101 Emotion-Provoking Quotations

In a world overflowing with words, some stand out for their profound ability to touch the heart and stir the soul. These are the quotes that linger in our minds, offering solace, challenging our thoughts, and igniting inspiration. Whether whispered in quiet moments of reflection or boldly proclaimed to motivate change, these emotion-provoking quotations capture the essence of human experience in a way that nothing else can. In this carefully curated collection of the top 101 emotion-provoking quotations, we invite you to explore the power of words, each one a testament to the depth and diversity of our emotions. Prepare to be moved, challenged, and inspired as we delve into expressions of love, resilience, hope, and more, each thoughtfully selected to resonate deeply within.

1. “A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.” - Rabindranath Tagore

2. “Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.” - James Thurber

3. “I can wade Grief—Whole Pools of it—I'm used to that—But the least push of JoyBreaks up my feet—And I tip—drunken—Let no Pebble—smile—'Twas the New Liquor—That was all!” - Emily Dickinson

4. “We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail.” - David Sedaris

5. “The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience.” - John Cage

6. “I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.You never bake bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.Then it's like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won't be joking? And what would it look like? And how would that feel?When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.I spent my life learning to feel less.Every day I felt less.Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

7. “I hate when people ask what a book is about. People who read for plot, people who suck out the story like the cream filling in an Oreo, should stick to comic strips and soap operas. . . . Every book worth a damn is about emotions and love and death and pain. It's about words. It's about a man dealing with life. Okay?” - J.R. Moehringer

8. “Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.” - Audre Lorde

9. “Dandies, who – as you know - scorn all emotions as being beneath them, and do not believe, like that simpleton Goethe, that astonishment can ever be a proper feeling for the human mind.” - Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

10. “The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.” - Gore Vidal

11. “It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.” - Alain De Botton

12. “The only noise now was the rain, pattering softly with the magnificent indifference of nature for the tangled passions of humans.” - Sherwood Smith

13. “...your mind was seizing on something to try to make sense of the emotion... Can you see the power emotion has to distort our outlook? Makes you wonder, did you have a bad day, or did you make it a bad day?” - Brandon Mull

14. “I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.” - Albert Camus

15. “Love, in short is the most dangerous emotion human can experience” - V.C. Andrews

16. “In any case, perhaps the quest for data to support our actions gets overemphasized. After all, our emotions distinguish us. Art and poetry and music are from and to the human heart, as is, for many, our relationship with the land.' ~ Randy Morgenson” - Eric Blehm

17. “No justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.” - C.S. Lewis

18. “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.” - T.S. Eliot

19. “You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn't want you anymore that he is right -- that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Don't. It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn't be like that. Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? You go up top and what do you see? His head. The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, beacuse the clouds let him; they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him. You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself.” - Toni Morrison

20. “Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue. . . . ” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

21. “Don't be ashamed to weep; 'tis right to grieve. Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also. A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones is sealed inside to comfort us.” - Brian Jacques

22. “Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.” - Anita Shreve

23. “Anyhow, with their extraordinary gift for, and experience in, affairs of the heart from the double point of view, both of the man and of the woman it is not difficult to see that these people have a special work to do as reconcilers and interpreters of the two sexes to each other.” - Edward Carpenter

24. “Like two side to a coin, there are two sides to life: your reason and emotional facets.” - Ami Blackwelder

25. “When she came to her senses again she cut off all contact with him. It had not been easy, but she had steeled herself. The last time she saw him she was standing on a platform in the tunnelbana at Gamla Stan and he was sitting in the train on his way downtown. She had stared at him for a whole minute and decided that she did not have a grain of feeling left, because it would have been the same as bleeding to death. Fuck you.” - Stieg Larsson

26. “Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.” - Honoré de Balzac

27. “I can imagine no greater catastrophe than if I were mistaken, and the theory were correct that what I consider secondary instincts or drives are actually primary instincts! Because in that case the emotional plague would rest upon the support of a natural law while its archenemies, truth and sociality, would be relying upon unfounded ethics. Until now both lies and truth have taken recourse to ethics. But only lies have profited because they were able to appear under the guise of truth. Under these circumstances, egoism, theft, petty selfishness, slander, etc., would be the natural rule. (26.july.1943)” - Wilhelm Reich

28. “The "stiff, dead, retracted pelvis" is one of man's most frequent vegetative disturbances. It is responsible for lumbago as well as for hemorrhoidal disturbances. Elsewhere, we shall demonstrate an important connection between these disturbances and genital cancer in women, which is so common.Thus, the "deadning of the pelvis" has the same function as the deadening of the abdomen, i.e., to avoid feelings, particularly those of pleasure and anxiety.” - Wilhelm Reich

29. “It’s hardly ever that I am hurt by something in only one dimension.” - Ashly Lorenzana

30. “[M]y favorite teacher was explaining that you don't say but however. These are pleonasms: the use of more words than necessary to express an idea. There are times in life that are very but however.” - Stefano Benni

31. “There's no such thing as emotion.It's only body chemistry in action.” - Toba Beta

32. “Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.” - Toni Morrison

33. “Too much stress cannot be laid...upon the admonition that we seek so far as possible to live in the lives of other people. By sharing in the misfortunes of others, and rejoicing in their happiness, you add to your own emotional serenity and stability.” - Ralph Alfred Habas

34. “V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love.” - Jess C. Scott

35. “Maybe you could be mine / or maybe we’ll be entwined / aimless in this sexless foreplay.” - Jess C. Scott

36. “I suppose it’s not a social norm, and not a manly thing to do — to feel, discuss feelings. So that’s what I’m giving the finger to. Social norms and stuff…what good are social norms, really? I think all they do is project a limited and harmful image of people. It thus impedes a broader social acceptance of what someone, or a group of people, might actually be like.” - Jess C. Scott

37. “Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.” - George Eliot

38. “You learned to run from what you feel, and that's why you have nightmares. To deny is to invite madness. To accept is to control.” - Megan Chance

39. “Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.” - C.S. Lewis

40. “It was almost enough to make me feel emotion.” - Jeff Lindsay

41. “Tell me something. Do you believe in God?'Snow darted an apprehensive glance in my direction. 'What? Who still believes nowadays?''It isn't that simple. I don't mean the traditional God of Earth religion. I'm no expert in the history of religions, and perhaps this is nothing new--do you happen to know if there was ever a belief in an...imperfect God?''What do you mean by imperfect?' Snow frowned. 'In a way all the gods of the old religions were imperfect, considered that their attributes were amplified human ones. The God of the Old Testament, for instance, required humble submission and sacrifices, and and was jealous of other gods. The Greek gods had fits of sulks and family quarrels, and they were just as imperfect as mortals...''No,' I interrupted. 'I'm not thinking of a god whose imperfection arises out of the candor of his human creators, but one whose imperfection represents his essential characteristic: a god limited in his omniscience and power, fallible, incapable of foreseeing the consequences of his acts, and creating things that lead to horror. He is a...sick god, whose ambitions exceed his powers and who does not realize it at first. A god who has created clocks, but not the time they measure. He has created systems or mechanisms that serves specific ends but have now overstepped and betrayed them. And he has created eternity, which was to have measured his power, and which measures his unending defeat.'Snow hesitated, but his attitude no longer showed any of the wary reserve of recent weeks:'There was Manicheanism...''Nothing at all to do with the principles of Good and Evil,' I broke in immediately. 'This god has no existence outside of matter. He would like to free himself from matter, but he cannot...'Snow pondered for a while:'I don't know of any religion that answers your description. That kind of religion has never been...necessary. If i understand you, and I'm afraid I do, what you have in mind is an evolving god, who develops in the course of time, grows, and keeps increasing in power while remaining aware of his powerlessness. For your god, the divine condition is a situation without a goal. And understanding that, he despairs. But isn't this despairing god of yours mankind, Kelvin? Is it man you are talking about, and that is a fallacy, not just philosophically but also mystically speaking.'I kept on:'No, it's nothing to do with man. man may correspond to my provisional definition from some point of view, but that is because the definition has a lot of gaps. Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. Man can serve is age or rebel against it, but the target of his cooperation or rebellion comes to him from outside. If there was only a since human being in existence, he would apparently be able to attempt the experiment of creating his own goals in complete freedom--apparently, because a man not brought up among other human beings cannot become a man. And the being--the being I have in mind--cannot exist in the plural, you see? ...Perhaps he has already been born somewhere, in some corner of the galaxy, and soon he will have some childish enthusiasm that will set him putting out one star and lighting another. We will notice him after a while...''We already have,' Snow said sarcastically. 'Novas and supernovas. According to you they are candles on his altar.''If you're going to take what I say literally...'...Snow asked abruptly:'What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?''I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose--a god who simply is.” - Stanisław Lem

42. “He was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart.” - Pat Conroy

43. “Emotion is what counts: it is more valuable than anything.” - Samael Aun Weor

44. “There is a sense in which all cognition can be said to be motivated. One is motivated to understand the world, to be in touch with reality, to remove doubt, etc. Alternately one might say that motivation is an aspect of cognition itself. Nevertheless, motives like wanting to find the truth, not wanting to be mistaken, etc., tend to align with epistemic goals in a way that many other commitments do not. As we have begun to see, all reasoning may be inextricable from emotion. But if a person's primary motivation in holding a belief is to hue to a positive state of mind, to mitigate feelings of anxiety, embarrassment, or guilt for instance. This is precisely what we mean by phrases like "wishful thinking", and "self-deception". Such a person will of necessity be less responsive to valid chains of evidence and argument that run counter to the beliefs he is seeking to maintain. To point out non-epistemic motives in an others view of the world, therefore, is always a criticism, as it serves to cast doubt on a persons connection to the world as it is.” - Sam Harris

45. “Emotion is always multiplied in the art of a person who doesn't really show much emotion. It once expanded deep within his hidden soul, and following the downplay his audience is blown away.” - Criss Jami

46. “There is a master way with words which is not learned but is instead developed: a deaf man develops exceptional vision, a blind man exceptional hearing, a silent man, when given a piece of paper...” - Criss Jami

47. “A good fragrance is really a powerful cocktail of memories and emotion.” - Jeffrey Stepakoff

48. “Wishes and fears are illusions, Dil Bahadur, not realities. You must practice detachment.” - Isabel Allende

49. “I might have been made of metal once, but not anymore. Like Pinocchio, I'd turned into a real girl. So far it sucked. But there was nothing I could do about it.” - Natalie Standiford

50. “Dickens writes that an event, "began to be forgotten, as most affairs are, when wonder, having no fresh food to support it, dies away of itself.” - Charles Dickens

51. “Emotion as well as reason belongs to the very stuff of history.” - Beryl Smalley

52. “The job of a writer is not to convey emotion but to invoke it.” - Eric T. Benoit

53. “Anger is a brief madness.” - Horace

54. “Lonely people have enthusiasms which cannot always be explained. When something strikes them as funny, the intensity and length of their laughter mirrors the depth of their loneliness, and they are capable of laughing like hyenas. When something touches their emotions, it runs through them like Paul Revere, awakening feelings that gather into great armies.” - Mark Helprin

55. “The best measure of a spiritual life is not its ecstasies but its obedience.” - Oswald Chambers

56. “In the world of the Machiguenga, sadness could be equated with anger, and anger was a perilous emotion, by which a foreigner could lose his life.” - Tahir Shah

57. “No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.” - Barbara W. Tuchman

58. “..I find it incredible impossible not to cry when I hear Stevie Nicks's "Landslide," especially the lyric: "I've been afraid of changing, because I've built my life around you." I think a good test to see if a human is actually a robot/android/cylon is to have them listen to this song lyric and study their reaction. If they don't cry, you should stab them through the heart. You will find a fusebox.” - Mindy Kaling

59. “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” - Sigmund Freud

60. “Imagination paints a charming view of the future, conveniently adapted to the demands of our current emotion.” - John Armstrong

61. “Listen, we got two stiffs and a river of red in a villa in Herne Bay...” - Rhys Chamberlain

62. “We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.” - H.P. Lovecraft

63. “I've loved you for a long time, ' she said. 'But there was always something holding me back. Maybe it was that I was afraid of an emotion that was so consuming. It still frightens me,' she admitted in a whisper. Tamani chuckled. 'If it makes you feel any better, it scares the daylights out of me on a regular basis.” - Aprilynne Pike

64. “Art is the overflow of emotion into action.” - Brian Raif

65. “There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions.” - Louise Erdrich

66. “Were we incapable of empathy – of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own – then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.” - Peter Singer

67. “I have cried even when the laugh did choke me. But no more think that I am all sorry when I cry, for the laugh he come just the same. Keep it always with you that laughter who knock at your door and say, ‘May I come in?’ is not true laughter. No! He is a king, and he come when and how he like. He ask no person, he choose no time of suitability. He say, ‘I am here.” - Bram Stoker

68. “Deep within I'm shaken by the violence of existing for only you...” - Sarah McLachlan

69. “Instead of letting our emotions run amok with our minds, we can use our minds as tools that allow us to build realities that serve us better,and we attract what we are meant to attract because we are aware and self-empowered enough to choose most of the time.” - jay woodman

70. “The more I drive myself into the depth of my inside, the more things come up to my vision, visibly or invisibly... I even do not know if I am seeing them with my eye or with my mind. I just need to copy them on my canvases. But this mental process is always overwhelming. I often have hard time to deal with my emotion on this state. You could call this depression on surface? But actually, so many 're-birth' and 'reform' are going on on my thoughts, inspiration, philosophy...etc in the underwater. I believe this struggle make my art real. My art always comes from my emotion.” - Hiroko Sakai

71. “The spirit is liquid and easily flows and surges, sinking and boiling with the currents of circumstances. Bringing every thought into the obedience of Christ is no easy-chair job.” - Elisabeth Elliot

72. “I'm numb and I'm tired. Too much has happened today. I feel as if I'd been out in a pounding rain for forty-eight hours without an umbrella or a coat. I'm soaked to the skin with emotion.” - Ray Bradbury

73. “emotion is first of all and in principle an accident” - Jean-Paul Sartre

74. “The written word can make one pause and contemplate. It can make a reader sigh to dream or question a belief in considerable depth.  But all of that is nothing if those words fail to touch the heart and make one feel.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

75. “If the landscape of human emotion were to exist in country, it would be in Italy." ~Lisa Fantino/Amalfi Blue” - Lisa Fantino

76. “Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.” - Jean Cocteau

77. “The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” - T. S. Eliot

78. “Krystal flung herself violently off the chair, away from her mother. She was surprised to feel warm liquid flowing down her cheeks, and thought confusedly of blood, but it was tears, only tears, clear and shining on her fingertips when she wiped them away.” - J.K. Rowling

79. “Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master;--obey!” - Mary Shelley

80. “When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.” - Robert McKee

81. “Deus ex machina not only erases all meaning and emotion, it's an insult to the audience. Each of us knows we must choose and act, for better or worse, to determine the meaning of our lives...Deus ex machina is an insult because it is a lie.” - Robert McKee

82. “I needed to know that there was such a thing as love and that it brought smiles and joy in its wake.” - Elie Wiesel

83. “You can't plan someone else's future, and I fully plan to become someone else.” - Stevie Mikayne

84. “It was the first honest emotional connection I'd had in a while. So I immediately panicked and had to leave.” - Candace Bushnell

85. “Physical intimacy isn’t and can never be an effective substitute for emotional intimacy.” - John Green

86. “If we deny the need for thought, Moneo, as some do, we lose the powers of reflection; we cannot define what our senses report. If we deny the flesh, we unwheel the vehicle which bears us. But if we deny emotion, we lose all touch with our internal universe. It was emotions which I missed the most.” - Frank Herbert

87. “Emotions can get in the way of truth-seeking. People do not process information in a neutral way.” - Cass R. Sunstein

88. “With hardly any effort at all, she made me feel special. Just like all the other people she toyed with.” - Neal Shusterman

89. “You must remember this feeling, Jon.The feeling of being happy. It doesn't happen often but when it does, you must grab it with both hands and hold it close. Let it overwhelm you. Don'tover analyse any emotion. But remember it. Always remember it.” - pleasefindthis

90. “Dreams can twist your emotions like no reality can.” - Neal Shusterman

91. “Emotion is not simply an overplus of feeling; it is life lived at white-heat, a state of wonder. To lose wonder is to lose the true element of religion.” - Oswald Chambers

92. “In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels” - Daniel Goleman

93. “She knows what it is to be sad and miserable, but those emotions are almost enjoyable. They throw moments of happiness and laughter into sharper relief.” - Simon Mawer

94. “It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own.” - George Eliot

95. “Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals - is optimal for brains. ... Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains.” - David Eagleman

96. “Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril.” - Andrew Motion

97. “If we indulge in inordinate affection, anger, anxiety, God holds us responsible; but He also insists that we have to be passionately filled with the right emotions.” - Oswald Chambers

98. “Love is not an idea, not a feeling, not a sensation, not a sentiment, not a passion, not even an emotion. It is becoming and being not... Ultimate nothingness! Complete self-annihilation!” - Raheel Farooq

99. “Begin to see the violence around you; begin to see the violence within you.” - Bryant McGill

100. “There's not one good thought in that place. There's nothing but waste and want. I can feel his selfish cravings and an abyss of secrets I hope to never know.” - Steve V. Cypert

101. “A man like you is a god, not just a machine covered with skin, but a theater where fine feelings sprout and grow-and feelings are all that matters, as far as I'm concerned. Is a feeling anything but an entire world poured into a thought?” - Honoré de Balzac