Envy, propelled by fear, can be even more toxic than anger, because it involves the thought that other people enjoy the good things of life which the envier can't hope to attain through hard work and emulation.
Martha NussbaumRead
Disgust is often more deeply buried than envy and anger, but it compounds and intensifies the other negative emotions.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Disgust is a powerful yet hidden emotion that can amplify other negative feelings.
In this quote, Martha Nussbaum highlights the idea that while feelings like envy and anger may be more overt, disgust can lurk beneath the surface, influencing our emotional landscape. This underlying emotion can intensify and magnify other negative feelings, leading to a more complex emotional experience that may not be immediately recognized or addressed.
Themes
DisgustEmotionNegativityIntensityPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
In a psychology lecture about the complexities of human emotions, one might use this quote to illustrate how disgust can influence behaviors.
More from Martha Nussbaum
All quotes βThis is true across every single society; we project grossness onto a racial or gender subgroup or caste. A big part of social subordination and discrimination is to ascribe hyper-animality to other groups and use that as an excuse for subordinating them further.
Martha NussbaumRead
Often, we feel helpless in lots of situations in our lives. The way anger gets a grip on us is it seems to be a way to extricate ourselves from helplessness.
Martha NussbaumRead
Courses in the humanities, in particular, often seem impractical, but they are vital, because they stretch your imagination and challenge your mind to become more responsive, more critical, bigger.
Martha NussbaumRead
I find so often, you know, just on a very mundane level; you've got a meeting and your child's acting in a school play. You can't do both things. And it's not simply that you can't do both, but whatever you do, you're going to be neglecting something that's really important.
Martha NussbaumRead
Look at the great tradition of Western political philosophy. Those people were all immersed in revolutionary movements. Most weren't career academics - often, they were too radical to be accepted in the academy. Rousseau's books were banned. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill couldn't hold academic positions because they were atheists.
Martha NussbaumRead
Similar quotes
Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.
Arthur SchopenhauerRead
The rule of law, democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of expression - we cannot take them for granted. They do not exist willy-nilly across the world; they are very rare.
Daniel LubetzkyRead
Faith and works should travel side by side, step answering to step, like the legs of men walking. First faith, and then works; and then faith again, and then works again--until they can scarcely distinguish which is the one and which is the other.
William BoothRead
No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.
Elie WieselRead
The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.
C. S. LewisRead
Before I knew that a man could kill a man, because it happens all the time. Now I know that even the person with whom you've shared food, or whom you've slept, even he can kill you with no trouble. The closest neighbor can kill you with his teeth: that is what I have Learned since the genocide, and my eyes no longer gaze the same on the face of the world.
Philip ZimbardoRead