•Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.
•You can't expect to prevent negative feelings altogether. And you can't expect to experience positive feelings all the time. The Law of Emotional Choice directs us to acknowledge our feelings but also to refuse to get stuck in the negative ones.
•All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
•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.
•Emotional intelligence, more than any other factor, more than I.Q. or expertise, accounts for 85% to 90% of success at work... I.Q. is a threshold competence. You need it, but it doesn't make you a star. Emotional intelligence can.
•The prevailing attunement is at any given time the condition of our openness for perceiving and dealing with what we encounter; the pitch at which our existence is vibrating. What we call moods, feelings, affects, emotions, and states are the concrete modes in which the possibilities for being open are fulfilled. They are at the same time the modes in which this perceptive openness can be narrowed, distorted, or closed off.
•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.
•It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain; and some of our grieves... have their source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling compassion as the common inheritance of us all.
•You learn to put your emotional luggage where it will do some good, instead of using it to shit on other people, or blow up aeroplanes.
