Sartre on emotion

Jean-Paul Sartre on emotion from his book Sketch for a theory of emotions (Routledge Classics, London and New York):

“Emotions are not fixed; they have no essence and indeed are subject to rapid fluctuations and about - turns." (on back cover)

“It is constitutive of emotion that it attributes to the object something that infinitely transcends it. Indeed, there is a world of emotion. All emotions have this in common, that they evoke the appearance of a world, cruel, terrible, bleak, joyful, ect, but in which the relations of things to consciousness are always and exclusively magical. We have to speak of a world of emotion as one speaks of a world of dreams or of worlds of madness. A world – that means individual syntheses in mutual relations and possessing qualities. But no quality is conferred upon an object without passing over to the infinite. This grey, for instance, represents the units of infinity of real and possible Abschattungen, some of which will be grey-green, some grey seen in a certain light, black ect.“ (pg.53)

“and, also naturally, two main types of emotion are not absolutely and strictly distinct; there are often mixtures of the two types and the majority of our emotions are less then pure.“ (pg. 58)