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People who think they can control their negative emotions and manifest them when they want to, simply deceive themselves. Negative emotions depend on identification; if identification is destroyed in some particular case, they disappear. The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them. I think that, for an ordinary mechanical man, the most difficult thing to realise is that his own and other people's negative emotions, have no value whatever and do not contain anything noble, anything beautiful or anything strong. In reality negative emotions contain nothing but weakness and very often the beginning of hysteria, insanity or crime. The only good thing about them is that, being quite useless and artificially created by imagination and identification, they can be destroyed without any loss. And this is the only chance of escape that man has.

P. D. Ouspensky#18

ControlEmotionsFreedomPsychologySelf deceptionWeakness

About this quote

What does it mean?
Negative emotions are weak and destructive, yet people often cling to them as if they were valuable.
In plain terms
Stop worshipping negative feelings since they only show weakness.
What can you take from it?
You can destroy negative emotions without losing anything.

Where it applies

  • conflict
  • personal stress
  • social interaction

Putting it to work

  • identify negative patterns
  • reject emotional indulgence

Questions to consider

  • Why do you hold onto anger?
  • What value do you assign to pain?

Another view

Not all negative emotions are useless; some signal real problems.

More from P. D. Ouspensky

  1. I've found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard new things: that is things that they had never heard before. The…

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  2. Under the conditions of modern life we have more control over our thoughts, and in connection with this there is a special method by which we may work on the d…

    Permalink to quote #19
  3. The greatest barrier to consciousness is the belief that one is already conscious.

    Permalink to quote #16

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