Imagination is the gatekeeper of the human soul.

This work led cognitive therapists such as Aaron Beck, David D. Burns, and Albert Ellis to build treatment around the idea that our thoughts shape our emotions, not the other way around. By changing...

Some people think emotionally more often than they think politically. Some think politically more often than they think rationally. Others never think rationally about anything at all. No judgment...

When people believe a tale that conflicts with self-checkable evidence it tells me that people undervalue the role of evidence on formulating an internal belief system. Why this is so is not clear,...

What might have happened to them to make them the way they were? It did not change what they now did, but it changed, profoundly, how he perceived their motivations, their place in the world.

The average level of happiness increases in old age; fewer negative emotions occur and, when they do, they don't persist as long. Connected to this, brain-imaging studies show that negative images...

Crucially, the brain region most involved in feeling afraid and anxious is most involved in generating aggression.

Through a process of transference, leftists blame their victims for being and doing what they themselves are and do. In a sick inversion, the real fascists in American politics masquerade as...

Within the heart of every individual lies a fundamental and primordial fear that sometimes manifests as the fear of life and other times as the fear of death.

Stephen had just come from a class discussion in which several students believed that the right cup of herbal tea would save them from pain and sorrow. Well acquainted with pain and sorrow, Stephen...

They yearn for what they fear for.

The very act of looking down on others made people more confident.

When you're a child you never figure a grownup is going to be jealous of. It's the grownups who seem to have everything. Children give adults far too much credit.

Cheerfulness, it would appear, is a matter which depends fully as much on the state

In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer...

Being in love doesn't mean loving. You may be in love with a woman and yet hate her.

I imagine that one of the reasons people cling so tenaciously to their hatreds is that they feel, once hatred has disappeared, they will be confronted with pain.

You see, Kenny, there are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked.

We have been married a little over a year and already there is a terrible silence around some subjects. We never speak of the disappearance of my brothers — a stranger listening to us would think it...

Love was supposed to be a kind of blissful insanity.

...three percent of all males are deemed to be antisocial and without conscience, while only one percent of females seem to lack compassion for others. But the icy manipulations of that one percent...

Our contradictions are never so to ourselves.

Bad news always travels faster than good.

Fanatics always seem to have the same scrubbed and staring look about them. They have the look of people who do not masturbate, but who think about it almost all the time.

These young men, in other words, represented a variety of types, but one thing they had in common was that they'd all given up on committing positively to anything in life. This was not their fault,...

Our prisons are full of people who think they're Napoleon..or God.

He did not understand how such a short time in this house could have returned him to adolescence. He could package the place as hell's interpretation of the Fountain of Youth and make a fortune: just...

The impressions we pick up as children, when our minds are still open to influence and as soft as damp sponges, are likely to stay with us the longest.

I knew there were no such things as death cooties. Unfortunately, that's an intellectual fact. And death cooties are an emotional reality.

Never try to understand the students. They hate it. They would much rather be tragically misunderstood, wallow in self-pity, stew in their own — That's enough, Phineas, said Dumbledore.