117 Emotion Quotes

Emotions shape our experiences and color our interactions, often in ways we least expect. They can lift us to the skies or plunge us into the depths of despair, offering a rich tapestry of human existence. To encapsulate the essence of this fascinating spectrum, we present a curated collection of the top 117 Emotion Quotes. Each quote is a reflection of the myriad feelings we navigate daily, providing insights and a sense of camaraderie with those who have articulated these sentiments so beautifully. Dive in and let these words resonate with your soul, offering wisdom, comfort, and inspiration.

1. “I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” - Oscar Wilde

2. “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart” - Helen Keller

3. “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” - David Hume

4. “The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.” - Horace Walpole

5. “I think of myself as an intelligent, sensitive human being with the soul of a clown which always forces me to blow it at the most important moments.” - Jim Morrison

6. “One thing you can't hide - is when you're crippled inside.” - John Lennon

7. “Well, there is rough old Albert, as ornery as any big brother a girl could have, putting his arm around Savannah and cooing to her like a repenting hound dog, and promising her she is not common nor shameful. I watched all this and thought you just never know sometimes what's in a man's heart. When you think he is all tough nails and boards he can be different on the inside. It makes me wonder about other men I know, too.” - Nancy E. Turner

8. “Can he love her? Can the soul really be satisfied with such polite affections? To love is to burn - to be on fire, like Juliet or Guinevere or Eloise...” - Emma Thompson

9. “When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.” - Haruki Murakami

10. “Choices will continually be necessary and -- let us not forget -- possible. Obedience to God is always possible. It is a deadly error to fall into the notion that when feelings are extremely strong we can do nothing but act on them.” - Elisabeth Elliot

11. “We've all had our moments of weakness, and if we manage to get through today without any, we'll be sure to have some tomorrow.” - Jose Saramango

12. “One hand was behind his back, and he held it out, presenting a bouquet of white and smoky purple lilies. “They’re straight from the underworld, by the way. They are everlasting. They won’t die.” - Jess C. Scott

13. “Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.” - P.D. James

14. “Relief is a wonderful emotion, highly underrated. In fact, I prefer it to elation or joy. Relief lets the air out of the Tire of Pain.” - Adriana Trigiani

15. “I keep telling you that feeling is not selective. You can't feel pain, you aren't gonna feel anything else either.” - Judith Guest

16. “Evelyn: There's nothing wrong with embracing one's emotions.Brittany: Mom, You don't just embrace your emotions, you make love to them hard-core.” - Gena Showalter

17. “She wished she hadn't succumbed to irritation. Because she wanted to know about his inner feelings. She always thought people were like pieces of art glass-- strong enough to handle and use, delicate enough to shatter under a strong blow, and filled with swirls of color that fascinated the eye. But while most people--and most glass--allowed light through, she could discern nothing of Devlin's heart and soul through the smoke and mirrors he held before him.” - Christina Dodd

18. “All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

19. “My heart feels not so much in my chest as in my hands. I am carrying it along swiftly, as though I have become the messenger for what is going on inside me.” - Claire Keegan

20. “The emotion that can break your heart is sometimes the very one that heals it...” - Nicholas Sparks

21. “Leaving out appraisal also would render the biological description of the phenomena of emotion vulnerable to the caricature that emotions without an appraisal phase are meaningless events. It would be more difficult to see how beautiful and amazingly intelligent emotions can be, and how powerfully they can solve problems for us.” - Antonio Damasio

22. “Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless ... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever."[Interview with CBS radio host Don Swaim, September 15, 1987.]” - Toni Morrison

23. “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

24. “. . . mixing defensiveness with anger - a wonderful mix, by the way.” - Liza Palmer

25. “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.” - Jonathan Swift

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. “It is a grave injustice to a child or adult to insist that they stop crying. One can comfort a person who is crying which enables him to relax and makes further crying unnecessary; but to humiliate a crying child is to increase his pain, and augment his rigidity. We stop other people from crying because we cannot stand the sounds and movements of their bodies. It threatens our own rigidity. It induces similar feelings in ourselves which we dare not express and it evokes a resonance in our own bodies which we resist.” - Alexander Lowen

28. “The madder it makes you, the harder you need to laugh at it.” - Destiny Booze

29. “Laine slowly rolled out of bed. The queen size was one of the few new things in the house. But now, even the new bed felt tainted. It was an inner-spring monument to lies, a petri dish of mendacity she had shared with her faithless husband, and shared now with creeping dreams that flew from the light but left harsh scratches and diseased black feathers. Laine promised herself that, as soon as, she could, she would rid herself of this house, this bed, her clothes, her jewelry - everything but the flesh she lived in. She would scrub herself clean and flee to start a new life whose first and only commandment would be: Never let thyself be lied to again.” - Stephen M. Irwin

30. “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

31. “It was an image Melody would never forget. Or was it the emotions the image conjured - hope, excitement, and fear of the unknown, all three tightly braided together, creating a fourth emotion that was impossible to define. She was getting a second chance at happiness and it tickled like swallowing fifty fuzzy caterpillars.” - Lisi Harrison

32. “The confusing lesson whipped Frankie's anger into something she had never felt before. It was like an emotional meringue - the airy feeling of loneliness topped with the hard crisp of injustice. Yet its taste was far from sweet.” - Lisi Harrison

33. “He tries to force the anger down, but it's like an anvil on his chest. He closes his eyes, like Sammy taught him, and forces the anvil up; he softens.” - Chris Crutcher

34. “Go through the proper motions each day and you'll soon begin to feel the corresponding emotions!” - George W. Crane

35. “I envy people that know love. That have someone who takes them as they are.” - Jess C. Scott

36. “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

37. “A feeling is no longer the same when it comes the second time. It dies through the awareness of its return. We become tired and weary of our feelings when they come too often and last too long.” - Pascal Mercier

38. “On accepting adversity in our lives: Always it is initiated by an act of will on our part; we set ourselves to believe in the overruling goodness, providence, and sovereignty of God and refuse to turn aside no matter what may come, no matter how we may feel. I mistakenly thought I could not trust God unless I felt like trusting Him. Now I am learning that trusting God is first of all a matter of the will. I choose to trust in God, and my feelings eventually follow.” - Margaret Clarkson

39. “But no: he was empty, he was confronted by a vast anger, a desperate anger, he saw it and could almost have touched it. But it was inert - if it were to live and find expression and suffer, he must lend it his own body. It was other people's anger. "Swine!" He clenched his fists, he strode along, but nothing came, the anger remained external to himself.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

40. “There is an emotional promiscuity we’ve noticed among many good young men and women. The young man understands something of the journey of the heart. He wants to talk, to “share the journey.” The woman is grateful to be pursued, she opens up. They share the intimacies of their lives - their wounds, their walks with God. But he never commits. He enjoys her... then leaves. And she wonders, What did I do wrong? She failed to see his passivity. He really did not ever commit or offer assurances that he would. Like Willoughby to Marianne in Sense and Sensibility.Be careful you do not offer too much of yourself to a man until you have good, solid evidence that he is a strong man willing to commit. Look at his track record with other women. Is there anything to be concerned about there? If so, bring it up. Also, does he have any close male friends - and what are they like as men? Can he hold down a job? Is he walking with God in a real and intimate way? Is he facing the wounds of his own life, and is he also demonstrating a desire to repent of Adam’s passivity and/or violence? Is he headed somewhere with his life? A lot of questions, but your heart is a treasure, and we want you to offer it only to a man who is worthy and ready to handle it well.” - Stasi Eldredge

41. “Emotions are messy.” - Ottilie Weber

42. “Certain things leave you in your life and certain things stay with you. And that's why we're all interested in movies- those ones that make you feel, you still think about. Because it gave you such an emotional response, it's actually part of your emotional make-up, in a way.” - Tim Burton

43. “What she really craved was a connection. That feeling you got when you knew you were supposed to be with someone.” - J. Sterling

44. “Our thoughts dictate how we feel; so it is important to recognize that we are as we think we are” - Jeremy Aldana

45. “I'd never heard of them, but at that moment, it was the best song I'd ever heard. I went out and bought Ten and listened to it on repeat. When I listened to track five, "Black," it was like I was there, in that moment all over again.After the summer was over, when I got back home, I went to the music store and bought the sheet music and learned to play it on the piano. I thought one day I could accompany Conrad and we could be, like, a band.” - Jenny Han

46. “...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues.” - Alain De Botton

47. “It's as if they have thinner boundaries separating them from other people's emotions and from the tragedies and cruelties of the world.” - Susan Cain

48. “I felt as if I had no control over what I said, as if loathsome, ugly words were waiting inside me like snakes and toads looking for a chance to sneak out before I could stop them.” - Gloria Whelan

49. “And people turn to internet with the hope that in this virtual world, where real identity need not be disclosed, they will find someone before whom they could be their true self,without any pretensions and get an opportunity to release the pent-up emotions and feel light.” - Chitralekha Paul

50. “If you believe everything you feel is an illusion then you’re delusional. Your emotion is part you. You’re made with it. Denying it and thinking it is all your mind, is denying your existence.” - Ann Marie Aguilar

51. “Never let yourself be swayed by emotions,' her mother had said. 'Emotions are fleeting. They come and go. But reality stays with you forever.” - Monica Fairview

52. “Listen, Harriet. I do unterstand. I know you don't want either to give or to take ... You don't want ever again to have to depend for happiness on another person.""That's true. That's the truest thing you ever said.""All right. I can respect that. Only you've got to play the game. Don't force an emotional situation and then blame me for it.""But I don't want any situation. I want to be left in peace.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

53. “love is undying,of that I feel certain.I mean deep,abiding,cherishing love.The love that gives protection even as you,my guardian angel,gave me protection long after you had gone-and continue to give this very day...A love beyond Death-a love that makes Life alive!” - Ruskin Bond

54. “Love is without a doubt the laziest theory for the meaning of life, but when it actually comes a time to do it we find just enough energy to over-complicate life again. Any devil can love, whom he himself sees as, a good person who has treated him well, but to love also the polar opposite is what separates love from fickle emotions.” - Criss Jami

55. “Bridget's anger evaporated and the sadness came back. The anger was easier. She owned and controlled it, whereas the sadness owned her.” - Ann Brashares

56. “Quotes ain’t all that useful. Fact is, there’s more concise ways to express what you’re feelin’, like screams and moans.” - M.C. Humphreys

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

58. “Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.” - Charles Darwin

59. “Having their feelings make sense is how people get their kicks.” - Mark Vonnegut

60. “There is a relationship between the eye contacts we make and the perceptions that we create in our heads, a relationship between the sound of another's voice and the emotions that we feel in our hearts, a relationship between our movements in space all around us and the magnetic pulls we can create between others and ourselves. All of these things (and more) make up the magic of every ordinary day and if we are able to live in this magic, to feel and to dwell in it, we will find ourselves living with magic every day. These are the white spaces in life, the spaces in between the written lines, the cracks in which the sunlight filters into. Some of us swim in the overflowing of the wine glass of life, we stand and blink our eyes in the sunlight reaching unseen places, we know where to find the white spaces, we live in magic.” - C. JoyBell C.

61. “All of us, whether vivisector or vegan, have been subject to mechanisms undercutting sympathy for animals. How long and to what extent we submit to these mechanisms is not a matter of rationality: to cut off our feelings and support animal exploitation is rational, given societal expectations and sanctions; but to assert our feelings and oppose animal exploitation is also rational, given the pain involved in losing our natural bonds with animals. So our task is not to pass judgment on others' rationality, but to speak honestly of the loneliness and isolation of anthropocentric society, and of the damage done to every person expected to hurt animals.” - Brian Luke

62. “Your heart is the beacon, your heart is the storm. Dare to embrace it; you'll never be torn.” - Vanna Bonta

63. “Sex is always about emotions. Good sex is about free emotions; bad sex is about blocked emotions.” - Deepak Chopra

64. “Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which you, the driver, have corrupted.” - Ayn Rand

65. “The seed of every sin known to man is in my heart”.” - Robert Murray McCheyne

66. “Up until then it had only been himself. Up to then it had been a private wrestle between him and himself. Nobody else much entered into it. After the people came into it he was, of course, a different man. Everything had changed then and he was no longer the virgin, with the virgin's right to insist upon platonic love. Life, in time, takes every maidenhead, even if it has to dry it up; it does not matter how the owner wants to keep it. Up to then he had been the young idealist. But he could not stay there. Not after the other people entered into it.” - James Jones

67. “Our emotions can be either corrupted or elevated. Human love was not created to be without premeditated purpose.” - Manis Friedman

68. “...men aren't in touch with their emotions, and don't share enough [?]” - Meg Cabot

69. “He had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out--through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful and believing and confused. Each thing he learned was so simple and obvious, once he grasped it, that he wondered why he had not always known it. And what had he learned? A philosopher would not think it much, perhaps, and yet in a simple human way it was a good deal. Just by living, my making the thousand little daily choices that his whole complex of heredity, environment, and conscious thought, and deep emotion had driven him to make, and by taking the consequences, he had learned that he could not eat his cake and have it, too. He had learned that in spite of his strange body, so much off scale that it had often made him think himself a creature set apart, he was still the son and brother of all men living. He had learned that he could not devour the earth, that he must know and accept his limitations. He realized that much of his torment of the years past had been self-inflicted, and an inevitable part of growing up. And, most important of all for one who had taken so long to grow up, he thought he had learned not to be the slave of his emotions.” - Thomas Wolfe

70. “[I]t wasn't history that was too fragile, but me.” - Jessi Kirby

71. “He wanted to say that all this talk of feelings was irrelevant. Thatemotions 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

72. “Most people tend to think the best of those who are blessed with beauty; we have difficulty imagining that physical perfection can conceal twisted emotions or a damaged mind.” - Dean Koontz

73. “The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence.” - Oscar Wilde

74. “All emotions, even those that are suppressed and unexpressed, have physical effects. Unexpressed emotions tend to stay in the body like small ticking time bombs—they are illnesses in incubation.” - Marilyn Van M. Derbur

75. “I wonder how one can hate to love and love to hate the same person over a period of time in a relationship” - Dr. Amit Abraham

76. “But feelings can't be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem.” - Anne Frank

77. “I MAY HAVE ALLOWED MYSELF SOME FLICKER OF EMOTION IN THE RECENT PAST, said Death, BUT I CAN GIVE IT UP ANY TIME I LIKE.” - Terry Pratchett

78. “I pen you words from my heartneither paper nor pen would doas I lay them out in flowery fontswhat more could you ask foras I am writing in your heartthe love that I want to endureI am no Keats nor am I anyone but mea poetess longing for your touchget lost with me in my wordsas I serenade you with a forever quill.” - Chimnese Davids

79. “The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past.” - George Eliot

80. “Love was something different. Love was pure delight, a fountain of emotions, sensual delights, and enjoying spending time together.” - Sergei Lukyanenko

81. “I recently read in the book My Stroke of Insight by brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor that the natural life span of an emotion—the average time it takes for it to move through the nervous system and body—is only a minute and a half. After that we need thoughts to keep the emotion rolling. So if we wonder why we lock into painful emotional states like anxiety, depression, or rage, we need look no further than our own endless stream of inner dialogue.” - Tara Brach

82. “I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life.” - Clive Bell

83. “Maneck studied beggermaster's excessive chatter, his attempt to hide his heartache. Why did human do that to their feelings? Whether it was anger or love or sadness, they always tried to put something else forward in its place. And then there were those who pretended their emotions were bigger and grander than anyone else's. A little annoyance they acted like gigantic rage; where a smile or chuckle will do, they laughed hysterically. Either way, it was dishonest.” - Rohinton Mistry

84. “Getting all emotionally wrapped up in made-up people's lives gives me a chance to take a break from my own life [...].” - Arlaina Tibensky

85. “...men are much softer than women, more sentimental. They cry at the movies and pretend not to. The male of the species is weak. He doesn’t tolerate pain well.” - Will Christopher Baer

86. “It is not what happens to you that matters; it is how you feel about it that does.” - Shannon L. Alder

87. “Ciss says, 'People have less emotions than actors think they have. For much of the time we hide our emotions, we haven't time for emotions. Our brains work so much faster than our emotions.” - Antony Sher

88. “Don't listen to anyone. Trust what gives you pleasure. Trust the emotions. If you love something but can't explain why, that's enough” - Calice Becker

89. “That’s what violence was: emotion leaking out from consciousness into the physical world, linking up with the muscles of the arms and shoulders and diaphragm and, inevitably, the face. Stifle emotion during an act of violence and the face becomes a blank, unreadable mask.” - Ryu Murakami

90. “I ate some emotional soup in my childhood and have spent a lifetime trying to digest it.” - Billy Ray Chitwood

91. “‎Man is never his emotions and that all feelings are ephemeral- that no one is truly genuinely ecstatic, sad, angry or passionately in love forever, which means emotions are never to be trusted.” - Lourd de Veyra

92. “All she wanted was a breathing space in which to hurt.” - Margaret Mitchell

93. “But sex...that was the opposite of control. There were emotions, and attraction, and that pesky other person that just had to be involved. Not my idea of fun.” - Cora Carmack

94. “We cannot let go of the past enough to live in the present unless we are able to grieve our losses. We must deeply feel our emotional pain in order to accept that what is happening is not what we wanted.” - John Kuypers

95. “In order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did and why you no longer need to feel it.” - Mitch Albom

96. “She felt whatever emotions she felt, but feeling was never a useful substitute for doing, and she never let the former get in the way of the latter. If anything, she used her emotions to motivate her and help her concentrate. The emphasis for her was always on doing what needed to be done.” - Will Schwalbe

97. “Anger is so easy to get into and so hard to get out of.” - Regena Thomashauer

98. “Of necessity she went further in aversion than she had gone in love, for her hatred was not in proportion to her love but to her disappointed hopes.” - Honoré de Balzac

99. “I knew they would kill me when they found out, but…” He struggled for words, releasing a sharp breath. “I think I realized that I would rather die because I betrayed them, than live because I betrayed you.” - Marissa Meyer

100. “there were worse things than feeling guilty, like feeling dead.” - Lori Brighton

101. “It's much easier on the emotions when one sees life as an experiment rather than a struggle for popularity.” - Criss Jami

102. “Music isn’t just heard, it is felt.” - Kelly Clarkson

103. “I think there were times when I was so afraid of losing you that I forgot I even had you at all.” - Ashly Lorenzana

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

105. “The parts of me that hurt the worst want me to write something for them, but I can't. I don't know what to say. I'm lost in all this sadness, and so are they.” - Ashly Lorenzana

106. “We may seem fine, even when the pain remains right there beneath our surface.” - Ashly Lorenzana

107. “Just remember that those who feel profoundly depressed are those whose happiness is likewise intense. What's so wrong with that?” - Ashly Lorenzana

108. “I don't think I've ever dared to write down what I see in the ruins of me, or tell in any detail the scars and all their secrets.” - Ashly Lorenzana

109. “Rather than allowing our response to an even affect our breathing, we can learn instead to let our breathing change our relationship to the event.” - Cyndi Lee

110. “Bodily haste and exertion usually leave our thoughts very much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination.” - George Eliot

111. “Amal,I believe that most Americans do not love as we do. It is not for any inherent deficiency or superiority in them. They live in the safe, shallow, parts that rarely push human emotions into the depths where we dwell.” - Susan Abulhawa

112. “I am not a victim of emotional conflicts. I am human.” - Marilyn Monroe

113. “I hate you!''That's good. Hate is a passionate emotion.” - Stephenie Meyer

114. “The emotions attached to them were like sand castles in the tide, slowly washing out to sea.” - Nicholas Sparks

115. “There comes a point where emotions must give way to objective facts.” - Max Brooks

116. “His rules were thus: One, resist when beneficial to the cause. Two, dignity before humiliation. Three, don’t show true emotions.” - Courtney Kirchoff

117. “Happiness is not always the answer let the other emotions out is sometimes what is needed” - Michael Burgess