Elina > Elina's Quotes

“He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Joy,” as the Archbishop said during the week, “is much bigger than happiness. While happiness is often seen as being dependent on external circumstances, joy is not.”
― Dalai Lama XIV, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World

“Wherever you have friends that’s your country, and wherever you receive love, that’s your home.”
― Dalai Lama XIV, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World

“Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. Some things are so sad that only your soul can do the crying for them.”
― Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

“When you get the nerve to talk to the attractive person across the room, your brain was being bold three-tenths of a second before you.”
― David Rock, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

“Bring your dopamine or adrenaline level down by activating other regions of the brain other than the prefrontal cortex.”
― David Rock, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

“New lovers tend to “lose their minds” and do all sorts of crazy things in the heat of the moment. One study showed that new lovers’ brains have a lot in common with people on cocaine. Dopamine is sometimes called the “drug of desire.” Too much dopamine, from being “high with excitement,”
― David Rock, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

“Mindfulness is a habit, it’s something the more one does, the more likely one is to be in that mode with less and less effort…it’s a skill that can be learned. It’s accessing something we already have. Mindfulness isn’t difficult. What’s difficult is to remember to be mindful.”
― David Rock, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

“Even the strongest toward emotion, lust, is unlikely to make you run, whereas fear can do so in an instant. The toward emotions are more subtle, more easily displaced, and harder to build on, than the away emotions. This also explains why upward spirals, where positive emotions beget more positive emotions, are less common than downward spirals, where negative emotions beget more negative emotions. Human beings walk toward, but run away.”
― David Rock, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

“Menneisyys on jotakin, mitä me omistamme, vaikka emme sitä hallitsisi. Menneisyys todistaa, että me olemme olemassa. Menneisyytemme on totta. Muistot ovat lihaa ja verta. Kuin armoton luonnonvoima, menneisyys voi olla ihmiselle julma. Se voi musertaa meidät armottoman hitaasti. Silti vain menneisyyden kautta voimme saada uuden alun. Uskallammeko katsoa noita elettyjä hetkiä silmiin ja ottaa vastaan totuuden? Totuuden itsestämme? Ja ehkä silloin voimme jättää menneen taaksemme ja kurottaa tulevaa, vielä tuntematonta kohti. Annetaan menneisyydelle rauha, annetaan niiden mennä, joiden aika on koittanut. On aika päästää irti. On aika päästää lähelle. On aika uskaltaa elää. Toinen vierelläsi. Me olemme totta.”
― Kimmo Ohtonen, Karhu – voimaeläin

“It appears that the perception of choice may be more important than diet and other factors for health. Choosing in some way to experience stress is less stressful than experiencing stress without a sense of choice or control.”
― David Rock, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

“There’s a famous finding in the psychological literature,” Ochsner explains, “showing that six months later, someone who has become a paraplegic is just as happy as someone who’s won the lottery. It seems clear people are doing something to find what’s positive in even the most dire of circumstances. The one thing you can always do is control your interpretation of the meaning of the situation,”
― David Rock, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

“The right dose of expectations can be as powerful as one of the strongest painkillers.”
― David Rock, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

“Many great leaders understand intuitively that they need to work hard to create a sense of safety in others. In this way, great leaders are often humble leaders, thereby reducing the status threat. Great leaders provide clear expectations and talk a lot about the future, helping to increase certainty. Great leaders let others take charge and make decisions, increasing autonomy. Great leaders often have a strong presence, which comes from working hard to be authentic and real with other people, to create a sense of relatedness. And great leaders keep their promises, taking care to be perceived as fair.”
― David Rock, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

“Trying to change other people's thinking appears to be one of the hardest tasks in the world. While the easy answer may seem to be to give people feedback, real change happens when people see things they have not seen before. The best way to help someone see something new is to help quiet her mind so that she can have a moment of insight. As you have insights, you change your brain, and by changing your brain you change your whole world.”
― David Rock, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

“Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.”
― Alice Walker

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”
― Selwyn Duke

“The left and right sides of the brain also process the imprints of the past in dramatically different ways.2 The left brain remembers facts, statistics, and the vocabulary of events. We call on it to explain our experiences and put them in order. The right brain stores memories of sound, touch, smell, and the emotions they evoke. It reacts automatically to voices, facial features, and gestures and places experienced in the past. What it recalls feels like intuitive truth—the way things are. Even as we enumerate a loved one’s virtues to a friend, our feelings may be more deeply stirred by how her face recalls the aunt we loved at age four.3 Under ordinary circumstances the two sides of the brain work together more or less smoothly, even in people who might be said to favor one side over the other. However, having one side or the other shut down, even temporarily, or having one side cut off entirely (as sometimes happened in early brain surgery) is disabling. Deactivation of the left hemisphere has a direct impact on the capacity to organize experience into logical sequences and to translate our shifting feelings and perceptions into words. (Broca’s area, which blacks out during flashbacks, is on the left side.) Without sequencing we can’t identify cause and effect, grasp the long-term effects of our actions, or create coherent plans for the future. People who are very upset sometimes say they are “losing their minds.” In technical terms they are experiencing the loss of executive functioning. When something reminds traumatized people of the past, their right brain reacts as if the traumatic event were happening in the present. But because their left brain is not working very well, they may not be aware that they are reexperiencing and reenacting the past—they are just furious, terrified, enraged, ashamed, or frozen. After the emotional storm passes, they may look for something or somebody to blame for it. They behaved the way they did way because you were ten minutes late, or because you burned the potatoes, or because you “never listen to me.” Of course, most of us have done this from time to time, but when we cool down, we hopefully can admit our mistake. Trauma interferes with this kind of awareness, and, over time, our research demonstrated why.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“To the people who look at the stars and wish, Rhys."
Rhys clinked his glass against mine. “To the stars who listen— and the dreams that are answered.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury