1. I believe the right proportion of Emotions to Praticality for an individual to be sensible & successful, should be 20 : 80 . This itself shows how powerful emotions are that to keep 20% of them in control we need 80% of praticality.
                  Keeping emotions under control & using them sensibly can give us happiness & success. And, moreover, most of the problems/mistakes are caused when we are in control of our emotions. We are generally more cautious when our emotions are in our control.

       2. Both the 'Harsh Truth' & the 'Lie' may commonly be for the negation of something. And they both cause pain . But there is a difference between a harsh truth & a lie.
                 When you tell the harsh truth , you hurt only people's mind which after sometime clearly sees the reason/logic . But when you tell a lie, you hurt people's Trust & the pain is real bad & it goes very slowly. It may even leave the concerned incident as a scar of unplesent memory.

        3. The advantage of reaching a stage where you won't feel any pain (Ice) is:
                        When you reach such a stage where your emotions are fully in your control, then you'll be able to decide when you want to be happy & when you want to be sad (if required). So that when you are in front of others, you can be happy & when you are alone, you can be sad (if you want to be).
                       One good outcome of this will be that you won't be contributing to others sadness by being sad yourself.

         4. I've observed that people generally think that Hope & Expectation are the same thing. But I feel that there is a difference between the two.
                  Expectation (about/from something/someone) starts with hope but as it grows, the No/negative part of the answer/event falls behind (in our consideration/focus) & the focus gradually shifts to the Yes/positive part of the answer/event to the extent that the No part is completely forgotten & only Yes remains in our consideration.
                  But in the case of Hope, Yes/positive part & No/negative part are always present in our consideration at every point of the event.