Temple Grandin Quotes

Our brain is the factory of the emotions

Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brain works so well that our reasoning can work at all.

We accept there's an emotional aspect to life. But we're not very developed in our ways of understanding it.

Emotions come first, and in the most direct sense: you first have an emotion and then have a feeling. But also first in the history of the human race, for the ability to have emotions long preceded the ability to have feelings.

We're humans, and we're moved by emotions.

Emotions are the same to all human beings. But there is some difference in the way people react to situations.

Remember that feelings or emotions emanate from the more ancient, less evolved, lower part of the human brain, while thoughts are a product of our highly evolved, uniquely human, outer part of the brain.

Oftentimes, those special brains, the ones that are capable of focusing more intently than others, do so at the expense of emotional maturity

I do believe that almost everything I do is based on my feelings, not on my intellect. Though But we won't chase ourselves up the particular sentiment, or we'll get lost.

Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. ... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness and acts that are contrary to habit.

Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.

Love not only occupies the higher lobes of the brain, but crowds out the lower to make room for its expansion.

Since I am not actually a real human being, my emotional responses are generally limited to what I have learned to fake.

One can truly say that the irresistible progress of natural science since the time of Galileo has made its first halt before the study of the higher parts of the brain, the organ of the most complicated relations of the animal to the external world. And it seems, and not without reason, that now is the really critical moment for natural science; for the brain, in its highest complexity-the human brain-which created and creates natural science, itself becomes the object of this science.

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

By nature, most people are controlled by their emotions. They feel sad, so they look sad.

Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It's just easier to handle those with emotions.

Whatever the emotion is, I have learned over the years to give it space, which is also why I love acting.

There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn’t. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say ‘I think’ we don’t leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

The brain is where most people really screw up.

Squirrel brains make you smart.

The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures.

Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations. And by this, in an especial manner, we acquire wisdom and knowledge, and see and hear and know what are foul and what are fair, what are bad and what are good, what are sweet and what are unsavory…. And by the same organ we become mad and delirious, and fears and terrors assail us….All these things we endure from the brain when it is not healthy….In these ways I am of the opinion that the brain exercises the greatest power in the man.

The world is ruled, and the destiny of civilization is established, by the human emotions.

I am learning how to be angry and sad and lonely and joyful and excited and afraid and happy.