Joshua

“when a person consumed by years of resentment, pain, and anger realizes that her father (for example) didn’t directly hurt her when he abandoned the family; all he did was move out of the house. His action was morally wrong, but the pain came from her reactions to the event, and if she can change those reactions, she can leave behind twenty years of pain and perhaps even get to know her father.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

“Two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other. When you refute a person’s argument, does she generally change her mind and agree with you? Of course not, because the argument you defeated was not the cause of her position; it was made up after the judgment was already made.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

“Events in the world affect us only through our interpretations of them, so if we can control our interpretations, we can control our world.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”26”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom