Emotional Distortion Quotes

Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.

Little things, when we're caught up and fretting about them, often appear to be big and meaningful and world-changing in the moment they are happening.

Pity is one of the noblest emotions available to human beings; self-pity is possibly the most ignoble . . . . [It] is an incapacity, a crippling emotional disease that severely distorts our perception of reality . . . a narcotic that leaves its addicts wasted and derelict.

There is no passion so much transports the sincerity of judgment as doth anger

When our emotions are engaged, we often have trouble seeing things as they are.

In my own life, I have found grief to be enormously distorting, particularly if it's sudden or extreme in nature.

Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror.

There needs to be understanding that anger never helps to solve a problem. It destroys our peace of mind and blinds our ability to think clearly. Anger and attachment are emotions that distort our view of reality.

The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion.

Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain.

Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.

But love was strange. It distorted your perspective and played havoc with your logic.

The heart is an artist that paints over what profoundly disturbs it, leaving on the canvas a less dark, less sharp version of the truth.

When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else.

I love you still, but with your death I succumbed to a kind of infatuation. I convinced myself that what you and I had, so very briefly, was of far vaster and deeper import than it truly was. Of all the weapons we chose to turn upon ourselves, guilt is the sharpest, Silverfox. It can carve one's own past into unrecognizable shapes, false memories leading to beliefs that sow all kinds of obsessions.

Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.

There's another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. [...] For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That's what hate does.

Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed.

I am a sucker for romance and I love girls and that is a terrible combination, because romance has the ability to overwhelm your perspective.

Beyond love, beyond unrequited love, perhaps even beyond any other passion known to humanity, deep, deep in the depths of the turgid, clinging, swamplike pit of despair that lies dormant within every soul, lurks JEALOUSY. Jealousy, that most demeaning and debilitating of emotions. Jealousy, which can double the strength of the love upon which it is based, but whilst doubling it, warp and pervert it, untill it is no longer recognizable as the thing of beauty it once was. Jealous love is no more like true love than Mr Hyde was like Dr Jekyll or a stagnant swamp is like a freshwater lake.

Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute.

I really believe hatred is not a primal emotion, in that you can't find it in nature. It's basically some kind of distortion of fear.

Even hatred of vileness Distorts a mans features.

Intense feeling too often obscures the truth.

Sentimentality works by our seeing only what we want to see.