Frugal Emotions

This extract is from : The Reason of Things, Living with Philosophy by A C Grayling

“… if one is frugal with one’s emotions – limiting love in order to avoid its pains, stifling appetites and desires in order to escape the price of their fulfillment – one lives a stunted, muffled, bland life only. It is practically tantamount to a partial death in order to minimize the electric character of existence – its pleasures, its ecstasies, its richness and colour, matched by its agonies, its wretchedness, its disasters and grief. To take life in armfuls, to embrace and accept it, to leap into it with energy and relish, is of course to invite trouble of all familiar kinds. But the cost of avoiding trouble is a terrible one: it is the cost of having trodden the planet for humanity’s brief allotment of less than a thousand months, without really having lived”

Thanks to Barbara for sending it to me.