7 Emotional Intelligence Quotes That Help You Understand Your Feelings
Understanding your feelings is not the passive experience of having them. It is the active, practiced skill of recognizing what is actually being felt beneath the surface-level label of the emotion, understanding why the feeling is arising in the specific context that is producing it, and learning to read what the feeling is genuinely trying to communicate about what matters, what is being threatened, and what is needed. The person who understands the feelings is not the person who is never overwhelmed by them. It is the person who has developed the specific, practiced relationship to the inner emotional life that makes the understanding possible even through the most challenging feeling.
These 7 emotional intelligence quotes are chosen for the specific quality of the illumination they offer about the understanding of the feelings. Each one carries a particular truth about what the emotional life is, what it requires, and what becomes possible when the relationship to it is built from the genuine understanding rather than the avoidance, the suppression, or the reactive expression that the lack of understanding most commonly produces. Read them with the specific feeling or the specific emotional pattern currently most present in your own life in mind.
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Get the Free Self-Care Starter Kit1. The emotion that can break your heart is sometimes the very one that heals it. — Nicholas Sparks
“Understanding your feelings is not the passive experience of having them. It is the active, practiced skill of recognizing what is actually being felt, understanding why the feeling is arising, and learning to read what the feeling is genuinely trying to communicate about what matters, what is threatened, and what is needed.”
This emotional intelligence quote from Nicholas Sparks carries the specific truth about the paradoxical nature of the most significant feelings: the ones most capable of the breaking are often the ones most capable of the healing, not in spite of their intensity but because of it. The grief that breaks the heart is the grief that also opens it. The love that produces the deepest vulnerability is the love that produces the deepest connection. The feeling that is most threatening to the comfortable is often the feeling that is most essential to the genuine. The emotional intelligence that understands the feelings deeply enough to recognize this paradox is the emotional intelligence that does not manage the most significant feelings away before they can produce both the breaking and the healing that the intensity of the genuine feeling makes possible.
2. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. — Carl Jung
This emotional intelligence quote from Carl Jung carries the most important available truth about the relationship between the understood and the ununderstood feeling: the feeling that is not brought to the conscious awareness does not disappear. It continues to direct the behavior, the choices, and the relational patterns from beneath the conscious awareness, where it cannot be examined, cannot be named, and cannot be worked with by the person whose life it is directing. The emotional intelligence of the understanding of the feelings is the specific practice of making the unconscious conscious: bringing the unexamined emotional patterns into the aware, named, examinable light of the consciousness where the directing can be seen for what it is rather than experienced as the inevitable fate it appears to be from the unconscious position.
3. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions. — Elizabeth Gilbert
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. The emotional intelligence of understanding the feelings is the practice of making the unconscious conscious: bringing the unexamined emotional patterns into the aware, named, examinable light where the directing can be seen for what it is.”
This emotional intelligence quote from Elizabeth Gilbert carries the specific diagram of the relationship chain that the understanding of the feelings most directly intervenes in: the thoughts produce the emotions, and the unexamined emotions direct the behavior of the person who has not yet developed the relationship to the emotions that would place the consciousness between the emotion and the automatic response to it. The emotional intelligence understanding this quote invites is the specific awareness of the thought-emotion-behavior chain that the feelings are moving through, and the specific, practiced skill of inserting the consciousness between the emotion and the behavior that the conscious examination of the chain makes possible. The slave to the emotions is not the permanent condition. It is the unexamined default that the understanding of the feelings can specifically change.
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Keep the reminders of the emotional intelligence and the self-understanding you are building visible in your daily space. Premier Print Works offers prints, mugs, and art for people who are doing the daily work of understanding their feelings and want their environment to reflect and reinforce the clarity and direction they are actively cultivating. Visit the shop today.
Visit Premier Print Works4. Feelings are not facts. They’re important information, but they’re not the whole story. — Brené Brown
This emotional intelligence quote from Brené Brown carries the specific and most practically useful distinction between the feeling as the data and the feeling as the reality: the feeling of the inadequacy is not the fact of the inadequacy. The feeling of the danger is not always the fact of the danger. The feeling of the rejection is not the confirmation of the rejection. The understanding of the feelings at the emotional intelligence level includes this specific, crucial distinction: the feelings are the important information about the inner experience, the values being activated, the needs being triggered, and the interpretations being made, but they are not the objective description of the external reality they are responding to. Understand the feelings as the information. Use the information. Do not mistake the information for the complete and accurate description of the reality the feeling is responding to.
5. The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude. — William James
This emotional intelligence quote from William James carries the specific empowering truth about the relationship between the inner orientation toward the emotional experience and the life that the inner orientation produces: the alteration of the attitude, the specific shift in the relationship to the feelings and the interpretations they are producing, is the specific, available, self-directed intervention that changes the life experience more fundamentally than the external circumstance change that most people pursue instead. The understanding of the feelings at the emotional intelligence level includes the understanding of how the attitude toward the feeling shapes the experience of the feeling and the behavior that the feeling produces. Alter the attitude toward the feeling. The life the altered attitude produces is the life available from the inside out rather than only from the outside in.
6. Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. — Viktor Frankl
“Alter the attitude toward the feeling. The life the altered attitude produces is available from the inside out. The greatest discovery of any generation is that the human being can change the life by changing the orientation toward the inner experience rather than only by changing the external circumstances that most people pursue instead.”
This emotional intelligence quote from Viktor Frankl carries the most foundational available truth about where the emotional intelligence lives in the practical experience of the daily life: in the space between the stimulus and the response. The understanding of the feelings is the specific practice of extending and inhabiting this space: the awareness of the feeling as it arrives, the pause between the feeling and the automatic reaction it would produce without the space, and the conscious choice of the response that the space makes available. The person who has learned to inhabit the space has learned the most practical available expression of the emotional intelligence: the specific, embodied skill of the choosing rather than the reacting, which is the entire difference between the emotionally intelligent life and the emotionally reactive one.
7. Feelings are much like waves. We can’t stop them from coming, but we can choose which ones to surf. — Jonatan Mårtensson
This emotional intelligence quote from Jonatan Mårtensson carries the specific, useful reorientation of the relationship to the feelings from the controlling or the suppressing to the choosing which ones to engage with and which ones to let pass: the feelings are not the crisis that requires the management into submission or the weakness that requires the suppression into silence. They are the waves, arriving continuously, carrying the information and the energy of the inner life, and requiring the specific skill of the person who surfs rather than the person who fights the ocean or pretends the waves are not arriving. The understanding of the feelings at the emotional intelligence level is the understanding of the surfing: which wave carries the important information that deserves the riding, which wave is the passing reactivity that the allowing to pass serves better than the engaging, and how to read the wave before it reaches the shore where the response is most committed.
How Amara and Daniel Each Found the Emotional Intelligence Quote That Most Accurately Named What Their Own Relationship to Their Feelings Most Needed to Understand
Amara had been in the specific pattern of the person whose feelings were directing the life from the unconscious position that the Jung quote most precisely names as the condition it is: the recurring relational pattern that had been producing the same specific quality of the difficulty in successive relationships without the understanding of what the pattern was or where it was originating. The emotional intelligence quote that most directly changed the relationship to the pattern was the Jung one: until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. The recurring relational difficulty had been the fate in precisely the sense the quote describes: the unconscious emotional pattern directing the behavior from the position where it could not be examined or altered. The work of bringing the unconscious to the conscious, the specific examination of the pattern with the therapist whose professional guidance made the examination possible, revealed the specific, underlying emotional pattern that the recurring difficulty had been expressing. The fate the unconscious had been calling the relational pattern became the specific, examinable, workable material that the consciousness made available once the unconscious had been brought into it. The pattern has not disappeared. Its direction of the life from the unconscious position has. The Jung quote named the difference between the two.
Daniel’s emotional intelligence quote was the Viktor Frankl one: between stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space is the power to choose the response. He had been in the specific emotional reactivity pattern of the person who is good at the post-event analysis and poor at the in-the-moment pause: the understanding of the feeling arrived reliably after the response to it had already been given, which had been producing the understanding without the choice that the space between the stimulus and the response would have made available. The practice he took from the Frankl quote was the specific, deliberate cultivation of the pause: the breath before the response, the moment of the genuine arrival at the feeling before the response to it, the small but significant extension of the space that the quote identified as the location of the power. The power had always been in the space. The space had been too brief to access from the reactive position. The deliberate extension of the space, practiced first in the lower-stakes situations, built the habit of the space that made the power available in the higher-stakes ones. The emotional intelligence is in the space. The Frankl quote pointed at the space. The practice built the access to it.
The Emotional Intelligence These 7 Quotes Are Building Is the Specific, Practiced Relationship to the Inner Emotional Life That Makes the Understanding of the Feelings Genuinely Available Rather Than Only the Having of Them.
Understanding your feelings is built from the specific practices that these emotional intelligence quotes are pointing toward: the making of the unconscious conscious, the recognition of the feeling as the information rather than the fact, the alteration of the attitude toward the feeling that changes the life the feeling is producing, the inhabiting of the space between the stimulus and the response where the power to choose lives, and the learning of the surfing that recognizes which waves carry the important information and which ones the allowing to pass serves better than the engaging. These seven quotes are the specific, honest illumination of what that understanding requires and what it produces.
Find the one or two quotes on this list that most specifically name what your own current relationship to the feelings most needs to understand. Sit with them. Write them somewhere they will find you in the moments when the understanding is most needed and least available. Return to them when the feelings are most directing the life from the position where the understanding has not yet reached them. The understanding is the building. These quotes illuminate where the building most directly needs to happen.
Free Download: The Self-Care Starter Kit
Let these emotional intelligence quotes be the reminder that understanding your feelings starts with the daily self-care practices that keep you genuinely present to the inner emotional life they are illuminating. The free Self-Care Starter Kit gives you those practices. Download it free today.
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Keep the reminders of the emotional intelligence and the self-understanding you are building visible in your daily space. Visit Premier Print Works for prints, mugs, and art for people who are doing the daily work of understanding their feelings and want their environment to reflect and reinforce the clarity and direction they are actively cultivating every day.
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The content on A Self Help Hub is for informational and inspirational purposes only. The emotional intelligence quotes, reflections, and personal stories in this article offer general support for everyday self-awareness, personal development, and intentional living. They are not professional mental health advice, psychotherapy, medical advice, or any form of clinical treatment.
If you are dealing with significant emotional dysregulation, trauma, depression, anxiety, or other conditions affecting your daily emotional functioning and wellbeing, please speak with a qualified mental health professional. General self-help content is not a substitute for professional care.
The stories and composite characters in this article, including Amara and Daniel, are illustrative. They are based on common experiences and created to make the content relatable. They are not real people. Any resemblance to a specific person is coincidental.
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