between the higher cortex and the older limbic and reptilian brains.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 96

Life, People, Art, Idea

“Reason works better when emotions are present; the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Ch 2 : The Nature of Creativity, p. 49
The Courage to Create (1975)

Personality

“When we free ourselves from physical disabilities, emotional disturbances, and mental distractions, we open the gates to our soul.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p. 22-23

Soul

“I think it is considered bad to be clever, because I think people usually assume that a clever person or a clever band doesn't have substance, doesn't really care about anything. People want music that matters, that believes in something, I think, whether it expresses anger or despair or love. People want to believe that their artists are portraying emotions that they really feel. And I think that's true of Patsy Cline, Johnny Rotten, whoever you want to name. If you believe the artist, you're going to go for it.”

John S. Hall (1960) Poet, author, singer, lawyer

Quotes from interviews

Love, People, Music, Feeling

“I think that all the silence is worse than all the violence, Fear is such a weak emotion that's why I despise it.”

Lupe Fiasco (1982) rapper

"Words I Never Said"
Albums, Lasers (2011)

Fear, Thinking, Silence

“I just think if you have an emotion and you let that go that moment might pass. If you don't open the door for the person to come in, it would have just been like, "Nice to meet you — goodbye."”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

As quoted in "Heidi Klum: No Regrets About Risqué Oprah Interview" by Samantha McIntyre and Oliver Jones in People (27 October 2007)

Thinking, Personality

“I’m very skeptical in approaching Bach as a clean slate. To understand Bach, one has to be at home in the whole literature of art and interpretation; one must have great experience in performing the complete literature, from Bach until the early avantgarde. I’m absolutely convinced that only by this deep knowledge one can feel the all-embracing range of effects that are compressed in Bach and his music - and how later generations have been inspired. Only by this experience you can give the Bach interpretation a new balance and tension. In the case of the Goldberg Variations we are confronted with these all-emotional effects, and I’m also skeptical whether this all-embracing range can be touched by much too young players, on harpsichord as well as on piano. Knowing the true worth of this condensed and nearly welded-in polyphonic structure and singular musical architecture, one ultimately knows that it is impossible to play with the variations, meaning to change voices, or make doublings. Then the music itself would be robbed of its true worth and sense, which can only be revealed by bringing out the embedded simplicity, which however is transformed to an electrified, heated atmosphere. One has to respect the internal strength.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Art, Music, Feeling, Home

“Whom could this operetta offend? Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel. We may become even more aware of the way we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs. The dauntless, scrubbed-face heroine (Julie Andrews), in training to become a nun, is sent from the convent to serve as governess to the motherless Von Trapp children, and turns them into a happy little troupe of singers before marrying their father (Christopher Plummer). She says goodbye to the nuns and leaves them outside at the fence, as she enters the cathedral to be married. Squeezed again, and the moisture comes out of thousands--millions--of eyes and noses. Wasn't there perhaps one little Von Trapp who didn't want to sing his head off, or who screamed that he wouldn't act out little glockenspiel routines for Papa's party guests, or who got nervous and threw up if he had to get on a stage? The only thing the director, Robert Wise, couldn't smooth out was the sinister, archly decadent performance by Christopher Plummer--he of the thin, twisted smile; he seems to be in a different movie altogether.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"The Sound of Music," p. 697
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

Happiness, Children, Smile, Way

“The emotions come closer than anything else to the vividness of inner data.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 24, Page 188
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 1

“The abnormal social and emotional behaviors that result from parental and social (somatosensory) deprivation are directly related to impaired brain functioning.”

James W. Prescott (1930) American psychologist

"Before Ethics and Morality" (1972)

Behavior, Parent

“One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.”

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic

"Rider Haggard: Still Riding", p. 28
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)

Dependency

“It appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again. The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer’s voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death. And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizomania and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons.”

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 58

Death, Men, Truth, Soul

“Of course, there is drawing in art as there is style in literature. Style that is mannered, that strains after effect, is bad. No style is good except that which effaces itself in order to concentrate all the attention of the reader upon the subject treated, upon the emotion rendered.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. V. Drawing and Color, p. 96

Art, Literature, Drawing

“I don't think women should be in any government job whatever. I mean, I really don't. The reason why I do is mainly because they are erratic and emotional.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

Quoted in John Boertlein, Presidential Confidential (2010), p. 293
2000s

Women, Thinking

“A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.”

Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) English writer

Source: Zuleika Dobson http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/zdbsn11.txt (1911), Ch. IX

“Love is an emotion common to all living beings. It is the path women can take to reach men, men to women, both to Nature, and Nature to the universe. And the love that overflows all boundaries is vishwa matrutvam—universal motherhood.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

The Infinite Potential of Women (2008)

Love, Women, Men, Nature

“The greater the emotional intensity, the greater the simplicity.”

Alan Hovhaness (1911–2000) Armenian-American composer

Alan Hovhaness program notes to “Avak The Healer” (1946).

“Think of late paintings where Christ is the central figure... Remember the large mosaics of Rome. Reconcile the employment of large-scale decorative means and the direct emotions of nature.”

Maurice Denis (1870–1943) French painter

Quote, March 1895, from Denis' Journal; as cited on Wikipedia: Maurice Denis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Denis - reference [23] <br class="br">1890 - 1920

Nature, Thinking, Christ, Painting

“We can search among the unconscious, emotion-laden learning rules for the kind of behavior most directly influenced by genetic evolution.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.3 Development

Behavior, Search, Learning

“My "Poems" were written without a purpose, other than the expression of faiths and ideals strongly realized and emotions keenly felt. They were written for the joy of writing, and for the satisfaction of an irresistible impulse. It is my belief that it is not the business of art either to teach or to preach.”

Florence Earle Coates (1850–1927) American writer and poet

Written at Camp Elsinore, Upper St. Regis Lake, New York, June 24, 1898. From Book News, Aug 1898.

Faith, Art, Business, Joy

“We have ranged over all the main phases of human information processing - from information encoding, storage, retrieval, and transformation to output. We have considered the role of consciousness in the analysis and selection of stimuli, in learning and memory, and in the production of voluntary responses, including those requiring planning and creativity.
In one sense, each of these tasks may be "conscious" (if it is at the focus of attention). We may be conscious of the stimuli that we analyze and select for more detailed attention, conscious of what we learn and commit to memory, and conscious of the responses we make to such stimuli. When the required responses are complex or novel we may be aware of devoting effort to planning and monitoring their execution. In reflective thought or problem solving we may have some awareness of internal processing in the form of thoughts, emotions, images, and so forth. Whether consciousness is necessary for such processing, however, is a different matter.”

Max Velmans (1942) British psychologist

Partly cited in: W.S. Robinson (2006). "Epiphenomenalism." Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science.
Is human information processing conscious?, 1991

Problem, Sense, Effort, Learning

“We started out in the middle ages creating music which had certain desirable physical properties (for example, a major chord sounds "nice" because the frequencies are in integer ratios to each other). And then as society evolved, we created these emotional contexts for certain instruments and progressions. Major-chord arpeggios sound "happy", minor chords sound "sad", chromatic scales can sound "scary", et cetera. In the 20th century, film soundtracks reinforced this point as people associated certain kinds of music with certain visual and emotional experiences. It's a giant feedback loop, really; once you grow up in a given culture, it leaves this musical fingerprint on you which colors your experiences.”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Andrew Sega Shrine interview, 2011

Happiness, People, Age, Sadness

“Like all good friends, they hated seeing their relationship lose its emotional innocence, its chastity of good will, and now that the thing was lost, now that searing statements had changed hands and left scars, neither looked forward to the future.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 14 (p. 160)

Hate, Change, Future

“The creation of space incorporates the debate about the dialogue between dream and reality. We must use the hidden surrealistic potential of our environment to awaken basic emotions.”

Justus Dahinden (1925) Swiss architect

Raumgebung beinhaltet die Auseinandersetzung mit dem dialogischen Verhältnis von Traum und Wirklichkeit. Wir müssen das surrealistische Potenzial ausschöpfen, welches in unserer Umwelt verborgen ist. Es lassen sich damit Basisgefühle wecken.
Man and Space - Mensch und Raum 2005

Dreams, Reality

“Very often people do not seem to understand the difference between control and suppression of an emotion. Say, one has a strong desire to enjoy a certain thing but there is no possibility to fulfil that desire. Here the desire is suppressed. On the other hand a desire for a certain enjoyment comes. The man can easily fulfil that desire, but he knows that the desire is bad for his growth and he discriminates and decides not to have that low desire. Here, it is called control. Suppression is bad and to discriminate, decide and to control an emotion is very good and there is a great need for it in this so-called scientific age.”

Swami Narayanananda (1902–1988) Indian guru

Brahman and the Universe (1978), in Minor Works II (2001), p. 62

People, Age, Understanding, Strong

“What we call structure is a shorthand way of describing repetitive patterns, encounters that people keep coming back to, a recycling of rituals. This larger structure has the feel of externality; it seems thing-like, compulsory, resistant to change. This sense of constraint arises in part because the major institutions as repetitive networks are based on their distinctive interaction rituals, which have generated emotional commitments to their identifying symbols. It is characteristic of these intensely produced membership symbols that people reify them, treat them as things, as “sacred objects” in Durkheim’s sense. Organizations, states, as well as positions and roles within them, are sacred objects in just this sense: reified patterns of real-life interaction, cognitively raised above the level of the merely enacted, and treated as if they were self-subsistent entities to which individuals must conform. This symbolic social structuring of the world extends even to physical objects by making them into property appropriated under the sanction of social groups.”

Randall Collins (1941) American sociologist

Source: The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), pp. 28-29

Life, People, World, Way