The Balance Within Quotes

“The notion of feelings as an integral part of illness is universal—not only across continents and peoples, but across the divide of time that separates us from our ancestors.”
― Esther M. Sternberg, The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions

“Or you can believe that you have no emotional response, feel wrapped in cotton-wool insulating yourself from the world, when in fact you are deeply grieving.”
― Esther M. Sternberg, The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions

“we can misinterpret some of our perceptions of emotions, those visceral feelings—mistaking anger for guilt, love for hate.”
― Esther M. Sternberg, The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions

“Emotions are amorphous and uncontrollable.”
― Esther M. Sternberg, The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions

“Sanguine, from the Latin sanguineus for “blood,” describes an optimistic, confident person. In the 1495 Manual of Medicine by Johannes de Ketham, a sanguine person was described as fat and merry and liking Bacchus and Venus, the gods of wine and love. Not a surprising description perhaps, since these conditions—drink and love—are often associated with a rosy or blushing countenance, which is indeed caused by blood rushing to the cheeks. The opposite type in de Ketham’s text, the melancholic, is a combination of melan, Latin for “black,” and choler, or bitter bile. A melancholic person is gloomy and bitter. But pure bile, or choler, makes one impetuous and irascible. Today, the French word for anger is colere, and the root of the word shows up also in a “colicky” baby—one who is irritable. Phlegm, on the other hand, makes one fat and languid, slow-moving. Today phlegmatic has come to mean stolidly calm, unexcitable, and unemotional.”
― Esther M. Sternberg, The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions

“James Lister and Louis Pasteur were at first excluded from academic honor societies and laughed at for their theories on sterilization, vaccination, and pasteurization.”
― Esther M. Sternberg, The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions

“Through such nerve pathways, the emotion we call fear and the emotion we call love get translated into the physical sensations we associate with these feelings.”
― Esther M. Sternberg, The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions

“And with advances in cellular and molecular biology, we can piece together how such nervous system and hormonal changes can affect our susceptibility to disease.”
― Esther M. Sternberg, The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions

“Sigmund Freud, himself a neuroanatomist frustrated by the inability to identify an anatomical cause for illnesses like hysteria.”
― Esther M. Sternberg, The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions