Emotional Capacity Quotes

He simply does not possess the emotional capacity to comprehend how his actions affect others. ~ Mary Jo Buttafuoco

It is one thing to read the Scriptures and affirm their truth. But until you are in the trenches of trial, until you are faced with life circumstances that test your faith, until you are pressed to the absolute limit of your physical and emotional capacity, until you face the unrelenting stress of ongoing trauma, you never really know how you'll respond to what you may have embraced so easily during a comfortable Bible study. ~ Kevin Malarkey

When we say to people, 'I will pray for you,' we make a very important commitment. The sad thing is that this remark often remains nothing but a well-meant expression of concern. But when we learn to descend with our mind into our heart, then all those who have become part of our lives are led into the healing presence of God and touched by him in the center of our being. We are speaking here about a mystery for which words are inadequate. It is the mystery that the heart, which is the center of our being, is transformed by God into his own heart, a heart large enough to embrace the entire universe. Through prayer we can carry in our heart all human pain and sorrow, all conflicts and agonies, all torture and war, all hunger, loneliness, and misery, not because of some great psychological or emotional capacity, but because God's heart has become one with ours. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

Palin was a political Hail Mary, a long bomb in the closing minutes of a game that John McCain and Co. were certain to lose. They didn't care if she had the policy or political or emotional capacity to serve as vice president, let alone president. They were willing to drive the country off a cliff, if that's what it took to win. ~ Dee Dee Myers

No, it's not a 'corpse thing.' I feel I lack the emotional capacity to deal with those in mourning ... ~ Jen Lancaster

It occurred to me that some people couldn't handle too much love. That everyone loves as they're able, but more, they are loved as they're able. Some are indomitable and open, like an ocean, but others aren't made to tread those waves, cannot stay afloat those waters. We embrace the kind of love we can manage. Less can be the right measure. But when it isn't, we must learn we cannot squeeze a mountain into a room with a glass ceiling. Or everything shatters. ~ Jennifer DeLucy

You know, men don't think like women."
"Well ... " I pulled a face. "That's because you have the emotional capacity of a shot cup. ~ Samantha Young

Emotions are inherent in your nature, but their content is dictated by your mind. Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. ~ Ayn Rand

It is not only negative feelings that become blocked. The repression extends to more and more of his emotional capacity.When one is given an anesthetic in preparation for surgery, it is not merely the capacity to experience pain that is suspended; the capacity to experience pleasure goes also - because what is blocked is the capacity to experience *feeling*. The same principle applies to the repression of emotions.
Chapter 1: Discovering the Unknown Self, pg. 9, Bantam Edition, 1984 ~ Nathaniel Branden

I don't have the emotional capacity to fall in love with you," I say, staring at his mouth for a second before dragging my already sluggish gaze to his eyes. "And I just don't want to. Love hurts too much."
"Then don't." He closes the tiny space and kisses me. ~ Jewel E. Ann

In view of the immense power of natural weather and climate fluctuations and the great buffering capacity of the Earth, especially the ocean, it is easy to be skeptical about whether small anthropogenic changes of atmospheric composition can have important practical impacts. ~ James Hansen

Grief ate at these doctors, distracting them from both their families and their patients. Many reported withdrawing from emotional involvement with their patients and that their patients had noticed they weren't fully present. ~ Danielle Ofri

Home is an emotional state, a place in the imagination where feelings of security, belonging, placement, family, protection, memory and personal history abide. -Thomas Moore ~ Louisa Thomsen Brits

I rise at 6. Strong coffee helps me face the paper edition of 'The New York Times.' It daily challenges my own capacity for faking anything deranged enough to sound true. I work till 2 P.M. unless I am in the throes of finishing something. I rewrite to be reread. ~ Allan Gurganus

Neuroscience seems to show that many emotional and behavioural problems we thought were caused by bad parents or trauma are also caused by wiring that isn't reversible. This explains why self-improvement is hard and sometimes impossible, even when we're strong willed and well guided. In other words, we're often fucked. ~ Michael I. Bennett

How can we be so utterly perfect, and you chose the douche who doesn't have the first clue what he has? ~ Melissa A. Craven

While doing work if the mind continues to be active let it be so, but there must be at the same time a capacity for silence. ~ Sri Aurobindo

It's peaceful. Death can be a release and a relief for the person, and that is a blessing. The thing is, a lot of times, it is work to die. It requires physical and emotional effort. What sucks is that for most, particularly if they're dying out of sequence, it's a job they don't want. It's about loss of control, loss of function, loss of identity and independence…loss of choice and decision, of family and friends. But if you can let go of all that, what comes with it is freedom. A soaring freedom, the soul released from its temporary prison of mortality." - Ivie ~ J.R. Ward

Intuition is a capacity of our heart. Our heart is the door to allowing Existence to guide us, instead of being directed by our ideas, desires and expectations. Since the days of Aristotle's, we have been taught that logic is the only way to reach a solution. But while logic works in a step-by-step-process to reach a solution, intuition simply takes a quantum leap to a solution without any intermediate steps. ~ Swami Dhyan Giten

I think of 'Liar & Spy' as completely different and actually not at all like a 'When You Reach Me'-type story. I feel like 'Liar & Spy' has a much quieter, more emotional revelation. ~ Rebecca Stead

At the individual level Swaraj is vitally connected with the capacity for dispassionate self-assessment, ceaseless self-purification and growing self-reliance. ... It is Swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves. ~ Timothy Ferriss

In order to experience bliss and contentment, we must not only be willing to live in the present - not in the past or looking toward the future - but also to accept that pain is a real possibility, if not a probability.

This is not to say that joy must come with pain, but instead, that pain could arrive in the midst of joy and this fact scares us senseless. We would rather half live than risk encountering unspeakable pain at the core of indescribable delight.

We erroneously believe that being a perpetual emotional flatline is better than experiencing the highs and the lows of living. ~ Florence Witt

I stormed into the chapel like an angry thunder waiting to release its emotional terror upon the crowd. ~ Ramona Matta

If a man has tortured and killed your father, your mother, your sweetheart, in short, one of those beings who leave an eternal emptiness and a perpetually bleeding wound when they are torn from your heart, do you think society has given you sufficient reparation because the blade of the guillotine has passed between the murderer's trapezius and his occipital bone, because the who made you undergo long years of mental and emotional suffering has undergone a few seconds of physical pain? ~ Alexandre Dumas

If one more person tells me that "all gender is performance," I think I am going to strangle them. Perhaps most annoying about that sound-bite is the somewhat snooty "I-took-a-gender-studies-class-and-youdidn't" sort of way in which it is most often recited, a magnificent irony given the way that phrase dumbs down gender. It is a crass oversimplification, as ridiculous as saying all gender is genitals, all gender is chromosomes, or all gender is socialization. In reality, gender is all of these things and more. In fact, if there's one thing that all of us should be able to agree on, it's that gender is a confusing and complicated mess. It's like a junior high school mixer, where our bodies and our internal desires awkwardly dance with one another, and with all the external expectations that other people place on us.

Sure, I can perform gender: I can curtsy, or throw like a girl, or bat my eyelashes. But performance doesn't explain why certain behaviors and ways of being come to me more naturally than others. It offers no insight into the countless restless nights I spent as a pre-teen wrestling with the inexplicable feeling that I should be female. It doesn't capture the very real physical and emotional changes that I experienced when I hormonally transitioned from testosterone to estrogen. Performance doesn't even begin to address the fact that, during my transition, I acted the same, wore the same T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers that I always had, yet once other pe ~ Julia Serano

The emotional people ... You tap into people's hearts. ~ Johnny Hunt

He sat there thinking of Man's capacity for the wiping out of species
sometimes in hate or fear, at other times for the simple love of gain. ~ Clifford D. Simak

Joss would come to understand that this position - respecting, admiring, and identifying with women while acknowledging the objectifying influence of the male gaze - helped him create female characters that worked and connected with an audience. "You can't write from a political agenda and make stories that are in any way emotional or iconic. You have to write it from a place that's a little dark, that has to do with passion and lust and things you don't want to talk about. ~ Amy Pascale

Living the good life as created beings depends on living within the limits and according to the truths of the human condition. Purity of heart and the capacity to channel desires toward personal self-mastery in holiness are part of the high calling of the Christian life. These remain necessities, despite the promises of a false humanism that claims that human nature has neither limits nor boundaries, being infinitely plastic and malleable -- a vain and counterproductive attempt to liberate humans from guilt. ~ George Cardinal Pell

It's always a shock to the people who run studios when a movie that is for women is a hit. They have an infinite capacity to be shocked. ~ Nora Ephron

As president, I watched in wonder as Nelson Mandela had the remarkable capacity to forgive his jailers following 26 years of wrongful imprisonment - setting a powerful example of redemption and grace for us all. ~ George H. W. Bush

We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for survival and renewal is awesome. ~ Isabel Allende

That's the moment when Tuesday, after all his caution, stopped being just my service dog, and my emotional support, and my conversation piece. That's when he became my friend. ~ Luis Carlos Montalvan

Trying to force things only disturbs your goals. Forcing will not help. Everything happens in its right time. ~ Judith Orloff

Wellbeing is all about balance. Unfortunately, the normal modern lifestyle (which actually isn't normal at all) often pushes us away from what's healthy and manageable, and prompts us to make decisions that overload our bodies and minds. As a society, we are just too busy, too stressed, too consumed with so-called success, too worried about our looks and our image, and not plugged in at all to our spiritual and emotional roots. ~ Susan Barbara Apollon

I know what it is to become something you hate, I know how it hurts. But life is full of hurt. And your capacity for baring it is much greater than you believe."

pg 287 ~ Veronica Roth

Usually, we believe that our pain is a misfortune that needs to be fixed, but in fact, all pain (physical, mental, and emotional) is a necessary step towards becoming conscious. ~ Mada Eliza Dalian

Strength is a capacity for endurance. One of the dividends of suffering is the universal discovery the we posses a strength within us we never knew we had. Navigating through a difficult episode not only shows us that inner strength is there but convinces us it will always be there to serve us in the future. Overcoming gives us an assurance of personal confidence and value that far exceeds what we thought we possessed before our struggles began. ~ Dennis Wholey

The attainment of knowledge is the high and exclusive attribute of man, among the numberless myriads of animated beings, inhabitants of the terrestrial globe. On him alone is bestowed, by the bounty of the Creator of the universe, the power and the capacity of acquiring knowledge. Knowledge is the attribute of his nature which at once enables him to improve his condition upon earth, and to prepare him for the enjoyment of a happier existence hereafter. ~ John Quincy Adams

When President Obama first unveiled his gun control proposals recommending a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and better background checks, there seemed to be momentum behind the effort. But then the proposals ran into a wall. ~ Robert Dallek

In the heights of emotional distress, sometimes your loved ones can't fill the answers you are longing for to wipe away the tears in your eyes, it's your friends, somehow, that un-noticeably comforted you. It is to them you could share your hidden sentiments that you are trying to conceal. ~ Jonathan Page Acabo

It's a subtle thing, freedom. It takes effort; it takes attention and focus to not act something like an automaton. Although we do have freedom, we exercise it only when we strive for awareness, when we are conscious not just of the content of the mind but also of the mind itself as a process.'
We may say, then, that in the world of the psyche, freedom is a relative concept: the power to choose exists only when our automatic mechanisms are subject to those brain systems that are able to maintain conscious awareness. A person experiences greater or less freedom from one situation to the next, from one interaction to the next, from one moment to the next. Anyone whose automatic brain mechanisms habitually run in overdrive has diminished capacity for free decision making, especially if the parts of the brain that facilitate conscious choice are impaired or underdeveloped. ~ Gabor Mate

Patience is the capacity to endure all that is necessary in attaining a desired end ... Patience never forsakes the ultimate goal because the road is hard. There can be no patience without an object. ~ Margaret Kennedy

What's actually amazing is that, after a couple of years of living with characters and writing characters and talking about characters, as we sit in the writers room and break episodes, it strikes you, every once in awhile, that you're talking about a character that's played by the same actor, who you've been talking about forever. We talk about a character dying, so you get emotional, and then you realize, "Oh, but wait, that actor is still on the show." ~ Jeff Pinkner

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments. ~ Joyce Cary

He [Spike] has already demonstrated a capacity to love, already demonstrated a capacity to be selfless, and, possibly most importantly, has demonstrated that he has a conscience. ~ Jim Ford

Laughter paves the way for many things. It's one way to build intimacy between people, something every healthy team needs. Humor has always been a primary part of how I lead. If I can get someone to laugh, they're at ease. If they see me laugh at things, they're at ease. It creates emotional space, a kind of trust, to use in a relationship. Sharing laughter also creates a bank account of positive energy you can withdraw from, or borrow against, when dealing with tough issues at work. It's a relationship cushion. ~ Berkun, Scott

Analysis is a glittering opportunity for training: it is just here that capacity for work, perseverence and stamina are cultivated, and these qualities are, in truth, as necessary to a chess player as a marathon runner. ~ Lev Polugaevsky

As much as he cared for Kaitlin, he knew that the clan's survival was much more important that his own heart. Without her, he would be heartbroken all over again. He would lose her just as he had lost Angela with no hope of ever seeing her again, but he could run the clan with a broken heart. He would be a stronger, more feared leader without her, but he was sure that if Kaitlin had known his reasoning, she would have understood. She was the only one to understand him. ~ Elaine White

We must develop the capacity to see men not as they are at present but as they may become. ~ Thomas S. Monson

By far the most numerous and most flagrant violations of personal liberty and individual rights are performed by governments ... The major crimes throughout history, the ones executed on the largest scale, have been committed not by individuals or bands of individuals but by governments, as a deliberate policy of those governments-that is, by the official representatives of governments, acting in their official capacity. ~ John Hospers

There was still one response, the greatest, that she had missed. She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth ... To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his ... No, not Francisco d'Anconia, not Hank Rearden, not any man she had ever met or admired ... A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience. ~ Ayn Rand

If the heartbeat is a vital sign of physical health, anger is the vital sign of emotional health. Anger protects the self in all relationships. It is rage that is damaging. ~ Sue Parker Hall

The things that are correct for me will come to me at the time that I am interested in them and have the capacity, the understanding, to do them. ~ Julia Roberts

My algebra was relatively poor. I found it very difficult to use equations that substituted numbers - to which I had a synesthetic and emotional response - for letters, to which I had none. It was because of this that I decided not to continue math at Advanced level, but chose to study history, French and German instead. ~ Daniel Tammet