Ntozake Shange Quotes

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.

It might sound goofy, but I do believe that emotions have power. We're all driven by something, and most of that is emotional reaction.

You need emotional content.

Anyone who says he is not emotional is not getting what he should out of life.

I know that I've had a very fortunate life, but also I think my job as an actor is to connect emotionally to human beings.

The secret to living a strong life is right in front of you, calling to you every day. It can be found in your emotional reaction to specific moments in your life.

My process started when I was born. The process is life experience. I believe that what makes you an artist, or at least an artist who can communicate the ideas that they want to get across, are people that have life experience.

I guess I'm pretty emotional.

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.

Authentic power is a new potential of this expanded perceptual system that we are all being given as a gift. As you begin to create authentic power with tools such as emotional awareness, responsible choice and intuition, you begin to draw to yourself others who are doing the same thing.

While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves. We can become the world's greatest experts on anger, jealousy, and self-deprecatio n, as well as on joyfulness, clarity, and insight. Everything that human beings feel, we feel. We can become extremely wise and sensitive to all of humanity and the whole universe simply by knowing ourselves, just as we are.

For there are two distinct sorts of ideas: Those that proceed from the head and those that emanate from the heart.

I'd rather deal with anger than apathy.

If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life is destroyed.

How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?

You are 100% emotional in everything you think, feel and decide. You decide emotionally and justify logically.

I think I'm an overly emotional person. I feel a lot, but I don't believe that's unique to me or that's how I am able to do the things I do.

In order to understand people, we have to understand their way of life and approach. If we wish to convince them, we have to use their language in the narrow sense of the mind. Something that goes even much further than that is not the appeal to logic and reason, but some kind of emotional awareness of the other people.

The important thing is being capable of emotions, but to experience only one's own would be a sorry limitation.

The capacity for emotional sobriety belongs to everybody in the human family and leads to a fully human response to the adventure and goodness of the gift of human life.

Just because you have the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn't mean we all have.

Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness.

We don't have the choice to control our emotions, but we do have the power to educate our emotions. And we do that through literature and through art and music to give ourselves a repertoire of emotional experiences.

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

We can only choose whether we will feel and not what we will feel.