Emotions Quotes

To give vent now and then to his feelings, whether of pleasure or discontent, is a great ease to a man's heart. ~Francesco Guicciardini

Let's not forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it. ~Vincent Van Gogh, 1889

Men are no more immune from emotions than women; we think women are more emotional because the culture lets them give free vent to certain feelings, "feminine" ones, that is, no anger please, but it's okay to turn on the waterworks. ~Una Stannard

But are not this struggle and even the mistakes one may make better, and do they not develop us more, than if we kept systematically away from emotions? ~Vincent Van Gogh

One's suffering disappears when one lets oneself go, when one yields — even to sadness. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Southern Mail, 1929, translated from French by Curtis Cate

Memory is always faulty. Emotions are always true. ~Author Unknown

Emotion turning back on itself, and not leading on to thought or action, is the element of madness. ~John Sterling

The feeling is often the deeper truth, the opinion the more superficial one. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy. ~Jim Rohn

How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling. ~Claude Debussy

All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you. ~Rainer Maria Rilke

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. ~Khalil Gibran

Too much emotion is like none at all. ~Du Mu, translated

Sadness is almost never anything but a form of fatigue. ~Andre Gide

Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you. ~Roger Ebert

And Lancelot stood on the shore, with an awful paleness in his face, as if the ghost of everything that might have made his life pure and noble was whispering woe to his soul forever. ~August Bell, "Quicksands of Love," 1887  [Here the excerpt is describing a picture the character Lawrence's friend painted that befits Tennyson's idyllic poem "Elaine." —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]

Yes, that's the worst of it. It's a desperately vexatious thing that, after all one's reflections and quiet determinations, we should be ruled by moods that one can't calculate on beforehand. ~George Eliot, Adam Bede

Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
~William Blake (1757-1827), "Auguries of Innocence"

[S]he suffered a sort of poverty which is more difficult to bear than actual want, since money cannot lighten it, and the rarest charity alone can minister to it. Her heart was empty and she could not fill it; her soul was hungry and she could not feed it; life was cold and dark and she could not warm and brighten it, for she knew not where to go. ~Louisa May Alcott, "Through the Mist," Work: A Story of Experience, 1873

But my Thirty Years' War is over, and I die "with sword unbroken, and a broken heart." ~Israel Zangwill, Dreamers of the Ghetto, "From a Mattress Grave," 1897  [quoting Heinrich Heine and spoken by the character Heine —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]

Now I am not one of the most constant creatures alive myself, and am apt to run through the spectrum which has the blues at the bottom about once a week. ~Byron Caldwell Smith (1849-1877), letter to Kate Stephens

Then there was, after all, something to be said for feelings which had not their basis in material relationships. They were not mere phantasmagoria conjured up by silly people, by sentimental people, by women. Clever men, men of distinction, recognized them, treated them as of paramount importance. The practical, if not the theoretical, teaching of her life had been to treat as absurd any close or strong feeling which had not its foundations in material interests. ~Amy Levy (1861–1889), Reuben Sachs: A Sketch, 1888

If you don't manage your emotions, then your emotions will manage you. ~Doc Childre and Deborah Rozman, Transforming Anxiety

Feelings are like toes! They have to breathe free or they'll stink to high heaven! ~Animal Crossing: Wild World (Nintendo video game) written by Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka, and Toshihiro Kawabata

We had before become acquainted with a scepticism terrifying, because terrified; which was nothing else than reason in despair; which resembled faith,—implied, contained, a species of faith,—a faith, shall I say, in the necessity of faith; which struggled against the darkness, and if conquered, cursed it. The scepticism of our days has no longer this character; men have fallen from despair to ennui: and when I speak of ennui, it is not that of an Attila embarrassed by his superfluous forces, and seeking employment for them; it is an impotent and rickety ennui, which has not even the remnants of energy necessary to prompt the getting out of self; no desire is keen enough, no impulse passionate enough, to vary its monotony; no grief sufficiently violent to awaken alarm or pity. The former scepticism walked on thorns; this sinks ankle-deep in mud. ~Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847)

Guilt is always hungry — don't let it consume you. ~Terri Guillemets

We got married in a fever hotter than a pepper sprout. ~June Carter Cash

Ere he returned, Madame descended and passed from the sparkling sunshine into the gloom of the portico, with a melancholy consciousness of the symbolic. For her spirit, too, had its poetic intuitions and insights... ~Israel Zangwill, Dreamers of the Ghetto, "From a Mattress Grave," 1897

Feelings are much like waves, we can't stop them from coming but we can choose which one to surf. ~Jonatan Mårtensson

Clouds open up into rain,
You too should release your pain.
~Terri Guillemets

...that freshness of feeling, that delicate honor which shrinks from wounding even a sentiment... ~George Eliot, Adam Bede

Melancholic madness strapped to your chest and you have no way of releasing the fear. ~Daniel, @blindedpoet

I feel an army in my fist. ~Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), The Robbers, translated from German

Herzog is dull, he is unendurably dull.... Yet the novel succeeds. There is its mystery. One reads it with compassion.... Bored by Herzog, still there is a secret burning of the heart. One's heart turns over and produces a sorrow. Hardly any books are left to do that.... Something goes on in Herzog's eye. It says: I am debased, I am failed, I am near to rotten, and yet something just as good and loving resides in me as the tenderest part of your childhood. ~Norman Mailer, Cannibals and Christians, 1969

...having planted her little thorn to rankle in [his] heart... ~August Bell, "Quicksands of Love," 1887

I had fallen; abased and thick with thorns the path I now must tread!
Wounded, I have trod it. Lower, year by year,
It slopes, ever loudlier I can hear
Voices of memories, loves, remorses, roll
And echo interblend amid my soul,
Reeling toward darkness where even death might shudder while it stole.
~Edgar Fawcett, "At a Window," Songs of Doubt and Dream, 1891

The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. ~Albert Einstein

Perhaps apathy is a wave of emotions too afraid to burst out of the darkness into the bright light of day. ~Terri Guillemets

At noon I feel as though I could devour all the elephants of Hindostan, and then pick my teeth with the spire of Strasburg cathedral; in the evening I become so sentimental that I would fain drink up the Milky Way without reflecting how indigestible I should find the little fixed stars, and by night there is the Devil himself broke loose in my head and no mistake. ~Heinrich Heine, "Ideas: Book Le Grand," 1826, translated from German by Charles Godfrey Leland, Pictures of Travel, 1855  #INFJ

From this bleak world, into the heart of night,
The dim, deep bosom of the universe,
I cast myself. I only crave for rest;
Too heavy is the load. I fling it down.
~Amy Levy, "A Minor Poet," c.1884

Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary. ~Mark Twain

When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion. ~Dale Carnegie