Seven emotions refer to seven emotions of people. Confucian sayings are: joy, anger, sorrow, fear, love, evil and desire.
As for the statement of "six desires", it originally came from Lu Chunqiu. Among them, it says: "The so-called life is suitable for all six desires." This means that "all one's life" people, "six desires" have been properly satisfied.
The so-called "all one's life" is the highest realm of human cultivation. Here, the ancients did not point out what the "six desires" included. Later, some people commented that "life and death, ears, eyes, mouth and nose" refers to people's various desires.
Extended data:
Secular desire is the basic physiological requirement and psychological motivation of human beings, the foundation of human nature, the nature that everyone has and the most basic color of human life. But people are different, and the manifestations of secular desires are varied. As the saying goes, everyone has worldly desires, and there are great differences. So Mencius said, "People are different from animals.
But man is not an animal after all, but a more advanced animal. The "spirit of all things" is of course much more advanced than the desire of animals. That is to say, human beings can not only receive and feel information, but also be moved, excited and impulsive by giving and receiving information, and control or deal with it rationally, thus developing the desire of animals to the height of emotion and rationality, while the desire and feeling of ordinary animals only stay at the instinctive level. In a sense, literature and art are the art of expressing secular desires.