112 Quotes About Emotions

Emotions are the invisible threads that connect us all, weaving through our daily experiences and influencing our perceptions, actions, and relationships. They have the power to uplift us with joy, weigh us down with sorrow, or inspire us with the myriad subtleties in between. To help us navigate this rich tapestry of feelings, we can turn to the wisdom of others. In this carefully curated collection, you'll find 112 quotes that delve into the complexity of emotions—each offering insight, comfort, or a fresh perspective. Whether you're seeking understanding or inspiration, these reflections on the human heart will resonate with anyone who has ever felt profoundly moved by the world around them.

1. “One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.” - Gustave Flaubert

2. “When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives. And we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures.” - George Eliot

3. “Don't allow your mind to tell your heart what to do. The mind gives up easily” - Paulo Coelho

4. “The eye--it cannot choose but see;We cannot bid the ear be still;Our bodies feel, where'er they be,Against or with our will.” - William Wordsworth

5. “Writing feels safer somehow. I can catch myself before I say the wrong thing.” - Hillary Frank

6. “Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, "Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody." ... [My dark side says,] I am no good... I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the "Beloved." Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.” - Henri J.M. Nouwen

7. “To ignore, repress, or dismiss our feelings is to fail to listen to the stirrings of the Spirit within our emotional life. Jesus listened. In John's Gospel we are told that Jesus was moved with the deepest emotions (11:33)... The gospel portrait of the beloved Child of Abba is that of a man exquisitely attuned to His emotions and uninhibited in expressing them. The Son of Man did not scorn of reject feelings as fickle and unreliable. They were sensitive antennae to which He listened carefully and through which He perceived the will of His Father for congruent speech and action.” - Brennan Manning

8. “Where loyalty bound creatures together, they became something larger, something new and whole and inexplicable.” - Orson Scott Card

9. “you mean machines are like humans?"I shook my head. "No, not like humans. With machines the feeling is, well, more finite. It doesn't go any further. With humans it's different. The feeling is always changing. Like if you love somebody, the love is always shifting or wavering. It's always questioning or inflating or disappearing or denying or hurting. And the thing is, you can't do anything about it, you can't control it. With my Subaru, it's not so complicated.” - Haruki Murakami

10. “Part of the problem with the word 'disabilities' is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can't feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren't able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities.” - Fred Rogers

11. “I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.” - Jodi Picoult

12. “You're not me. You can't feel like I feel.""I can feel.""No you can't. You just choose not to feel or something and everything's fine.""It's not fine. It's just not so bad.” - John Fowles

13. “No one knows how another person feels in private.” - Whitney Otto

14. “Emotions come and go and can't be controlled so there's no reason to worry about them. That in the end, people should be judged by their actions since in the end it was actions that defined everyone.” - Nicholas Sparks

15. “If sexuality is one dimension of our ability to live passionately in the world then in cutting off our sexual feelings we diminish our overall power to feel know and value deeply.” - Judith Plaskow

16. “My survival was up to me. I had nothing and I had no one. What I did have, I told myself, was my mind, my imagination, my memory, my feelings, my spirit. These were important and powerful things.” - John Marsden

17. “I didn't know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only think I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt like I could see through t something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way.” - Sue Monk Kidd

18. “Unlike my mother, my father does not cry quietly. His wails roll out like a wave of pain, and I scramble to roll up my window. My mother cannot hear that. I cannot bear to hear it myself. I am not used to my father's crying. I've had no time to harden my heart against him.” - Margaret Peterson Haddix

19. “Don't tell me anymore. You should have your dream, as the old woman told you to. I understand how you feel, but if you put those feelings into words they will turn into lies. (from Thailand)” - Haruki Murakami

20. “There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.” - George Eliot

21. “It was a limitation of human consciousness: We live only in the future and past, we cannot perceive now. Now occupies no space, a hypothetical gap between future and past. Only an exceptional few could feel now athletes and jazzmen and, yes, thieves...” - William Landay

22. “Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.” - Oscar Wilde

23. “Smiles and tears are so alike with me, they are neither of them confined to any particular feelings: I often cry when I am happy, and smile when I am sad.” - Anne Brontë

24. “My stepfather, John O'Hara, was the goodest man there was. He was not a man of many words, but of carefully chosen ones. He was the one parent who didn't try to fix me. One night I sat on his lap in his chair by the woodstove, sobbing. He just held me quietly and then asked only, "What does it feel like?" It was the first time I was prompted to articulate it. I thought about it, then said, "I feel homesick." That still feels like the most accurate description - I felt homesick, but I was home.” - Sarah Silverman

25. “When she cried, he would say, "there is nothing wrong with crying. Your feelings tell you who are. They tell what is important. Don't ever be ashamed of them.” - Terry Brooks

26. “As adults, we hvae many inhibitions against crying. We feel it is an expression of weakness, or femininity or of childishness. The person who is afraid to cry is afraid of pleasure. This is because the person who is afraid to cry holds himself together rigidly so that he won't cry; that is, the rigid person is as afraid of pleasure as he is afraid to cry. In a situation of pleasure he will become anxious. As his tensions relax he will begin to tremble and shake, and he will attempt to control this trembling so as not to break down in tears. His anxiety is nothing more than the conflict between his desire to let go and his fear of letting go. This conflict will arise whenever the pleasure is strong enough to threaten his rigidity.Since rigidity develops as a means to block out painful sensations, the release of rigidity or the restoration of the natural motility of the body will bring these painful sensations to the fore. Somewhere in his unconscious the neurotic individual is aware that pleasure can evoke the repressed ghosts of the past. It could be that such a situation is responsible for the adage "No pleasure without pain.” - Alexander Lowen

27. “Profondamente sospirò e si gettò - c'era nei suoi gesti una passione che merita la parola - sul nudo suolo ai piedi della quercia. Godeva nel sentire, sotto l'effimera apparenza dell'estate, la spina dorsale della terra; ché tale era per lui la dura radice della quercia, oppure - l'immagine seguendo l'immagine - era il dorso d'un gran destriero che cavalcava; o la tolda di una nave in preda alle onde; qualsiasi cosa, insomma, purché solida, poiché egli anelava a qualche cosa cui ormeggiare il suo fluttuante cuore; quel cuore che ogni sera in quella stagione, quando s'aggirava per le campagne, pareva ricolmo di aromatiche e languide sensazioni d'amore. Alla quercia egli lo legò.” - Virginia Woolf

28. “No pain, no gain." You can hear the phrase in the world of physical exercise and conditioning. Muscles that feel no pain are probably getting neither stronger, nor more flexible. It presents an analogy for the exercise of the heart. Those who run the risk of genuine love alone must worry about emotional pain. The more friends; the more good-byes - and the more wakes to attend, the more graves to visit, the more deaths to share. Those who truly live life to the fullest will bear the full cup of suffering. Only those who are willing to pay the price in pain and anguish find life full to the brim. Happy people also suffer; they are no more lucky than the rest. They create their own happiness. That's the rule of thumb.Some thumbs, however, don't seem to rule very well. Slogans and catch-words, for all their conventional wisdom, fail to carry the whole weight of truth; they leave too much room for false inferences. "No pain, no gain" may leave one with nothing but pain - an intolerable amount of it. There is simply no guarantee that pain will bring gain, that hardship will yield happiness, that suffering will make one a better person. It may; but it's not inevitable.” - Robert Dykstra

29. “...бывают в жизни человека редкие моменты, когда возникает в душе жажда откровенности и речей, хотя после часто и стыдно бывает, особенно когда догадаетесь, что вас слушали без сочувствия. "Эк меня разносило! - думается увлёкшемуся человеку. - Опять, опять не утерпел!.. Зачем было высказываться до таких подробностей? К чему эти вопли, которые не нормальное же моё состояние? Разве первый раз ощутил я прилив этих чувств? Надобно смотреть на других: все спокойны, не увидишь одушевлённого лица - все, как доска, без выражения, не услышишь сильно поднятой ноты в голосе. Мало ли что вчера было больно, нестерпимо, кричать хотелось, а сегодня больно от неумеренного крику". Но напрасно человек заклинает горячее слово и откровенную беседу; когда созреет вопль душевный, радостный или печальный, опять явится откровенность, потому что это закон физилогический и психический, это закон природы. Есть какой-то хмель в откровенности; она одуряет и увлекает; и как рад человек, когда найдёт другого человека и когда он, оглядевшись, уверится, что над его мыслью никто не стоит, запрёт двери - и тут-то польются речи рекой, и тогда именно можно заговориться до охмеления. Поговорить хоть, если нельзя делать; хоть потихоньку, если нельзя вслух. Кто не испытывал этого блаженства речи?..- Н.Г. Помяловский "Мещанское счастье” - Н.Г. Помяловский

30. “...всё мертвое, всё прошлое, всё, что больше не встретится в жизни нашей, - не возбуждает злости.Егор Иваныч Молотов- Н.Г. Помяловский "Мещанское счастье” - Н.Г. Помяловский

31. “‎"Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights.” - John Wooden

32. “When I write, I make discoveries about my feelings.” - Gail Carson Levine

33. “Feelings are not supposed to be logical. Dangerous is the man who has rationalized his emotions.” - David Borenstein

34. “I did not like this feeling of having feelings.” - Jeff Lindsay

35. “(Quoted by Thomas Carlyle) The rude man requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect.” - Thomas Carlyle

36. “If you want to be able to recall everything and anything in detail,then you need to be strong enough to feel all bad memories as well.” - Toba Beta

37. “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

38. “Before everything, I used to do this thing when I was upset-I used to take all my feelings and push them down inside me. It was like they were garbage and I was compacting it to get more in. I felt like I could keep pushing all my feelings down into my socks and I wouldn't have to worry about them. I don't think I do that anymore.” - Brent Runyon

39. “Let your feelings flow freely, accept each one of them, know that they are your feelings and no one is to blame for them. Live from your essence and watch your feelings flow; only when you accept them can you understand the story of your life.” - Patricia Selbert

40. “If we are always pushing away from feelings that we condemn as wrong, painful, or ugly, we are also pushing away from the very energy that can bring us incredible joy and ecstasy.” - Shaeri Richards

41. “When I die I hope it may be said:'Her suffering was black, but her books were read'.” - Shannon Alder

42. “Feelings are your guide. Trust your feelings and learn to express them, and do not blame anyone for how you feel. Be yourself, observe yourself. Look to understand any crisis you have been in or will be in.” - Barbara Marciniak

43. “So, what's up with you and Damian?" Helena asks."What do you mean?" I can feel the hear of a blush coloring on my cheeks. I can't ever seem to not show how I feel. It's becoming pretty annoying.” - Lisa Ann Sandell

44. “Ugly and ungainly. The least dependable creature you ever met. Just when you think you understand her, she changes. If only I had a son," he said bitterly.Over and over he disparaged her, and George would have thought that Beatrice would be so used to it, she could not be hurt further. But he saw her neck grow stiffer and stiffer.” - Mette Ivie Harrison

45. “I think that is what film and art and music do; they can work as a map of sorts for your feelings.” - Bruce Springsteen

46. “When a man is able to connect with his feelings, he is able to care more.” - Warren Farrell

47. “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you do, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” - Jason Barger

48. “What would happen if you stopped fighting, and gave yourself permission to feel? Not just the good things, but everything?” - R.J. Anderson

49. “You can't run from feelings, Charity. You have to face them. Otherwise your future will look just like your past.” - Elizabeth Jane Howard

50. “I usually know almost exactly how I feel. The problem is, I just can't tell anyone.” - Meg Cabot

51. “Others can make us vulnerable and the sooner such vulnerabilities are dealt with the better” - Ron Rash

52. “I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.” - Toni Morrison

53. “She left me, offended at my want of sympathy, and thinking, no doubt, that I envied her. I did not - at least, I firmly believed I did not.” - Anne Brontë

54. “The importance of falling in love lies not in how it feels, but in what it perceives. And as always with our feelings, the key moral issue is how truthful the perception is... Falling in love is a sign that this might be someone with whom you could make a good marriage. Still, it's not enough, because the feeling is not always as perceptive as it should be... So falling in love is not the basis for a good marriage. It's not even a requirement. Marriage does not depend on falling in love; it depends on the promises you make to each other in your wedding vows and then spend a lifetime keeping. As many people have pointed out, you can't promise how you'll feel. But you can promise to cultivate a virtue, such as the virtue of love.” - Phillip Cary

55. “Just ask how I'm feeling, I want to say. Just ask and I may tell you.But no one does.” - Melina Marchetta

56. “Never apologize for showing your feelings. When you do, you are apologizing for the truth.” - José N. Harris

57. “He stared at Esmelda with a face like glass, nothing hidden. What I saw there wasn’t steel or fire or stone. Feelings stirred in me and I had to look away. I knew what I saw because I’d felt them, too — understanding, sadness, compassion...forgiveness.” - Deborah Wheeler

58. “You ask me what it feels like to have wings. I can only tell you the feeling with words. And words have neither feelings nor wings. Words are leaky vessels into which a cargo of meaning and emotion are placed, and when they leave you and reach the farther shore of another mind a considerable portion of that cargo has been lost at sea. Fallen overboard, gone to rot, consumed by vermin, decayed to a state unlike its original form.” - Steven R. Boyett

59. “..I learned that there's a kind of love which must feel like coming home,...” - Ellen Sussman

60. “Sitting at the old patio table she’d cleared of leaves, she smiled and leaned back. The stars looked twisted in the limbs of the trees, like Christmas lights. She felt like part of the hollow around her was filling. She’d come here with too many expectations.” - Sarah Addison Allen

61. “I urge you: don't cut short these thought-trains of yours. Follow them through to their end. Your thoughts and your feelings. Follow them through and you will grow with them.” - J.M. Coetzee

62. “Getting on with her life is important. But right now it may be more important to put the feelings out there, deal with them, and find a way to be okay with all that's happened.” - Jennifer Brown

63. “It is our determination to overcome fear and discouragement that constitutes the only effective antidote to the sense of powerlessness over unwanted feelings.” - Gordon Livingston

64. “...it's easy to express romantic love - harder to manage daily love - to forgive failings close to feelings - to divide self from soul...” - John Geddes

65. “The point of life isn't to avoid pain. The point of life is to be alive! To feel things. That means the good and the bad. There'll be pain. But also joy, and friendship and love. And it's worth it, believe me.” - John Stephens

66. “Milyen érdekes, hogy az ember oly könnyen kiönti a szívét egy darab papírnak, miközben szemtől szemben megszólalni sem mer.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

67. “The most important thing for any con artist is never to think like a mark. Marks think they can get something for nothing. Marks think they can get what they don’t deserve and could never deserve. Marks are stupid and pathetic and sad. Marks think they’re going to go home one night and have the girl they’ve loved since they were a kid suddenly love them back. Marks forget that whenever something’s too good to be true, that’s because it’s a con.” - Holly Black

68. “I’d allowed myself to feel love –yes, love– for another person in a way I’d once sworn to myself I never would. I’d become completely vulnerable, and now I’d been torn apart with hurt and catapulted onto a path I might never have taken otherwise. I’d risked my life for an outsider. For a stranger. Worse, I had a feeling I was going to do it again.” - Kate Avery Ellison

69. “To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.” - Jeanette Winterson

70. “I used to hope that if I went to church long enough, all my inside weight would go away. That ain't right. Jesus may have come to take away our sins, but he left our feelings right where they've always been. I still have inside me some of what I've always had, built up over a lifetime. I just keep adding to it, everyday, like everybody else, and hope the stew gets better the more ingredients I put in.” - Todd Johnson

71. “Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.” - Walker Percy

72. “Ariel: "Why do such stories always sound so sad? Why can't people part on more amiable terms?"Danny: "Human nature," he said. "When feelings change and a person is at their most insecure, it's a matter of personal survival, I think. It's not always meant to hurt, but it often does.” - Judith Victoria Douglas

73. “You make me love books and the words inside them, because they talk about you. I know they do, they tell me that I love you, not as cliché as I write it, but in the warmest, deepest, calmest words I could ever read. I love you, like the books say it. And I'll find a better way to say it one day.” - Nema Al-Araby

74. “I am in the Aleph, the point at which everything is in the same place at the same time. I'm at a window, looking out at the world and its secret places, poetry lost in time and words left hanging in space...sentences that are perfectly understood, even when left unspoken. Feelings that simultaneously exalt and suffocate.” - Paulo Coelho

75. “He wished he could relieve himself of his doubts and guilts half as easily.” - George R.R. Martin

76. “I remember I’ve never shared tears with someone that longedfor (me) and loved me; I didn’t know how to be compassionate.”(The truth, the lies & the love, p. 76)” - Chimnese Davids

77. “For what it’s worth: trust your feelings. I can’t promise that you’ll never get hurt again, but I can promise you the risk is worth it.” - Rick Riordan

78. “Sometimes I feel that our bright blue sky is like a pregnant women’s belly.” - Santosh Kalwar

79. “Don't you get it? You can't tell me what to feel.” - Lauren Oliver

80. “Look to your heart and soul first, rather than looking to your head first, when choosing. Rather than what you think, consider instead how you feel. Look to the nature of things. Feel your choices and decisions. It just might change everything.” - Jeffrey R. Anderson

81. “It may come as an extraordinary shock to you but you're the only woman who has ever succeeded in getting under my skin. It could be because you're a raving lunatic.” - Margaret Way

82. “At some point in reading, we realize we have to read not just the books that we'd enjoy, but the books that move us, touch us, those that break us and hurt us, those which remind us that we will always be the ignorant of this life. We have to read the books that make us so little, make us a speck of dust or a grain of sand in a galaxy, until we feed our minds with all the knowledge we need, which is infinite in itself.” - Nema Al-Araby

83. “Love gives us a heightened consciousness through which to apprehend the world, but anger gives us a precise, detached perception of its own.” - Scott Spencer

84. “All those men who end up disappointing you. After a while, you don't even want to have feelings anymore. You just want to get on with your life.” - Candace Bushnell

85. “Humans are moving into a new phase, one based on the knowledge that talking about their feelings has never got them anywhere.” - Glen Duncan

86. “My feelings are too loud for words and too shy for the world.” - Dejan Stojanovic

87. “Spesso la gente non ha le emozioni chiare, altro che le idee.” - Diego De Silva

88. “The heart is a place with worm holes made by feelings you aren't supposed to have but do.” - Elizabeth Scott

89. “I'm not sure if you even want me around or if you just feel sorry for me. I'm not sure of anything.” - Sarah Ockler

90. “Feelings, she learned, were hard to fight. She treasured his smiles and compliments and tried not to dwell on the fact that he gave this things to his friend Kel.His dreamy-eyed gazes, poems, and fits of passionate melancholy were for Uline. It was hard not to resent the older girl.” - Tamora Pierce

91. “You know what he taught me? He taught me to feel more. He taught me to give myself over to feelings. And now that's all I have. I'm swamped by them. I can't breathe because I feel so damn much.” - Ellen Sussman

92. “It’s not a real place, not a real thing. Mom made up the Gray Space, the place of anti-art, antifeeling, the cold dark place that felt like death. It was just her zany way of describing the place she went when she felt most depressed, when making music at all became impossible.It isn’t real.” - Kate Ellison

93. “...that's the essence of me - I don't think, I feel - at best, I think-feel...” - John Geddes

94. “It's so hard to find the place somewhere in the middle of the best and worst I've felt.” - Ashly Lorenzana

95. “I had to sever my emotional cord to escape the anger and shame that silently slithered through my head, disconnecting myself from the stares and whispers that followed me down the hall.” - Rebecca Donovan

96. “Some want to be owned, and some want to be saved. Only some want to exist in the glow of contentment.” - Umair Naeem

97. “...you want things to remain the same, which they never can, and so you’re wounded by your own feelings & resentful others don’t seem to care...” - John Geddes

98. “Maybe attraction was aligned in heaven before our birth because there was no other way to explain my feelings. There were millions of boys on the earth. Why did it feel so strong?” - Belinda Jeffrey

99. “Feelings demand living space.” - Isidore Isou

100. “Feelings are like chemicals, the more you analyze them the worse they smell.” - Charles Kingsley

101. “Do you know how hard it is to find someone who can reciprocate your feelings?” - Yelena Black

102. “Through the anger came something I recognized; the sadness that can result from too many years absorbing the poison of others. - Alex Delaware on Dr. Lehmann” - Jonathan Kellerman

103. “You don’t know how I feel about you? I try to show you how much I care about you every day. How can you not see that?” - Cardeno C.

104. “The ways of men and women are such a puzzle. And I could barely decipher my own feelings, let along anyone else's.” - Megan Shepherd

105. “Don't keep all your feelings sheltered - express them. Don’t EVER let life shut you up.” - Steve Maraboli

106. “I wonder why when I told him that my chest still ached even though I had finally told him how I felt, he said, "So you finally realize how I've felt these past three years?" and laughed.” - Kou Yoneda

107. “It was strange what Chris was feeling within, but he didn’t mind for he was loving her.” - Moffat Machingura

108. “Ive told you before and my feelings haven't changed. I love you Sakura. Even if I cant match up to Natsume, my feelings would not lose to his. Even if we part ways and you forget about me, I will always think of you. Even if I grow old and leave this academy, I will definitely come see you. I'm here for you, until the day you look my way, I will always... I will always wait for you, together with Natsume. And this time around, I wont let Natsume steal you away again. Next time we meet, I will be more straight forward with my feelings, so that this time around, it wont be Natsume, but me you will choose, and me you will love. I wont lose, definitely." - Ruka” - Tachibana Higuchi

109. “Feelings were clouds across the sky. They would change and pass. It wasn't important how she felt.” - Suchen Christine Lim

110. “The moment when you dream of someone deeply at night and in the morning you see that person staring and smiling at you.For me there is no word to express that feeling.” - M.F.Moonzajer

111. “You’ll be fine. You’re 25. Feeling [unsure] and lost is part of your path. Don’t avoid it. See what those feelings are showing you and use it. Take a breath. You’ll be okay. Even if you don’t feel okay all the time.” - Louis C.K.

112. “You make me come alive- too alive. It's breathless, like a disaster. Ravishing, like crossing over into the desert and losing your bearings. Nothing's the same again.” - Margaret Way