Dangerous Emotions Quotes

“You will be identified as thin-skinned and moody; in reaction you will identify yourself as civilized and sensitive. You will barricade yourself in that preposterous condition known as self-respect.”
― Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

“Power among humans is not simply the physical force with which one material body may move another; it is the force to distract, detour, maneuver, and command. Every pleasure we indulge in and every pain we suffer exerts power over others.”
― Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

“A gift is truly a gift only to the extent that, however modest, there is an element of impetuousness, recklessness in it. Giving is a passionate act. Giving, by abnegating ownership of resources, puts the giver at risk. Every act of giving already educes the passion to give one’s life.”
― Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

“A man who works hard and uses his wealth to purchase jewelry to adorn himself, suits tailored in London, shoes handmade in Rome, and a hundred-thousand-dollar sportscar, which he drives cautiously and keeps in meticulous repair, will be viewed by everybody as a poor fool with a lot of pathetic needs.”
― Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

“Back from the funeral, we think we felt the grim reaper swing close; we feel him stalking us. We ward off anxiety before the imminent and inescapable annihilation awaiting us by establishing control over our life and field of operations, by projecting an advance representation of what each day brings, and by measuring our enterprises to our forces. We arrange our home and our situation and our workday in such a way that we retain, behind the forms of our performances, a reserve of force for the tasks that will recur the next day. We settle into an occupation that requires only those mental tasks for which we have already contracted the mental skills. We frame our pleasures and our angers, our affections and our vexations, in the patterns and confines of feelings we can repeat indefinitely. We avoid going to places utterly unlike any other, which would leave us wholly astonished, with an astonishment that could never recur. We seek out partners others might also fall in love with, and we love our partner as others love like partners, with a love that we could recycle for another partner should we lose this one. For we sense that were we to expend all our forces on an adventure, discharge all our mental powers on a problem, empty out all the love in our heart on a woman or a man unlike any other, we would be dying in that adventure, that problem, that love.”
― Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

“When we attend to someone who greets us, it is not to require confirmation, attestation, certification of our identity. To respond to someone who greets us is to drop our concerns and thoughts, and expose ourselves to her. It is to expose ourselves to questioning and judgment. Simply responding to her greeting is to recognize her rights over us. Each time we enter into conversation we expose ourselves to being altered or emptied out, emptied of our convictions, our expectations, our memories.”
― Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

“The violation of the existence and natures of things, of oneself, or of others is evil. Disrespect encroaches upon the space of others, and alters or empties their nature. Respect is respect for the limits, the boundaries, the space of others, and thus for their natures. Morally good action designates the active respect for others, for things, and also for ourselves.”
― Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

“At the cocktail party or singles bar, you are on the lookout for the woman who materializes your girlfriend or wife fantasy. You set out to lure and settle her into your own bed, apartment, and domesticated retreat from the world, where she will be the medium for your selfrecognition in daily conversation where everything she says responds to what you say, think, and fantasize. But you do not know a woman until you find yourself blessing the universe and her because she has made you laugh and laugh at yourself, until she has made you cry, until you find yourself cursing her and yourself because she makes you weep as no hammer-blow hurled at your thumb or collapse of all your investments ever has or could.”
― Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

“There are transcendent collective events. There is anger spreading through the streets of Port-au-Prince in Haiti, anger marking in black the unallowable, the intolerable, anger that hurls itself beyond all that can reasonably be expected or demanded. This anger is the most precious gift of the disinherited to tourists and academics who have imprisoned their hearts through so many years of well-paid compromises and betrayals”
― Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

“The term gift designates events, apparitions, and things whose grandeur and graciousness remove them from practices of appropriation—from measurement, categorization, and seizure.”
― Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

“A man who works hard and uses his wealth to purchase jewelry to adorn himself, suits tailored in London, shoes handmade in Rome, and a hundred-thousand-dollar sportscar, which he drives cautiously and keeps in meticulous repair, will be view”
― Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

“The geisha and the temple maiden of the Hindus, Persians, Mayas, or Inca present the sovereignty of idle beauty, completely withdrawn from the world of work. Living in idleness, she preserves those soft and fluid forms of the voice, of the smile, of the whole body, that captivate without resisting what they touch. Her beauty does not triumph in the endurance of stern physical tasks; it does not endure; it is as ephemeral as the flowers that bloom in the night and die when the sun rises. She makes herself an object by covering herself with brilliant and fluid garments, jewels, and perfumes. The working man is stopped in his tracks, contemplating a body set apart, remote from his laborious concerns, ostentatious and alluring. Her sumptuous dress, jewelry of precious stones, plumes of exotic birds, and perfumes made of fields of rare flowers represent values, represent the dissipation of human labor in useless splendor. This intense consumption exerts a dangerous fascination. She tempts the worker to the follies and excesses of passion and dispossession.”
― Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

“The death of a collaborator gives us an unnerving premonition that a like violence—a heavy or sharp tool that slips, an automobile collision, a microbe—could abruptly befall us in our time and space of work and reason, and could annihilate, along with our future, the significance of our past.”
― Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

“Actions leave you empty when you do them. You happened to be there at the right time, somehow said the right thing to the youth, were able to pass him on the money for the tuition in such a way that he would take it. It needed to be done with a lot of tact and secrecy to be done right, and any lifting of that veil of secrecy would spoil it now. Prostitutes understand that, covering
their kind hearts with harsh and cynical words. You are left the next day emptied, your good deed more a burden than a glory, the glory of it surely a burden, not left with strengthened powers but with harnessed powers, not knowing if new powers, the right powers, will be there when the time comes.”
― Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

“Awakening is a bound, not weighted down with the past that inculpates the present and demands compensation from the future, a bound out of the drunkenness of remorse and resentment. Awakening is a commencement. It is a point of departure. We come alive; we become alive
to the dragonfly, to the twisted grain of the porch railing. Awakening is a birth. Awakening is joyous. The innocence of awakening, the active disconnection from the past, make possible this joy. How good to be alive! How refreshing is this silence! How calm the morning is! How pungent it smells! In every joy there is an awakening.”
― Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

“And what else is erotic craving but a craving to be violated? In voluptuous turmoil, we are left not simply wounded, but shattered. The violent emotions that are aroused, that sense the obscenity in anguish, that push on in a momentum that can no longer derail or control itself, sense also the exultation of risking oneself, of plunging into the danger zone, of expending our forces at a loss.”
― Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

“Resentment secretes images that obscure your view of the present and distort your memory of the past. Resentment is a positive force of mendacity.”
― Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

“In the city people are moving down sidewalks, up and down escalators, along aisles; they are stationed in the driver’s seat of buses, at gas pumps, computers, and cash registers. There is a low-intensity fear in them. They avoid turning in certain directions, flailing their arms or poking their hands in certain ways. They respect invisible barriers.”
― Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions

“A question is not a supplication, an entreaty, nor a velleity for knowledge just put out in the air; it is already an order, a command. (Beggars, the destitute, pupils, factory workers, enlisted soldiers, prisoners, and patients have no right to question; they can only entreat.) A question commands a certain focus of attention, a selection of resources on hand, a certain type of language. It lays down a direction; it imposes a directive to think further down a certain track.”
― Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions