#mo

Your motivations--get that promotion, throw the best parties, run for public office--aren't impersonal abstractions but powerfully reflect who you are and what you focus on. An individual's goals figure prominently in the theories of personality first developed by the Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. According to his successor David McClelland, what Friedrich Nietzsche called "the will to power," which he considered the major driving force behind human behavior, is one of the three basic motivations, along with achievement and affiliation, that differentiate us as individuals. A simple experiment show show these broad emotional motivations can affect what you pay attention to or ignore on very basic levels. When they examine images of faces that express different kinds of emotion, power-oriented subjects are drawn to nonconfrontational visages, such as "surprise faces," rather than to those that suggest dominance, as "anger faces" do. In contrast, people spurred by affiliation gravitate toward friendly or joyful faces. ↗

— Winifred Gallagher

#attention #control #dominance #focus #motivation

Evergreens are prudish. Evergreens over the holidays are a tease. ↗

— Bauvard

#humor #prudishness #trees #funny

"Old times" never come back and I suppose it's just as well. What comes back is a new morning every day in the year, and that's better. ↗

— George Edward Woodberry

#better #come #comes #day #every

Now, wages in the automobile industry are made up of two components, what we call base rates and the cost of living factor which is fed in by the operation of the escalator. ↗

— Leonard Woodcock

#automobile industry #base #call #components #cost

On the porch were the still-smoking remains of long-stemmed roses, evidence that someone angry and passive-aggressive didn't know Peter was out of town. ↗

— Theric Jepson

#anger #byu #dating #flowers #humor

You're in a rather odd mood today." I'm soaking wet, Eloise." No need to snap at me about it, I didn't force you to walk across town in the rain." It wasn't raining when I left,". There was something about a sibling that brought out the eight-year-old in a body. I'm sure the sky was gray," Clearly, she had a bit of the eight-year-old in her as well. ↗

— Julia Quinn

#humor #funny

A gypsy girl approached Don Zana and Alfanhui and held out her tambourine. Don Zana said to her, 'You don't pay for art, kid. ↗

— Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio

#cheek #donation #humor #art

Why? Why don't you want to go with me?" She huffed. "It's not that I don't want to go with you, its that I'm not going at all/" "So you do want to go with me." ..."It doesn't matter. Because I can't." "But I need you." "Need me?" "Yes. Don't you see? If I'm spending all my time with you, then Queen Levana can't rope me in to any conversations or..." He shuddered. "Dancing. ↗

— Marissa Meyer

#funny

My calculations - allowing for a 12 percent margin of error, based on the radius of the corresponding confidence interval and the surgeon general's warning - concluded that they probably didn't stay behind for the tacos. ↗

— Darynda Jones

#dead-people #funny-humor #funny

What happened?" he asked brusquely, interrupting me. "What do you mean, what happened?" "I sensed your fear, heard you call out my name." "I...no, I didn't." Stone Wall, I told myself. Great Wall of China, around my thoughts. "The Great Wall of China isn't going to do it, Violet. Come on, tell me what happened. ↗

— Kristi Cook

#funny #haven #humour #violet #winterhaven