Emotional Asymmetry Quotes

You tend to feel very hurt when people attack you and feel indifferent when you get praise. You think, 'Of course they like it. They should like it.'

Even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.

I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like.

You need a reason to be sad. You don't need a reason to be happy.

It is very hard to be in love with someone who no longer loves you, but it is far worse to be loved by someone with whom you are no longer in love.

If you consume something that's poisonous, you don't consciously think of vomiting; your body just does it. It's a reflex. When I'm happy, I don't instantly feel the need to get rid of that feeling. But when I'm sad, I think maybe that's what happens.

Why is it so hard to articulate love yet so easy to express disappointment?

Some cynical Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated.

Contempt is the only asymmetrical expression in the muscular facial system: Disgust, fear, happiness, surprise and anger typically express themselves symmetrically. Contempt is marked by one lip corner pulled up and in a dismissive sneer.

If we say I love you, it may be received with doubt, for there are times when it is hard to believe. Say I hate you, and the one spoken to believes it instantly, once for all. ... Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.

Now that I've won a slam, I know something very few people on earth are permitted to know. A win doesn't feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn't last long as the bad. Not even close.

I think one of the major results of the psychology of decision making is that people's attitudes and feelings about losses and gains are really not symmetric. So we really feel more pain when we lose $10,000 than we feel pleasure when we get $10,000.

A man may be buoyed up by the efflation of his wild desires to brave any imaginable peril; but he cannot calmly see one he loves braving the same peril; simply because he cannot feel within turn that which prompts another. He sees the danger, and feels not the power that is to overcome it.

The first thing we become convinced of is that man is organized so as to be far more sensible of pain than of pleasure.

Why do we have such a finite capacity for pleasure but an infinite one for pain?

Loss aversion is a really disproportionate anxiety about stuff that doesn't matter very much. So for instance, if you lose $5, you feel really bad about the $5 you've lost. You're cursing yourself. You're going through it again and again. If, on the other hand, you find $5, you go - hey, great, five bucks. And you've forgotten about it really quickly.

I have invariably been in love when I haven't had the same reciprocated emotion at all. I don't choose to talk about my personal life because I believe that I don't want to, and I believe my personal life is personal.

A question I’ve thought about a great deal is why it is so much easier to write about the things we dislike/hate/acknowledge to be flawed than the things we love.