“It is with the heart that one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” - Antoine de Saint Exupéry

All emotions are impulses to act

Continual emotional distress can create deficits in a child’s intellectual abilities, crippling the capacity to learn

Emotional intelligence: abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate ones moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathize and to hope

People who are emotionally adept—who know and manage their own feelings well, and who read and deal effectively with other people’s feelings—are at an advantage in any domain of life

Interpersonal intelligence is the ability to understand other people: what motivates them, how they work, how to work cooperatively with them

Intrapersonal intelligence is a capacity to form an accurate model of oneself and to be able to use that model to operate effectively in life

Self-awareness—recognizing a feeling as it happens—is the keystone of emotional intelligence

The brain is remarkably plastic, constantly learning

The key to sounder personal decision making: being attuned to our feelings

Reframing a situation more positively is one of the most potent ways to put anger to rest

A strong work ethic translates into higher motivation, zeal, and persistence—an emotional edge

The more prone to worries a person is, the poorer their performance

Good moods enhance the ability to think flexibly and with more complexity, making it easier to find solutions to problems, whether intellectually or interpersonal

Hope is believing you have both the will and the way to accomplish your goals

Optimism means having a strong expectation that things will turn out all right in life, despite setbacks and frustrations

It is the combination of reasonable talent and the ability to keep going in the face of defeat that leads to success

People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities

Being able to manage emotions in someone else is the core art of handling relationships

Children learn to do what they see done

Emotions are contagious

People who are able to help others soothe their feelings have an especially valued social commodity; they are the souls others turn to when in greatest emotional need

When two people interact, the direction of mood transfer is from the one who is more forceful in expressing feelings to the one who is more passive

To love and to work are the twin capacities that mark full maturity

Boys take pride in a lone, tough-minded independence and autonomy, while girls see themselves as part of a web of connectedness

Men are content to talk about “things,” while women seek emotional connection

When emotionally upset, people cannot remember, attend, learn, or make decisions clearly

Stress makes people stupid

Leadership is not domination, but the art of persuading people to work toward a common goal

Taking initiative: being self motivated enough to take on responsibilities above and beyond their stated job

People who are extremely scared do terribly in surgery

Anger seems to be the one emotion that does most harm to the heart

Being prone to anger was a stronger predictor of dying young that were other risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol

Social isolation—the sense that you have nobody with whom you can share your private feelings or have close contact—doubles the chances of sickness or death

Once your emotional system learns something, it seems you never let it go. What therapy does is teach you to control it—it teaches your neocortex how to inhibit your amygdala. The propensity to act is suppressed, while your basic emotion about it remains in a subdued form

While we cannot decide when we have our emotional outbursts, we have more control over how long they last

“The main hope of a nation lies in the proper education of its youth.” - Erasmus

We need to be in control of ourselves—our appetites, our passions—to do right by others

It takes will to keep emotion under the control of reason

Being able to put aside ones self-centered focus and impulses has social benefits: it open the way to empathy, to real listening, to taking another persons perspective

Seeing things from another persons perspective breaks down biased stereotypes, and so breeds tolerance and acceptance of differences