Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

Strong feelings are fine; it's the overreactions that mess us up.

You live through stuff, and it affects the way you feel about the world, and you write about it.

I'm not one to wallow, but I am one to feel the sting of a slap for a while, I think.

We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.

The human capacity for grief. It just isn't capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn't just level off - it just gives up, resets itself to zero.

Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.

I have to accept everything... I will be back strong.

Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.

God, I feel like hell tonight. Tears of rage I cannot fight. I'd be the last to help you understand... Nothing's true and nothing's right so let me be alone tonight 'cause you can't change the way I am... I have a face I cannot show, I make the rules up as I go. It's try and love me if you can. Are you strong enough to be my man? When I've shown you that I just don't care, when I'm throwing punches in the air, when I'm broken down and I can't stand will you be man enough to be my man?

We won't let ourselves feel our anger, rage, and pain. We push it down or anesthetize it through drugs, alcohol, shopping, or whatever we do in order not to feel it. When that memory and the associated feelings get lodged down there in our soul, the feelings are still there. They don't just magically go away. We have to give ourselves the opportunity to feel them.

My feelings - as usual - we will slaughter them all.

You've just got to go out there and try to control the things you can control. Deal with things and stay mentally strong.

Desire looks clear from the eyes of a lovely bride: power as strong as the founded world

When people are protecting something truly special to them, they truly can become...as strong as they can be.

The same strength of character which helps a man resist love, helps to make it more violent and lasting too. People of unsettled minds are always driven about with passions, but never absolutely filled with any.

Laughing doesn't make bad things worse any more than crying makes them better. It doesn't mean you don't care, or that you've forgotten. It just means you're human.

Rage is for little wrongs; despair is dumb.

Irony dissolves sentiment, but occasionally a sentiment is strong enough to dissolve irony.

Everybody who undergoes a death and finds themselves grieving is obsessed with — or maybe overly focused on — the idea that they can’t display self-pity, they have to be strong. Actually there are a lot of reasons why you are going to feel sorry for yourself, but that’s your first concern.

The idea that when one reacts, one is not reacting to any one of those moments. You're reacting to the accumulation of the moments. I wanted the book, as much as the book could do this, to communicate that feeling. The feeling of saturation. Of being full up. I wanted it to be simulacra.

When I'm scared - and I'm always scared when I have to face an audience, when I have to read a review, when I publish a book...then, I think of my grandfather. My grandfather was this strong, tough Basque who would never bend....What would he do? Well, he would go ahead, close his eyes, and drive forward. You do it and the spirit that is within you....is there.

A strong and well-constituted man digests his experiences (deeds and misdeeds all included) just as he digests his meats, even when he has some tough morsels to swallow.

It takes something to get married: nerve, hope, a strong desire to make a certain statement - and it takes something to stay married: more hope, determination, a sense of humor, and needs that are best met by being in a pair.

She had to have faith not just in trying but in failing. Was she strong enough to fail Was she strong enough not to

Sorrow comes in great waves...but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.