“The word 'smile' doesn’t even exist in Latin or Ancient Greek. Smiling was an invention of the Middle Ages, and broad, toothy-mouthed smiles (with crinkling at the eyes, named the Duchenne smile by Ekman) became popular only in the eighteenth century as dentistry became more accessible and affordabl…”— Lisa Feldman Barrett, amazon.com
“Numerous experiments showed that people feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious.”— Lisa Feldman Barrett, amazon.com
“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm any hostility.”— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, amazon.com
“Social scientists sometimes talk about the concept of 'identity.' It is the idea that you have a particular vision of the kind of person you are, and you feel awful when you do things that are out of line with that vision.”— Steven D. Levitt, amazon.com
“As W.C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.”— Steven D. Levitt, amazon.com
“Every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith―acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove. Every religion describes God through metaphor, allegory, and exaggeration, from the early Egyptians through modern Sunday school. Metaphors ar…”— Dan Brown, amazon.com
“Should we wave a flag and tell the Buddhists that we have proof the Buddha did not come from a lotus blossom? Or that Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth? Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.”— Dan Brown, amazon.com
“Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.”— Richard Dawkins, amazon.com
“Processing trauma doesn’t feel good but it does good. Procrastinating feels good but it doesn’t do good. If you let feelings totally control your actions, you will never progress.”— Brianna Wiest, forbes.com
“People who are controlled by their emotions typically have something in common: they tend to only do what feels most comfortable. In other words, their emotions are organized into feels good and feels bad, not feels good or does good.”— Brianna Wiest, forbes.com
“I kept noticing a self-help cliché that people say to each other all the time, and share on Facebook incessantly. We say to each other: “Nobody can help you except you.” It made me realize: we haven’t just started doing things alone more, in every decade since the 1930s. We have started to believe t…”— Johann Hari, amazon.com
“By understanding and analyzing our feelings, we learn to see how emotions impact on our behavior in unexpected, counterintuitive and sometimes dangerous ways. Philosophers were the first therapists.”— Alain de Botton, dailystoic.com
“You could perhaps say ‘happiness’ but ‘happiness’ is misleading, for it suggests continuous chirpiness and joy, whereas ‘fulfillment’ seems compatible with a lot of pain and suffering, which every decent life must by necessity have.”— Alain de Botton, dailystoic.com
“There are situations in our lives that represent real challenges to our growth. These constitute about 10% or less of the stress that we will ever experience. The remaining 90% of stress is of our own fabrication. This automatically means that the odds are better than nine to one that if we drop our…”— Swami Chetanananda, amazon.com
“Desires are not real anyway, they are only the wish list reflecting the limits of our imagination.”— Swami Chetanananda, amazon.com
“The easiest way for you to manipulate your romantic partner is to not only praise behavior you want to see in that person, but also to praise the opposite of the unwelcome behavior the person is been engaged in rather than attempting to punish it.”— James J. Sexton, psychologytoday.com
“We've been indoctrinated to believe that it’s immoral to try to change someone else. We’ve been told that love, real love, is about accepting your partner “for who they are." But we’re constantly changing our romantic partners merely by our presence in their day-to-day lives. They react to us. We re…”— James J. Sexton, psychologytoday.com
“Our culture is fascinated with self-improvement. But I’ll let you in on a secret: It’s easier to change other people than it is to change yourself.”— James J. Sexton, psychologytoday.com
“The strangeness of time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.”— Joyce Carol Oates, amazon.com