A Quote by Robert Greene

Emotions are continually affecting our thought processes and decisions, below the level of our awareness. And the most common emotion of them all is the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

Robert Greene

Quote Topics

Affecting Avoidance Awareness Below Common Continually Decisions Desire Emotion Emotions Level Most Our Pain Pleasure Processes Them Thought Thought Process

Quote Author

Robert Greene
English - Playwright
1558 - 1592

It is important to distinguish between sense-pleasure and sense-desire. There is nothing wrong with sense-pleasure. Pleasure and pain are part of our human experience. Sense-desire, on the other hand, is the grasping at pleasure or the avoidance of pain. This is what creates suffering-grasping and avoidance.

Dipa Ma

The truth is that we can learn to condition our minds, bodies, and emotions to link pain or pleasure to whatever we choose. By changing what we link pain and pleasure to, we will instantly change our behaviors.

Tony Robbins

For the decisions of our will are often so directly opposed to the decisions of our emotions, that, if we are in the habit of considering our emotions as the test, we shall be very apt to feel like hypocrites in declaring those things to be real which our will alone has decided.

Hannah Whitall Smith

Commitment to the truth...means a relentless willingness to root out the ways we limit or deceive ourselves from seeing what is, and to continually challenge our theories of why things are the way they are. It means continually broadening our awareness. It also means continually deepening our understanding of the structures underlying current events.

Peter Senge

The avoidance of that which causes you pain does not produce enlightenment. It produces avoidance. Religion is the avoidance of pain and suffering.

Frederick Lenz

Awareness is our true self; it's what we are. So we don't have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments. We're either in awareness, which is our natural state, or we're doing something else.

Joko Beck

Most human behavior is nothing other than the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure.

Deepak Chopra

Awareness is not the same as thought. It lies beyond thinking, although it makes no use of thinking, honoring it's value and it's power. Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking, helping us to see and know our thought as thought rather than getting caught up in them as reality.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Of course our feelings matter. But emotional decisions are usually not the best ones. On the other hand, your emotions can affect your decisions whether you like it or not because the effects can occur on the unconscious level.

Leonard Mlodinow

Tony Blair made decisions on what he thought was best for the people of Great Britain, and I made decisions on what I thought was best for Americans. And I really don't view our relationship as one of quid pro quo. I view our relationship as one of strong allies and friends working together for the common good.

George W. Bush

If we can allow some space within our awareness and rest there, we can respect our troubling thoughts and emotions, allow them to come, and let them go. Our lives may be complicated on the outside, but we remain simple, easy, and open on the inside.

Tsoknyi Rinpoche

We begin every act of choice and avoidance from pleasure, and it is to pleasure that we return using our experience of pleasure as the criterion of every good thing.

Epicurus

It must be pointed out, however, that strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of mental processes. If such a dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or to lead to pleasure, whereas universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion.

Sigmund Freud

Heaven is beyond our imagination . . . . At our most creative moment, at our deepest thought, at our highest level, we still cannot fathom eternity.

Max Lucado

When we say that pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasure of the profligate or that which depends on physical enjoyment--as some think who do not understand our teachings, disagree with them, or give them an evil interpretation--but by pleasure we mean the state wherein the body is free from pain and the mind from anxiety.

Epicurus

Ninety-five percent of thought, emotion, and learning occur in the unconscious mind - that is, without our awareness.