Emotions Quotes

It is not our exalted feelings, it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.

Elizabeth Bowen

The evidence of the emotions, save in cases where it has strong objective support, is really no evidence at all, for every recognizable emotion has its opposite, and if one points one way then another points the other way. Thus the familiar argument that there is an instinctive desire for immortality, and that this desire proves it to be a fact, becomes puerile when it is recalled that there is also a powerful and widespread fear of annihilation, and that this fear, on the same principle proves that there is nothing beyond the grave. Such childish proofs are typically theological, and they remain theological even when they are adduced by men who like to flatter themselves by believing that they are scientific gents...

H. L. Mencken

The prevailing attunement is at any given time the condition of our openness for perceiving and dealing with what we encounter; the pitch at which our existence is vibrating. What we call moods, feelings, affects, emotions, and states are the concrete modes in which the possibilities for being open are fulfilled. They are at the same time the modes in which this perceptive openness can be narrowed, distorted, or closed off.

Medard Boss

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

Bertrand Russell

Sentimentality is the only sentiment that rubs you the wrong way.

W. Somerset Maugham

Sentiment is the poetry of the imagination.

Alphonse de Lamartine

Our emotions are only incidents in the effort to keep day and night together.

TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot

Answer me, you who believe that animals are only machines. Has nature arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in order for it not to have any at all?

Voltaire

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.

George Santayana

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.

George Santayana

If you would have me weep, you must first of all feel grief yourself.

Horace

Emotional intelligence, more than any other factor, more than I.Q. or expertise, accounts for 85% to 90% of success at work... I.Q. is a threshold competence. You need it, but it doesn't make you a star. Emotional intelligence can.

Warren Bennis

He understood the tone of voice instinctively, as he always had; it was his greatest gift, to know emotions even better than the person feeling them.

Orson Scott Card

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

Herman Melville

A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action... with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.

Aristotle

If one uses one's intellect to become master over the unlimited emotions, it may produce a sorry and diversionary effect upon the intellect.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, AllT

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

Every time a resolve or fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing fruit, it is worse than a chance lost; it works to hinder future emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.

William James

Grief helps you come to grips with the loss of a loved one. Guilt helps you make better moral decisions or bring you to apologise for a wrongdoing. In proper doses, these types of negative emotions are necessary and healthy.

Stephen Richards

An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man's reason and his emotions

Ayn Rand, (interview), "Playboy"