Emotions are a powerful force that shape our experiences and influence the way we see the world. They can inspire us, challenge us, and help us connect with others on a deeper level. To celebrate the complexity and beauty of our feelings, we’ve gathered a curated collection of the top 103 quotes about emotions. Whether you’re seeking comfort, insight, or inspiration, these words offer a thoughtful reflection on the many facets of the human heart.
1. “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence.” - Marianne Moore
2. “Anything that feels good couldn't possibly be bad.” - angelina jolie
3. “Why are you leaving me?He wrote, I do not know how to live.I do not know either but I am trying.I do not know how to try.There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt me” - Jonathan Safran Foer
4. “Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.” - Audre Lorde
5. “Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.” - Edith Sitwell
6. “Feelings do not grow old along with the body. Feelings form part of a world I don’t know, but it’s a world where there’s no time, so space, no frontiers.” - Paulo Coelho
7. “One of the most frustrating words in the human language, as far as I could tell, was love.So much meaning attached to this one little word. People bandied it about freely, using it todescribe their attachments to possessions, pets, vacation destinations, and favorite foods. In thesame breath they then applied this word to the person they considered most important in theirlives. Wasn’t that insulting? Shouldn’t there be some other term to describe deeper emotion?” - Alexandra Adornetto
8. “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
9. “I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.” - Isaac Asimov
10. “The only noise now was the rain, pattering softly with the magnificent indifference of nature for the tangled passions of humans.” - Sherwood Smith
11. “It was hard to feel the right emotions at the right times. They didn’t come at all when you set a place for them, and they sacked when you weren’t ready, when you were just innocently flossing your teeth, for example, or eating a bowl of cereal. ” - Ann Brashares
12. “The cases described in this section (The Fear of Being) may seem extreme, but I have become convinced that they are not as uncommon as one would think. Beneath the seemingly rational exterior of our lives is a fear of insanity. We dare not question the values by which we live or rebel against the roles we play for fear of putting our sanity into doubt. We are like the inmates of a mental institution who must accept its inhumanity and insensitivity as caring and knowledgeableness if they hope to be regarded as sane enough to leave. The question who is sane and who is crazy was the theme of the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. The question, what is sanity? was clearly asked in the play Equus.The idea that much of what we do is insane and that if we want to be sane, we must let ourselves go crazy has been strongly advanced by R.D. Laing. In the preface to the Pelican edition of his book The Divided Self, Laing writes: "In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all of our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal." And in the same preface: "Thus I would wish to emphasize that our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities; that many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities."Wilhelm Reich had a somewhat similar view of present-day human behavior. Thus Reich says, "Homo normalis blocks off entirely the perception of basic orgonotic functioning by means of rigid armoring; in the schizophrenic, on the other hand, the armoring practically breaks down and thus the biosystem is flooded with deep experiences from the biophysical core with which it cannot cope." The "deep experiences" to which Reich refers are the pleasurable streaming sensations associated with intense excitation that is mainly sexual in nature. The schizophrenic cannot cope with these sensations because his body is too contracted to tolerate the charge. Unable to "block" the excitation or reduce it as a neurotic can, and unable to "stand" the charge, the schizophrenic is literally "driven crazy."But the neurotic does not escape so easily either. He avoids insanity by blocking the excitation, that is, by reducing it to a point where there is no danger of explosion, or bursting. In effect the neurotic undergoes a psychological castration. However, the potential for explosive release is still present in his body, although it is rigidly guarded as if it were a bomb. The neurotic is on guard against himself, terrified to let go of his defenses and allow his feelings free expression. Having become, as Reich calls him, "homo normalis," having bartered his freedom and ecstasy for the security of being "well adjusted," he sees the alternative as "crazy." And in a sense he is right. Without going "crazy," without becoming "mad," so mad that he could kill, it is impossible to give up the defenses that protect him in the same way that a mental institution protects its inmates from self-destruction and the destruction of others.” - Alexander Lowen
13. “Love, in short is the most dangerous emotion human can experience” - V.C. Andrews
14. “My head’ll explode if I continue with this escapism.” - Jess C. Scott
15. “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
16. “Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” - M. Scott Peck
17. “The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.” - Stendhal
18. “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
19. “Then, whenever I feel the sun on my face, I will think of you, " I told him. "You will always be with me, Bill. Because of all I have felt for you, and all I have learned from you.” - Cornelia Maude Spelman
20. “Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.” - Anita Shreve
21. “In this world of numbness and information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed.” - Patrick Ness
22. “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
23. “No one ought even to desert a woman after throwing her a heap of gold in her distress! He ought to love her forever! You are young, only twenty-one, and kind and upright and fine. You'll ask me how a woman can take money from a man. Oh, God, isn't it natural to share everything with the one we owe all our happiness to? When one has given everything, how can one quibble about a mere portion of it? Money is important only when feeling has ceased. Isn't one bound for life? How can you foresee separation when you think someone loves you? When a man swears eternal love--how can there be any separate concerns in that case?” - Honoré de Balzac
24. “Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.” - Honoré de Balzac
25. “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
26. “It’s hardly ever that I am hurt by something in only one dimension.” - Ashly Lorenzana
27. “[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
28. “¿Por qué? ¿Acaso crees que los demonios no podemos sentir afecto? Somos seres racionales y experimentamos emociones complejas. Si los ángeles pueden matar, ¿por qué nosotrso no podemos amar?” - Laura Gallego García
29. “It's like an emotional dance party: Some dances will be your favorites -- others more awkward or difficult to learn. Some will be boring or make you mad. some you will wish you never needed to do again. But AHA! You think. I will dance all the dances I can.” - SARK
30. “The right thing was confusing, and difficult, and sometimes Jason wondered if it was in fact a nonexistent ideal, like heaven or the American dream. There was no right thing. You did what you did for whatever reasons occurred to you at the time, depending on whichever emotion was running thickest in your blood. Your desire and fear and adrenaline and longing. You made your choice and came up with the reasons later.” - Thomas Mullen
31. “Our tears are precious, necessary, and part of what make us such endearing creatures.” - David Richo
32. “Maybe you could be mine / or maybe we’ll be entwined / aimless in this sexless foreplay.” - Jess C. Scott
33. “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
34. “I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged.” - Koren Zailckas
35. “Emotional baggage,” which is carried over from the past, colors our perceptions. Likewise, past conclusions and beliefs, based on reasoning that may or may not have been accurate, also tint our perception of reality. Retaining our capacity for reason is common sense, but definite conclusions and beliefs keep us from seeing life as it really is at any given moment.Emotional reactions can be unreasonable, and reason can be flawed. It’s difficult to have deep confidence in either one, especially when they’re often at war with each other. But the universal mind exists in the instant, in a moment beyond time, and it sees the universe as it literally is. It’s the universe perceiving itself. It is, moreover, something we can have absolute confidence in, and with that confidence, we can maintain a genuinely positive attitude.” - H.E. Davey
36. “We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling.” - T.E. Lawrence
37. “What makes and experience a memory is when we share with someone, the emotions we felt” - Jeremy Aldana
38. “He tasted passion. He tasted emotion. He tasted a world he’d never imagined, one he could never enter. It was right there in front of him, suddenly open to him. Unexpected. Exciting. Scary.” - Christine Feehan
39. “If the sum of living be love's fee,Tremble. You are my one eternity.” - Laura Benet
40. “Man is a play station whereas a woman will always remain at an emotion station.” - Santosh Kalwar
41. “To want to tackle everything rationally is irrational.” - Ilyas Kassam
42. “He was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart.” - Pat Conroy
43. “Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won’t hurt you. It will only help. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, “All right, it’s just fear, I don’t have to let it control me. I see it for what it is".” - Mitch Albom
44. “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
45. “To me it seems that too many young women of this time share the same creed. 'Live, laugh, love, be nothing but happy, experience everything, et cetera et cetera.' How monotonous, how useless this becomes. What about the honors of Joan of Arc, Beauvoir, Stowe, Xena, Princess Leia, or women that would truly fight for something other than just their own emotions?” - Criss Jami
46. “A good fragrance is really a powerful cocktail of memories and emotion.” - Jeffrey Stepakoff
47. “I never heard sound and thrill of my painful heart until that very day she touched it.” - Santosh Kalwar
48. “There was still one response, the greatest, that she had missed. She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth... To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his... No, not Francisco d'Anconia, not Hank Rearden, not any man she had ever met or admired... A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience.” - Ayn Rand
49. “In politics, Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck. Daffy's always going berserk, jumping up and down, yelling. Bugs's got that sly smile, like he always knows what's up, like nothing can ruffle him.” - Jeff Greenfield
50. “Wishes and fears are illusions, Dil Bahadur, not realities. You must practice detachment.” - Isabel Allende
51. “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
52. “Logic in all its infinite potential, is the most dangerous of vices. For one can always find some form of logic to justify his action, and rest comfortably in the assurance, that what he did abides by reason. That is why, for us brittle beings, Intention is the only true weapon of peace.” - Ilyas Kassam
53. “The job of a writer is not to convey emotion but to invoke it.” - Eric T. Benoit
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. “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” - Sigmund Freud
59. “Listen, we got two stiffs and a river of red in a villa in Herne Bay...” - Rhys Chamberlain
60. “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
61. “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
62. “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
63. “He had no ideal world of dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him.” - George Eliot
64. “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
65. “People say 'I love Artists', but what they really know about Artists? They've ever thought about sharing the real madness with us? I believe those extreme passions/emotions in me separated from the real world is the sauce to pull out the inspirations out of me that touch the core of people's hearts, which is usually wandering about deep inside of you unconsciously covered with the social taboo called 'common sense'.” - Hiroko Sakai
66. “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
67. “A politician is not allowed to get too emotional in public, so what he does is drop subtle hints that, over time, cause the public to get emotional. Once the same emotions are generated by enough people, the politician can use it to steer the public in his desired direction. Fear is an emotion that is often used this way. A smart politician knows that if he can create fear in enough people, those people will give up what they truly want in order to give the politician what he says they need.” - Victor L. Wooten
68. “I never thought meeting you would be this boring. I thought we'd put our Italian emotion into gear and scream the place down. I never expected indifference.” - Melina Marchetta
69. “Painting is a great outlet for those inner emotions you cannot get out any other way.” - Carol Brearley
70. “She could and had faced an armed laser in the hands of a mad mutant mercenary with less fear than she faced such unswerving emotion...” - J.D. Robb
71. “one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald
72. “there are some some times in life where you have to let your feelings go and do what must be done” - Evan Meekins
73. “Feeling sorry for myself was an art.” - Benjamin Alire Saenz
74. “These past two days, I’ve seen a fire in your eyes that I never have before. Granted, it’s mostly anger and frustration, but it’s still emotion.” - Rebecca Donovan
75. “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
76. “Okay, if this is what falling in love feels like, someone please kill me now. (Not literally, overzealousreaders.) But it was all too much—too much emotion, too much happiness, too much longing, perhapstoo much ice cream…” - James Patterson
77. “As to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.” - G.K. Chesterton
78. “Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.” - Jean Cocteau
79. “For Sayonara, literally translated, 'Since it must be so,' of all the good-bys I have heard is the most beautiful. Unlike the Auf Wiedershens and Au revoirs, it does not try to cheat itself by any bravado 'Till we meet again,' any sedative to postpone the pain of separation. It does not evade the issue like the sturdy blinking Farewell. Farewell is a father's good-by. It is - 'Go out in the world and do well, my son.' It is encouragement and admonition. It is hope and faith. But it passes over the significance of the moment; of parting it says nothing. It hides its emotion. It says too little. While Good-by ('God be with you') and Adios say too much. They try to bridge the distance, almost to deny it. Good-by is a prayer, a ringing cry. 'You must not go - I cannot bear to have you go! But you shall not go alone, unwatched. God will be with you. God's hand will over you' and even - underneath, hidden, but it is there, incorrigible - 'I will be with you; I will watch you - always.' It is a mother's good-by. But Sayonara says neither too much nor too little. It is a simple acceptance of fact. All understanding of life lies in its limits. All emotion, smoldering, is banked up behind it. But it says nothing. It is really the unspoken good-by, the pressure of a hand, 'Sayonara.” - Anne Morrow Lindbergh
80. “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
81. “A concrete love is a mass of emotion formed into a compound mixture of affection, care, desire and expectation.” - Munia Khan
82. “When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.” - Robert McKee
83. “I needed to know that there was such a thing as love and that it brought smiles and joy in its wake.” - Elie Wiesel
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. “Emotions can get in the way of truth-seeking. People do not process information in a neutral way.” - Cass R. Sunstein
86. “True beauty cannot fail to move the beholder” - Jocelyn Murray
87. “But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing. For now, there is only a homestead built of trash and scraps, at the edge of a broken city, just beyond a towering city dump; and our arrival-hungry, and half-frozen, to a place of food and water and walls that keep out the brutal winds. This, for us, is heaven.” - Lauren Oliver
88. “Booze makes you stupid and like it. It makes you fall around and not care. And eventually, stupid is the only way you know how to be. Cocaine makes you feel important, that life matters, that you matter. That the music is better than it really is. That every conversation is profound and that all pretenses have been stripped away. Ecstasy makes you dance all night and love your friends so much, in a way that you've never been able to tell them about before. Acid makes you see pretty colours and makes things breathe. But Sadness, there is nothing like Sadness.” - pleasefindthis
89. “Dreams can twist your emotions like no reality can.” - Neal Shusterman
90. “When two people respect each other, the ability to be vulnerable and to reveal hurt feelings can create a powerful emotional connection that is the source of real intimacy and friendship.” - David D. Burns
91. “Some people call me sick and twisted. I feel that I'm neither; I am instead a Romantic.” - Kenzie Western
92. “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
93. “A gentle, warm, sweet pain spreads through my chest at those words.” - Aleksandr Voinov
94. “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
95. “Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril.” - Andrew Motion
96. “The supernatural world was like an onion. You peel back the layers, only to find more layers, on and on, hopelessly trying to reach the mysterious core. Then you start crying.” - Carrie Vaughne
97. “A sentimentalist is one who delights to have high and devout emotions stirred whilst reading in an arm-chair, or in a prayer meeting, but he never translates his emotions into action. Consequently a sentimentalist is usually callous, self-centred and selfish, because the emotions he likes to have stirred do not cost him anything.” - Oswald Chambers
98. “Emotions unreel in her like spools of cotton.” - Louise Erdrich
99. “Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west.The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire.” - Louise Erdrich
100. “Begin to see the violence around you; begin to see the violence within you.” - Bryant McGill
101. “Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling.” - Alfred North Whitehead
102. “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
103. “No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. but they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.” - C.S. Lewis
