Loving yourself is scary. That's why people don't do it. To love yourself is to make eye contact with yourself- stare a measureless distance into your soul and embrace the journey to and through pillars of emotions and resting on the cushions of the heart. Imagine that. Then make it a reality.

?what we focus on shapes the soul-the mind, the will, the emotions.

The job of a writer is not to convey emotion but to invoke it.

Too much stress cannot be laid...upon the admonition that we seek so far as possible to live in the lives of other people. By sharing in the misfortunes of others, and rejoicing in their happiness, you add to your own emotional serenity and stability.

"The greatest Emotion is Love.

Throughout our emotional odyssey in the unembellished narrative of our life, we may sense many alluring voices that are enticing us into a beguiling, seamless story. Our inner monologue, however, might start raising consequential questions about the scintillation of that story, about our vulnerability during the tempting process and the danger of losing our real self. The question may be asked, whether the lure might enlighten, weaken or destroy our living. While our interior monologue mostly listens to the wisdom of our experience and the guidance of our memory, it may happen that it prefers not to listen. In that event, however, unreason and passion will be calling all the shots. ( "Woman in progress" )

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

True art is thoughtful, emotional examination of how human themes impact the overall experience of existing. The rest is kitsch.

The cold rationalism simply covers for raw, wounded emotion. The more driven people are by the mind, the more they feel and further encode their feelings. The thickness of the tarpaulin cover is as the size of the emotion.

Privacy is a protection from the unreasonable use of state and corporate power. But that is, in a sense, a secondary thing. In the first instance, privacy is the statement in words of a simple understanding, which belongs to the instinctive world rather than the formal one, that some things are the province of those who experience them and not naturally open to the scrutiny of others: courtship and love, with their emotional nakedness; the simple moments of family life; the appalling rawness of grief. That the state and other systems are precluded from snooping on these things is important - it is a strong barrier between the formal world and the hearth, extended or not - but at root privacy is a simple understanding: not everything belongs to everyone.

It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.

"Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion?

If that's the case, I understand why emotions are hard for you. You've numbed yourself to make room for the grief you carry.

Many people falsely believe that if you want to be holy, you are not allowed to enjoy life...Holiness brings us to life. It refines every human ability. Holiness doesn't dampen our emotions; it elevates them. Those who respond to God's call to holiness are the most joyful people in history. They have a richer, more abundant experience of life, and they love more deeply than most people can every imagine. They enjoy life, all of life.

"It's strange how what drives us may abandon us midstream, how what tickles our ears with lies one moment may tell us truths that knock us on our emotional ass the next.

Every poet knows that the gift of the Gods is not fire but language. "Man dwells poetically on this earth," H?lderin wrote. Language is the essence of being human. We can think, thanks to language, for thought exists only by the grace of words. Our experiences and emotions are molded by language. It is language that allows us to name and know the world. We ourselves are known by language, through prayer, confession, poetry. Language gives us a world that reaches beyond the reality of the moment, to a past (there was?) and a future (there shall be?). It is through language that eternity has a space and that the dead continue to speak: "Defunctus adhuc loquitur" (Hebrews 11:4). Thanks to language, there is meaning, there is truth.

There's Only so much emotional super glue in a person's soul, that everything just stays broken.

Trivers, pursuing his theory of the emotions to its logical conclusion, notes that in a world of walking lie detectors the best strategy is to believe your own lies. You can't leak your hidden intentions if you don't think they are your intentions. According to his theory of self-deception, the conscious mind sometimes hides the truth from itself the better to hide it from others. But the truth is useful, so it should be registered somewhere in the mind, walled off from the parts that interact with other people.

I've been working hard at assuming Court polish, but the more I learn about what really goes on behind the pretty voices and waving fans and graceful bows, the more I comprehend that what is really said matters little, so long as the manner in which it is said pleases. I understand it, but I don't like it. Were I truly influential, then I would halt this foolishness that decrees that in Court one cannot be sick; that to admit you are sick is really to admit to political or social or romantic defeat; that to admit to any emotions usually means one really feels the opposite. It is a terrible kind of falsehood that people can only claim feelings as a kind of social weapon.

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'.

After that day, I discovered one indelible truth. I discovered that love wasn't everything that mattered in life. It was an emotion that not many had the luxury of feeling without any pain attached to it. Many say that love will set you free, but I disagree. Love is a cage, a very painful one; its gilded bars made with yearning, heartache, and unfulfilled dreams. And the moment I realized that love wasn't necessary to one's survival I became free. No one would have the power to hurt me again.

"Some people with DID present their narratives of sadistic abuse in a quite matter-of-fact way, without perceptible affect. This may sometimes be done as a way of protecting themselves, and the listener, from the emotional impact of their experience. We have found that people describing trauma in a flat way, without feeling, are usually those who have been more chronically abused, while those with affect still have a sense of self that can observe the tragedy of betrayal and have feelings about it. In some cases, this deadpan presentation can also be the result of cult training and brainwashing. Unfortunately, when a patient describes a traumatic experience without showing any apparent emotion, it can make the listener doubt whether the patient is telling the truth.

I wondered if emotions were like menstrual cycles, if you get enough women together. Give it time, and everyone was crying.

The only faithfulness people have is to emotions they're trying to recapture