Quotes About Emotions

35 quotes

Anne Frank wrote that feelings can't be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem. Nietzsche suggested that a person's only problem might be that they scream without letting themselves cry. Marilyn Monroe put it simply: I am not a victim of emotional conflicts. I am human.

Several writers looked at how feeling and reason meet. Jonathan Swift observed that it is useless to try to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into. George Eliot noticed that bodily haste and exertion leave our thoughts at the mercy of our feelings and imagination. Joseph Conrad described the mind of man as capable of anything, holding joy, fear, sorrow, devotion and valor. Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed to what shows feeling most clearly: a person's actions can speak so loudly that their words go unheard. Voltaire used animals to argue that feelings are real, doubting that nature gave them all the machinery of feelings only for them to have none.
Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence.

— The Soul of Man Under Socialism

British writer and journalist

The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement.

— 1984

4th-century BCE Greek philosopher

Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are free from the grasp, not of one mad master only, but of many.

— The Republic

16th Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 and Stoic philosopher

When you are disturbed by events and lose your serenity, quickly return to yourself and don't stay upset longer than the experience lasts; for you'll have more mastery over your inner harmony by continually returning to it.

— Meditations

Christian theologian, philosopher, and saint

You are not the mind itself. For You are the Lord God of the mind. All these things are liable to change, but You remain immutable above all things.

— Confessions

French novelist and playwright

Though the human heart may have to pause for rest when climbing the heights of affection it rarely stops on the slippery slope of hatred.

— Père Goriot

German-born Dutch Jewish diarist and Holocaust victim

But feelings can't be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem.

— The Diary of a Young Girl

English naturalist and biologist

Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.

— The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

American author and journalist

You wouldn't believe it. It's like a wonderful nightmare.""Sure," I said. "I'd believe anything. Including nightmares." "What's the matter? Feel low?""Low as hell.

— The Sun Also Rises

English playwright and poet

Alack, sir, no; her passions are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love. We cannot call her winds and waters sighs and tears; they are greater storms and tempests than almanacs can report: this cannot be cunning in her; if it be, she makes a shower of rain as well as Jove.

— Antony and Cleopatra

American actress and model

I am not a victim of emotional conflicts. I am human.

— Marilyn: Her Life in Her Own Words

French novelist

One thinks of nothing,’ he continued; ‘the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.

— Madame Bovary

Dutch philosopher

I shall treat the nature and power of the Affects, and the power of the Mind over them, by the same Method by which, in the preceding parts, I treated God and the Mind, and I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a Question of lines, planes, and bodies.

— Complete Works

Swedish director and screenwriter

My pictures are always part of my thinking, and my emotions, tensions, dreams, desires.

French writer, art critic and journalist

Everything she heard, everything she saw seemed to be in disagreement with her own manner of understanding and feeling. To her, the sun did not appear red enough, the nights pale enough, the skies deep enough. Her fleeting conception of things and beings condemned her fatally to a perversion of her senses, to vagaries of the spirit and left her nothing but the torment of an unachieved longing, the torture of unfulfilled desires.

— Le Calvaire

Author, novelist, writer

There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison

— Persuasion

British philosopher and logician

We know too much and feel too little. At least, we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life springs.

— Authority and the Individual

President of the United States from 1861 to 1865

Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.

— Speeches and Writings, 1832-1858

26th President of the United States from 1901 to 1909

Most of the men had simple souls. They could relate facts, but they said very little about what they dimly felt.

— The Rough Riders

Roman poet (1st century BC)

Love conquers all. Let Love then smile at our defeat.

— The Eclogues

American boxer

When it comes to love, compassion, and other feelings of the heart, I am rich.

— The Soul of a Butterfly: Reflections on Life's Journey

French philosopher, author, and journalist

He was one of those rare people, rare in our town as elsewhere, who have the courage of their good feelings. What little he told of his personal life vouched for acts of kindness and a capacity for affection that no one in our times dares own to.

— The Plague