Great Throughts Treasury

"Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional. The person who truely loves does so because of a decision to love. This person has made a commitment to be loving whether or not the loving feeling is present. ...Conversely, it is not only possible but necessary for a loving person to avoid acting on feelings of love." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck

"The greatest happiness is to transform one’s feelings into actions. " - Madame de Staël, Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein, born Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Madame Necker

"When you contemplate the body by being within the body, you should not engage in all sorts of ideas about it; the same when you contemplate feelings by being within feelings, you should enter in without ideas; the same applies to contemplating the mind by being within the mind and contemplating thoughts by being within thoughts. The thoughts should be just the objects of mind and you should not apply yourself to any train of ideas connected with them. In this way, by putting ideas aside, your mind will become tranquil and fixed on one point. It will then enter into a meditation that is without discursive thought and is rapturous and joyful." - Majjhima Nikāya

"Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to know them." - Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust

"Herein lies the likely reason for feelings. Just as negative feelings are a "here-be-dragons" sensory system that alarms you, telling you unmistakably that you are in a win-lose encounter, the feeling part of positive emotion is also sensory. Positive feeling is a neon "here-be-growth" marquee that tells you that a potential win-win encounter is at hand." - Martin Seligman, Martin E. P. "Marty" Seligman

"Happiness in the present moment consists of very different states from happiness about the past and about the future, and itself embraces two very distinct kinds of things: pleasures and gratifications. The pleasures are delights that have clear sensory and strong emotional components, what philosophers call "raw feels"; ecstasy, thrills, orgasm, delight, mirth, exuberance, and comfort. They are evanescent, and they involve little, if any, thinking. The gratifications are activities we very much like doing, but they are not necessarily accompanied by any raw feelings at all. Rather, the gratifications engage us fully, we become immersed and absorbed in them, and we lose self-consciousness. Enjoying a great conversation, rock climbing, reading a good book, dancing, and making a slam dunk are all examples of activities in which time stops for us, our skills match the challenge, and we are in touch with our strengths. The gratifications last longer than the pleasures, they involve quite a lot of thinking and interpretation, they do not habituate easily, and they are undergirded by our strengths and virtues." - Martin Seligman, Martin E. P. "Marty" Seligman

"I read of a Buddhist teacher who developed Alzheimer's. He had retired from teaching because his memory was unreliable, but he made one exception for a reunion of his former students. When he walked onto the stage, he forgot everything, even where he was and why. However, he was a skilled Buddhist and he simply began sharing his feelings with the crowd. He said, "I am anxious. I feel stupid. I feel scared and dumb. I am worried that I am wasting everyone's time. I am fearful. I am embarrassing myself." After a few minutes of this, he remembered his talk and proceeded without apology. The students were deeply moved, not only by his wise teachings, but also by how he handled his failings. " - Mary Pipher, aka Mary Elizabeth Pipher or Mary Bray Pipher

"I practiced what the Dalai Lama calls 'inner disarmament.' Of course, I still had judgments, but I tried to accept even my judgments without judgment. At a glacial pace, I moved beyond repression and self-criticism to something more skillful. I discovered the difference between recoiling from feelings and opening to them. I trained myself to be more curious than fearful. Sometimes I even felt compassion for myself as I struggled." - Mary Pipher, aka Mary Elizabeth Pipher or Mary Bray Pipher

"I seek not a fellow feeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be participated. But now that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy? I am content to suffer alone while my sufferings shall endure; when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone." - Mary Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

"It is no more natural and no less conventional to shout in anger or to kiss in love than to call a table 'a table'. Feelings and passional conduct are invented like words. Even those which like paternity seem to be part and parcel of the human make-up are in reality institutions. It is impossible to superimpose on man a lower layer of behavior which one chooses to call 'natural' followed by a manufactured cultural or spiritual world. Everything is both manufactured and natural in man as it were in the sense that there is not a word, not a form of behavior which does not owe something to purely biological being and which at the same time does not elude the simplicity of animal life and cause forms of vital behavior to deviate from their pre-ordained direction through a sort of leakage and through a genius for ambiguity which might serve to define man." - Maurice Merleau-Ponty

"Realizing that our actions, feelings and behaviour are the result of our own images and beliefs gives us the level that psychology has always needed for changing personality." - Maxwell Maltz

"Failure feelings – fear, anxiety, lack of self-confidence – do not spring from some heavenly oracle. They are not written in the stars. They are not holy gospel. Nor are they intimations of a set and decided fate which means that failure is decreed and decided. They originate from your own mind." - Maxwell Maltz

"The man who cannot blush, and who has no feelings of fear, has reached the acme of impudence. " - Menander, aka Menander of Athens NULL

"You tend to have far more real, intense friendships when you are single, perhaps because you can be more honest when you do not have the marriage or someone else's feelings to protect." - Merle Shain

"Together with war [the death penalty] was for a long time the other form of the right of the sword; it constituted the reply of the sovereign to those who attacked his will, his law, or his person... As soon as power gave itself the function of administering life, its reason for being and the logic of its exercise - and not the awakening of humanitarian feelings - made it more difficult to apply the death penalty. How could power exercise its highest prerogatives by putting people to death, when its main role was to ensure, sustain and multiply life, to put this life in order? For such a power, execution was at the same time a limit, a scandal, and a contradiction. Hence capital punishment could not be maintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crime itself than the monstrosity of the criminal, his incorrigibility, and the safeguard of society. One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others." - Michel Foucault

"The contrast between Leonardo and Michelangelo is an allegory of the arts of modern times. Leonardo left copious notes of his observations on nature and the world around him, but little about his feelings or his inner life. Michelangelo, in his letters, his poetry, in biographies by his friends and students Vasari and Condivi, in conversations with Francisco de Hollanda and others, left us vivid revelations and eloquent chronicles of himself. Leonardo, the self-styled "disciple of experience," was a hero of the effort to re-create the world from the shapes and forms and sensations out there. But Michelangelo, prophet of the sovereign self, found mysterious resources within. These two greatest figures of Italian Renaissance art dramatized a modern movement from craftsman to artist. If Leonardo could be called the Aristotle—practical-minded organizer and surveyor of experience—Michelangelo would be the Plato, seeker after the perfect idea." - Michelangelo Antonioni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce

"Where can we find greater structural clarity than in the wooden buildings of the old. Where else can we find such unity of material, construction and form? Here the wisdom of whole generations is stored. What feelings for material and what power of expression there is in these buildings! What warmth and beauty they have! They seem to be echoes of old songs." - Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, born Ludwig Mies

"When I realize everything’s equality I forget all about my close friends and my relatives It’s OK to forget the objects of your attachment. When I realize wisdom beyond thought I forget everything included in perceiver and perceived It’s OK to forget these causes of happiness and pain. Beyond memory, beyond feelings I forget all about experiences, the good ones and the bad It’s OK to forget them, they just go up and down. When I know the three kayas are present naturally I forget all about the deity’s generation stage practice It’s OK to forget the Dharma made of concepts. When I realize the result’s inside of me I forget all about the results you have to strive and strain to get It’s OK to forget the Dharma of the relative truth. Meditating on the key instructions I forget all other explanations and their conventional terms It’s OK to forget the Dharma that makes you arrogant. When I realize appearances are my texts I forget all about those big books with their letters in black It’s OK to forget the Dharma that’s just a heavy load." - Milarepa, fully Jetsun Milarepa NULL

"And so, when I began to read the proffered pages, I at one moment lost the train of thought in the text and drowned it in my own feelings. In these seconds of absence and self-oblivion, centuries passed with every read but uncomprehended and unabsorbed line, and when, after a few moments, I came to and re-established contact with the text, I knew that the reader who returns from the open seas of his feelings is no longer the same reader who embarked on that sea only a short while ago." - Milorad Pavić

"Language is just a map of human thoughts, feelings and memories. And as all the maps, language is a hundred thousand times the thumbnail image that he is trying to convey. " - Milorad Pavić

"Do you know what is better than charity and fasting and prayer? It is keeping peace and good relations between people, as quarrels and bad feelings destroy mankind." - Muhammad, also spelled Mohammad, Mohammed or Mahomet, full name Muhammad Ibn `Abd Allāh Ibn `Abd al-Muttalib NULL

"All this emphasis on youth - I don’t buy it. Listen, I know what a misery being young can be, so don’t tell me it’s so great. All these kids who came to me with their struggles, their strife, their feelings of inadequacy, their sense that life was miserable, so bad they wanted to kill themselves... and in addition to all the miseries, the young are not wise. They have very little understanding about life. Who wants to live everyday when you don’t know what’s going on? When people are manipulating you, telling you to buy this perfume and you’ll be beautiful, or this pair of jeans and you’ll be sexy - and you believe them! It’s such nonsense." - Morrie Schwartz, fully Morris "Morrie" S. Schwartz

"In Aristotelian terms, the good leader must have ethos, pathos and logos. The ethos is his moral character, the source of his ability to persuade. The pathos is his ability to touch feelings to move people emotionally. The logos is his ability to give solid reasons for an action, to move people intellectually." - Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler

"Functional Integration turns to the oldest elements of our sensory system- touch, the feelings of pull and pressure, the warmth of the hand, its caressing stroke. The person becomes absorbed in sensing the diminishing muscular tonus, the deepening and the regularity of breathing, abdominal ease, and improved circulation in the expanding skin. The person senses his most primitive, consciously forgotten patterns and recalls the well-being of a growing young child." - Moshé Feldenkreis, fully Moshé Pinchas Feldenkrais

"Children of any religion who have true faith must realize that God is the only One who knows all of everything. Therefore, only God can judge whether a person has faith, certitude, and determination or not and whether a person lives with that purity that can be called Islam or not. No one else can give that judgment. Do not wave your religion like a banner and go out to capture others. Only one kind of war is permissible in the eyes of God: the war you wage within yourself to defeat the demonic forces of lust, anger, jealousy, desire for revenge, and other evil feelings and attributes that may exist within your heart. God has sent each of the prophets as witnesses to the grace of God and as supports to help us in this inner war. This is the reason for the Qur'an. It is to help the true Muslim fight this inner battle and win victory over his own base desires that God sent the Messenger with the Qur'an." - Bawa Mahaiyadden, fully Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen

" Killing, cutting, slaughtering, destroying, injuring or abusing another's life is not Islam. But to each one of us is enjoined the Qurban, the sacrifice - the sacrifice of our Nafs, our base desires, our animosities, our egoism. Other than Allah and His Truth, every other thing must be the object of our sacrifice. His Word, His Qualities, His Traits, His Actions, His unique Three- thousand Qualities, - other than these, everything else are all enemies unto you and these must be sacrificed. And to wage total war against such enemies unto oneself, is Islam. Anger, hastiness, rage, fury, impatience, feelings of superiority of 'I' and 'you', pride, jealousy, treachery, selfishness, sorcery and black magic, mesmerism trickery, self-praise, conceit, titles, position and status, exclusiveness as between 'you' and 'I', falsehood, envy, - to cut away these base qualities and more, - is Islam. Such then is the formidable war within. This is one's very own battle, one's own sacrifice or Qurban, this is one's own war of purification, one's own purging of all that are enemies unto oneself. It is these which are the wars of Islam. Islam is certainly vehemently not a war which kills man or another human being or which slaughters or divides human kind or causes dissensions in human societies or annihilates humans. This is not Islam... For, Islam by its definition, has no enmity, no differences, no distinctions. To segregate and divide those who themselves divide and cause separation among the children of Adam, - is not Islam." - Bawa Mahaiyadden, fully Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen

"Children are born capable of all feelings, ranging from affection to rage. In the beginning they respond genuinely with how they feel -- screaming, cooing, cuddling. In due time, however, children adapt their feelings according to their experiences. For example, children are naturally cuddly, yet can learn to become rigid and to withdraw in fear when someone approaches the crib. Children naturally seek pleasure over pain, yet can adapt to seek pain, even death. Children are naturally self-centered, yet can learn to feel guilty about wanting anything for themselves. Children are not born with their feelings already programmed toward objects and people. Each child learns toward whom and what to show affection. Each learns toward whom and about what to feel guilty. Each learns whom and what to fear. Each learns whom and what to hate." - Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward

"It has been four years since I commenced this life of solitude, living in the maid's room and cooking for myself. At first there was a certain novelty in the arrangement. Then, toward the end of last year, the ways of the military government began to grow more arbitrary, and there came a change in the world; and somehow the drab and inconvenient life of the bachelor has come to seem so appropriate to the moods of the days that I would not now find it easy to change. Indeed, my feelings and thoughts are quite beyond description when, on an evening of a sudden autumn rain, I drag my sandals along the cliff, taking care that the frayed thong does not break, and buy onions and radishes in Tanimachi. I am quite drunk with the melancholy poetry of it all. However malicious and arbitrary may be the ways of the government, it cannot keep one's fancies from running free. There will be freedom while there is life." - Kafū Nagai, pen name for Nagai Sōkichi

"Democracy may become frenzied, but it has feelings and can be moved. As for aristocracy, it is always cold and never forgives." - Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I

"One must marry one's feelings to one's beliefs and ideas. That is probably the only way to achieve a measure of harmony in one's life." - Napoleon Hill

"Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. When man rejects reason as his standard of judgement, only one alternative standard remains to him: his feelings. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feelings with knowledge." - Nathaniel Branden

"And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multi-tude.. ... But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart..... I used to think that I could imagine all passions, all feelings and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know!...Indeed, we are but shadows—we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream—till the heart be touched. That touch creates us,—then we begin to be,—thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity. " - Nathaniel Hawthorne

"God joins us together by means of the body, in consequence of the laws of the communication of movements. He affects us with the same feelings in consequence of the laws of the conjunction of body and soul." - Nicolas Malebranche

"His life had already touched upon the age when everything that breathes of impulse shrinks in a man, when a powerful bow has a fainter effect on his soul and no longer twines piercing music around his heart, when the touch of beauty no longer transforms virginal powers into fire and flame, but all the burnt-out feelings become more accessible to the sound of gold, listen more attentively to its alluring music, and little by little allow it imperceptibly to lull them completely. Fame cannot give pleasure to one who did not merit it but stole it; it produces a constant tremor only in one who is worthy of it. And therefore all his feelings and longings turn toward gold.”" - Nikolai Gogol, fully Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol or Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol

"A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions." - Pablo Picasso, fully Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso

"Desire is produced by indiscriminate contact with the objects of the senses. Expressing as the likes and dislikes of the ego, desire creeps into the consciousness of one who is not watchful enough in governing the reaction of his feelings to his various experiences in the world. It is a condition the ego imposes on itself, and is therefore detrimental to man's evenmindedness. Whatever has its origin in desire is a disturbing element, for desires are like stones pelted into the calm lake of consciousness. Attachment to pleasure or aversion to pain both destroy the equilibrium of the inner nature." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

"If outer events bring him to a position where he can bear them no longer and force him to cry out to the higher power in helplessness for relief or if inner feelings bring humiliation and recognition of his dependence on that power, this crushing of the ego may open the door to grace. " - Paul Brunton, born Hermann Hirsch, wrote under various pseudonyms including Brunton Paul, Raphael Meriden and Raphael Delmonte

"In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel… In the first place, you shouldn’t believe in promises. The world is full of them: promises of riches, of eternal salvation, of infinite love. Some people think they can promise anything, others accept whatever seems to guarantee better days ahead. Those who make promises they don’t keep end up powerless and frustrated, and exactly the same fate awaits those who believe those promises." - Paulo Coelho

"My whole life, I think about love as a form of voluntary slavery. Well, a lie: freedom only exists when love is present. He brings him or her integrity, perfect, people feel the most freedom lovers with all my heart. And love with all my heart feels free. That's because why, despite what I might experience, do or learn, nothing meaningful at all. I hope this time will pass quickly, so I can start the search for himself - a man who will understand me and did not hurt me. But I'm saying? In love, no one can harm anyone; we must take responsibility for their own feelings and not blame others for what we feel. Being hurt when I gradually beat lost the man I loved. But now, I believe that no one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. It's true experience of freedom: to be the most important things in this world without owning it. " - Paulo Coelho

"The only power you have on this planet is the power of your decisions… The optimist and the pessimist both die in the end, but each lives his life in a completely different way… The pain of yesterday is the strength of today… The past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one’s dreams would have no meaning… The two toughest tests on the spiritual path are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage to not disappoint us with what we find… The universe always helps us in the fight for our dreams, as crazy as they may be. Because they are our dreams, and we even know how much trouble it costs us to dream them… The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with. " - Paulo Coelho

"Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, The signet of its all-enslaving power, Upon a shining ore, and called it gold: Before whose image bow the vulgar great, The vainly rich, the miserable proud, The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, And with blind feelings reverence the power That grinds them to the dust of misery." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Mankind, transmitting from generation to generation the legacy of accumulated vengeances, and pursuing with the feelings of duty the misery of their fellow-beings, have not failed to attribute to the Universal Cause a character analogous with their own. The image of this invisible, mysterious Being is more or less excellent and perfect — resembles more or less its original — in proportion to the perfection of the mind on which it is impressed." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Thus suicidal selfishness, that blights The fairest feelings of the opening heart, Is destined to decay, whilst from the soil Shall spring all virtue, all delight, all love, And judgment cease to wage unnatural war With passion's unsubduable array." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"You ought to love all mankind; nay, every individual of mankind. You ought not to love the individuals of your domestic circles less, but to love those who exist beyond it more. Once make the feelings of confidence and of affection universal, and the distinctions of property and power will vanish; nor are they to be abolished without substituting something equivalent in mischief to them, until all mankind shall acknowledge an entire community of rights." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Not only are there meaningless questions, but many of the problems with which the human intellect has tortured itself turn out to be only 'pseudo problems,' because they can be formulated only in terms of questions which are meaningless. Many of the traditional problems of philosophy, of religion, or of ethics, are of this character. Consider, for example, the problem of the freedom of the will. You maintain that you are free to take either the right- or the left-hand fork in the road. I defy you to set up a single objective criterion by which you can prove after you have made the turn that you might have made the other. The problem has no meaning in the sphere of objective activity; it only relates to my personal subjective feelings while making the decision. " - Percy W. Bridgman, fully Percy Williams Bridgman

"As man does not live in a solitary state, habits and feeling develop within him which are useful for the preservation of society and the propagation of the race. Without social feelings and usages life in common would have been absolutely impossible. It is not law which has established them; they are anterior to all law. Neither is it religion which has ordained them; they are anterior to all religions. They are found amongst all animals living in society. They are spontaneously developed by the new nature of things, like those habits in animals which men call instinct. They spring from a process of evolution, which is useful, and, indeed, necessary, to keep society together in the struggle it is forced to maintain for existence." - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

"The hospitality of primitive peoples, respect for human life, the sense of reciprocal obligation, compassion for the weak, courage, extending even to the sacrifice of self for others which is first learnt for the sake of children and friends, and later for that of members of the same community — all these qualities are developed in man anterior to all law, independently of all religion, as in the case of the social animals. Such feelings and practices are the inevitable results of social life. Without being, as say priests and metaphysicans, inherent in man, such qualities are the consequence of life in common." - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

"The same feelings are today produced in the man who for the first time hears that the abolition of the State, its laws, its entire system of management, governmentalism and centralization, also becomes an historical necessity: that the abolition of the one without the abolition of the other is materially impossible. Our whole education — made, be it noted, by Church and State, in the interests of both — revolts at this conception." - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

"Arguments for preservation based on the beauty of wilderness are sometimes treated as if they were of little weight because they are merely aesthetic. That is a mistake. We go to great lengths to preserve the artistic treasures of earlier human civilizations. It is difficult to imagine any economic gain that we would be prepared to accept as adequate compensation for, for instance, the destruction of the paintings in the Louvre. How should we compare the aesthetic value of wilderness with that of the paintings in the Louvre? Here, perhaps, judgment does become inescapably subjective; so I shall report my own experiences. I have looked at the paintings in the Louvre, and in many of the other great galleries of Europe and the United States. I think I have a reasonable sense of appreciation of the fine arts; yet I have not had, in any museum, experiences that have filled my aesthetic senses in the way that they are filled when I walk in a natural setting and pause to survey the view from a rocky peak overlooking a forested valley, or by a stream tumbling over moss-covered boulders set amongst tall tree-ferns, growing in the shade of the forest canopy, I do not think I am alone in this; for many people, wilderness is the source of the greatest feelings of aesthetic appreciation, rising to an almost mystical intensity. " - Peter Singer

"Possibly the most interesting first impression of my life came from the world of dreams… Suddenly I began to find a strange meaning in old fairy-tales; woods, rivers, mountains, became living beings; mysterious life filled the night; with new interests and new expectations I began to dream again of distant travels; and I remembered many extraordinary things that I had heard about old monasteries. Ideas and feelings which had long since ceased to interest me suddenly began to assume significance and interest. A deep meaning and many subtle allegories appeared in what only yesterday had seemed to be naive popular fantasy or crude superstition. And the greatest mystery and the greatest miracle was that the thought became possible that death may not exist, that those who have gone may not have vanished altogether, but exist somewhere and somehow, and that perhaps I may see them again. I have become so accustomed to think scientifically that I am afraid even to imagine that there may be something else beyond the outer covering of life. I feel like a man condemned to death, whose companions have been hanged and who has already become reconciled to the thought that the same fate awaits him; and suddenly he hears that his companions are alive, that they have escaped and that there is hope also for him. And he fears to believe this, because it would be so terrible if it proved to be false, and nothing would remain but prison and the expectation of execution. " - P.D. Ouspensky, fully Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, also Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky