Bo Wang

“This change of beliefs or way of seeing your experiences will allow you to filter reality completely differently. The assumption that a map is not actual terrain is extremely helpful in social interactions and building relationships with people. Now, before you judge someone's behavior, you will remember that it comes from a different map of the reality that person has. If you want to create a strong relationship with another person, first get to know their map and then try to empathize with it. You will be able to understand their emotions, needs, behaviors and experiences at a much deeper level. This”
― Ian Tuhovsky, Communication Skills Training: A Practical Guide to Improving Your Social Intelligence, Presentation, Persuasion and Public Speaking

“He will surmise that love can endure only when one is unfaithful to its beguiling opening ambitions, and that, for his relationships to work, he will need to give up on the feelings that got him into them in the first place. He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

“There’s one thing you must remember—you can regulate your emotions. Once again, it is a skill, like any other. Calming down the unpleasant feelings when necessary, reinforcing the positive ones, whenever you want. In every single moment of your life, you can feel exactly as you want to feel. It will guide you directly to the conscious life in which creating lasting relationships and making new challenges will be accompanied by excitement and enjoyment rather than fear and stress.”
― Ian Tuhovsky, Emotional Intelligence: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Emotions and Raising Your EQ

“Vincent was the victim of his own fanatic heart. “There’s something in the way he talks that makes people either love him or hate him,” he tried to explain. “He spares nothing and no one.” Long after others had put away the breathless manias of youth, Vincent still lived by their unsparing rules. Titanic, unappeasable passions swept through his life. “I am a fanatic!” Vincent declared in 1881. “I feel a power within me … a fire that I may not quench, but must keep ablaze.” Whether catching beetles on the Zundert creekbank, collecting and cataloguing prints, preaching the Christian gospel, consuming Shakespeare or Balzac in great fevers of reading, or mastering the interactions of color, he did everything with the urgent, blinding single-mindedness of a child.”
― Steven Naifeh, Van Gogh