Emotional Culture Quotes

When a Spanish man cries it's not a sign of weakness.

I was raised that emotion was a good thing.

We live in an emotionally fragile culture. We are in touch with every hurt past, present, and perceived. We are the walking wounded, and we want everyone to know.

Being brought up in a culture is a matter of learning appropriate forms of feeling as much as particular ways of thinking.

You have to be mad in the language you're mad in.

Today, we celebrate happiness. Happiness is supposed to make us better workers and parents and partners; it's supposed to make us live longer. In the 16th century, sadness was thought to do most of those things. It's possible to read self-help books from that period which try to encourage sadness in readers by giving them lists of reasons to be disappointed. These self-help authors thought you could cultivate sadness as a skill, since being expert in it would make you more resilient when something bad did happen to you, as invariably it would. I think we could learn from this today. Feel sad today, and you might feel impatient, even a little ashamed. Feel sad in the 16th century, and you might feel a little bit smug.

Oh, I'm not English, I cannot talk on behalf of an English person. I'm French. I can say about French. They are quite emotional, though, and they talk about their emotions.

I think, you know, I'm German, and um, probably not very expressive in my emotions.

I had always been taught that the pursuit of happiness was my natural (even national) birthright. It is the emotional trademark of my culture to seek happiness. Not just any kind of happiness, either, but profound happiness, even soaring happiness. And what could possibly bring a person more soaring happiness than romantic love.

We are taught to believe it's bad to be angry, or at least it's not good. That's not the case all throughout the world. People are more open and not embarrassed about it. For instance in Paris, people believe Americans have a really unhealthy relation with anger. They think it's essential to get angry.