Both sit and understanding are trifles, without integrity. We have seen that work, maintenance, and leisure take up most of our psychic energy. However, one person might love to work and the other strongly dislike it; one person might enjoy free time and the other might be bored when there is nothing to do. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 14

So while what we do day in and day out has a lot to do with what kind of life we have, how we experience what we do is even more important. You have to love what you do to do it every day. Our actions obey an unknown law, implicit in ourselves, but which does not conform to our logic. Love gives insight, and insight often given to faith. The elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 14

Energy is perhaps of all qualities the most valuable. What we feel matters much more than what we know. Emotions are in some respect the most subjective elements of consciousness, since it is only the person himself or herself who can tell whether he or she truly experiences love, shame, gratitude, or happiness. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 14

Yet an emotion is also the most objective content of the mind, because the gut feeling we experience when we are in love, or ashamed, or scared, or happy is generally more real to us than what we observe in the World outside, or whatever we learn from science or logic. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 14

Thus we often find ourselves in the paradoxical position of being like behavioral psychologists when we look at other people, discounting what they say and trusting only what they do; whereas when we look at ourselves we are like phenomenologist, taking our inner feelings more seriously than outside events or overt actions. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 14

If you boil it down to the impression which make it simply a feeling, personal feeling is not always in the wrong. However, there is a limit to the length of the inspection which a man can endure, under certain circumstances. #RyanPhillippe 6 of 14

Psychologists have identified up to nine basic emotions that can reliably be recognized by facial expressions among people living in very different cultures; thus it seems that just as all humans can see and can speak, so they also share a common set of feeling states. However, to simplify as much as possible, one can say that all emotions share in a basic duality: they are either beneficial and attractive, or they are negative and repulsive. #RyanPhillippe 7 of 14

It is because of this simple feature that emotions help us choose what should be good for us. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude. There are some feelings which are to tender to be suffered by the World. #RyanPhillippe 8 of 14

A baby is attracted to a human face, and is happy when he sees his father, because it helps him bond with a caretaker. We feel pleasure when eating, or when we have company because we probably could not survive without food or family. We feel an instinctive revulsion at the sight of snakes, insects, rotten smells, darkness—all things that in the evolutionary past might have presented serious dangers to survival. #RyanPhillippe 9 of 14

Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than just that degree of encouragement, which suffices to keep them at a reasonably full exertion of their powers. I never see a modest man, but I am sure that he has a treasure in his mind which requires nothing but the key of encouragement to unlock it, to make him shine. #RyanPhillippe 10 of 14

There is a point beyond which endurance becomes ridiculous, if not culpable. In addition to the simple genetically wired emotions, humans have developed a great number of subtler and tender, as well as debased, feelings. #RyanPhillippe 11 of 14

The evolution of self-reflective consciousness has allowed our race to toy with feelings, to fake or manipulate feelings in ways that no other being can. The songs, dances, masks of our ancestors evoked dreed and the same thing now. However, originally emotions served as signals about the outside World; now they are often detached from any real object, to be indulged in for their own sake. #RyanPhillippe 12 of 14

What an instrument is the human voice! How wonderfully responsive to every emotion of the human heart. There are some feelings which are too tender to be suffered by the World. Happiness is the prototype of the good emotions. Everything we do is officially aimed at experiencing happiness. #RyanPhillippe 13 of 14

We do not really want wealth, or health, or fame as such—we want these things because we hope that they will make us happy. However, happiness we seek not because it will get us something else, but or its own sake. If happiness is really the bottom line of life, what do we know about it? #RyanPhillippe 14 of 14