Facial expressions of emotion are universal, not learned differently in each culture
Darwin in his great 1872 book, “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals” puts forth that a specific set of six universal emotions, namely:
- anger and fear,
- surprise and disgust,
- joy and sadness
“The language of the emotions” as he terms these facial expressions and body language, are considered to be the result of natural selection and the process of evolution, and shared across cultures and civilizations, ingrained in our genetic makeup.
Your example
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity... It is, in short, the subject of the history of the Grail. Only a predestined being has the ability to ask another: what is your torment? And he doesn't have it when he enters life. He has to go through years of dark night.
-----
Source: Letter to the poet Joë Bousquet, 1942
Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
------
Source : LIFE magasine, May 2, 1955
The Alchemist picked up a book that someone in the caravan had brought. Leafing through the pages, he found a ...
A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.
Beauty always has an element of strangeness. I do not mean a deliberate cold form of strangeness, for in that case it would be a monstrous thing that had jumped the rails of life. But I do mean that it always contains a certain degree of strangeness, of simple, unintended, unconscious strangeness, and that this form of strangeness is what gives it the right to be called beauty. It is its hallmark, its special characteristic. Reverse the proposition and try to imagine a commonplace beauty! (…) This element of strangeness which constitutes and defines individuality, without which there is no beauty, plays in art (and may the precision of this comparison excuse its triviality) the role of taste or flavouring in cookery; if the individual usefulness or the degree of nutritious value they contain be excepted, viands differ from each other only by the idea they reveal to the tongue.