57 Quotes About Emotions

Emotions are an integral part of the human experience, shaping our perceptions and reactions to the world around us. They fuel our passions, challenge our thinking, and enrich our lives with a depth that pure logic cannot achieve. In this curated collection of quotes, you'll find powerful insights and reflections from thought leaders, authors, and philosophers on the wide spectrum of emotions. These words of wisdom not only help articulate what we sometimes struggle to put into words but also serve as a reminder of the universal nature of our emotional journeys. Dive in to explore how emotions inspire, complicate, and enrich our lives.

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

2. “Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. ” - Jeffrey Eugenides

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

4. “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

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

6. “Do you imagine the universe is agitated? Go into the desert at night and look at the stars. This practice should answer the question.” - Lao Tzu

7. “Do not let another day go by where your dedication to other people's opinions is greater than your dedication to your own emotions!” - Steve Maraboli

8. “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

9. “Books can also provoke emotions. And emotions sometimes are even more troublesome than ideas. Emotions have led people to do all sorts of things they later regret-like, oh, throwing a book at someone else.” - Pseudonymous Bosch

10. “I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors... All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain.” - Temple Grandin

11. “What is this "heart"? If I tear open that chest of yours, will I see it there? If I smash open that skull of yours, will I see it there?~ulquiorra” - Tite Kubo

12. “I'm not going to be hardened by these people, to these things, I'm not going to let them destroy my feelings or my emotions.” - Pete Doherty

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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.” - Judith Guest

17. “Society can only hurt if you care for its opinion” - Jude Morgan

18. “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

19. “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

20. “Emotions are messy.” - Ottilie Weber

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

22. “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

23. “The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.” - Pat Conroy

24. “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

25. “I read once that water is a symbol for emotions. And for a while now I've thought maybe my mother drowned in both.” - Jessi Kirby

26. “Do not only think about it, but feel about it, also, before taking appropriate action.” - T.F. Hodge

27. “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

28. “When we refuse to work with our disappointment, we break the Precepts: rather than experience the disappointment, we resort to anger, greed, gossip, criticism. Yet it's the moment of being that disappointment which is fruitful; and, if we are not willing to do that, at least we should notice that we are not willing. The moment of disappointment in life is an incomparable gift that we receive many times a day if we're alert. This gift is always present in anyone's life, that moment when 'It's not the way I want it!” - Charlotte Joko Beck

29. “Though her emotions had not deviated from a jittery frailty she knew that in her own room she could at least attempt sleep and that if she dreamed she might then finally be with Henry.” - Anna Godbersen

30. “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.

31. “We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day.We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep,Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow,The path of its departure still is free.Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;Nought may endure but Mutability!” - Percy Bysshe Shelley

32. “The day you give priority to bogus ethics over human reactions, you become a loser. Human reactions are priceless. Rules should never, ever stifle emotions. Tennis is a very human game facing a great danger that it will be strangulated in a cat's cradle of unnecessary or inhumane rules.” - Ted Tinling

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

34. “Our senses and emotions are the great source of inspiration for creating compelling and interesting art pieces (books included). Each art piece, be it a book, a song, a painting, a photograph or a product should touch our senses and evoke emotions. Emotionless art lacks purpose and interest.” - Serafima Bogomolova

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

36. “We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.” - Jeanette Winterson

37. “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

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

39. “‎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

40. “Only death consistently excites your emotions, whether contemplating when life is safe and stale, or fleeing it when life is threatened and precious” - Yann Martel

41. “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

42. “Can we be sure that they are incapable of the feelings or sentiments that are believed to place them on a lower scale than humans? Do we deny sensitivity to all of the so-called lower orders to blunt, protect, and, ultimately, deny our own? We will see that bees can grieve over teh loss of a queen, sound war cries or hum with contentment; they can be angry, docile, ferocious, playful, aggressive, appear happy, or utter pitiful sounds of distress. are these not emotions akin to ours, merely expressed differently?” - William Longgood

43. “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

44. “You are the captain of your emotions. No one and nothing can control those feelings except you. You have the sole ability to either let these make or break you, inspire or destroy you."- Elizabeth's Quotes” - Elizabeth E. Castillo

45. “It is only right and proper to be moved by the Bible, but present-day reality has so strong a hold over us that even when we try to imagine the past the minor events in our lives immediately wrench us out of our musings, and our own adventures throw us back irrevocably upon our personal feelings—joy, boredom, suffering, anger, or a smile.” - Vincent Van Gogh

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

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

48. “In some cases, I am able to respect what so many call bigots. Such people have a more solid foundation for drawing their lines when it comes to the security of their ways and quite possibly the security of mankind. They rely on something that has worked to get man this far without placing ideals blindly driven by emotion first; they have a sure line and they say, 'No.' That, in a sense, is something I find to be highly respectable.” - Criss Jami

49. “My relationship with him was defined by these complex emotions, this mixture of gratitude and resentment.” - Otsuichi

50. “Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else.” - V.S. Ramachandran

51. “Emotions enthrall, but change, and as such have the ability to disrupt and destroy.” - Donna Lynn Hope

52. “yelling while eating was like swallowing anger. It’s simply not good for us. It leaves us unhappy and unsatisfied, as if the meal didn’t count or wasn’t good, and an hour later we’re back looking for something to make us feel better.” - Mary DeTurris Poust

53. “Subject to the law(s) of nature, hate is born to die” - T.F. Hodge

54. “The act of sex is healthy, normal, God-given. It's the emotions and entitlement that everyone attaches to it that is harmful.” - Alessandra Torre

55. “I'm glad I'm feeling this way. I'm really glad."Dr. Keyes looked rather dismayed. "Really, sweetheart?""Yes. And I don't want to let it go. Not yet. I'm just starting to feel it. And it feels...I don't know. Right, I guess. Maybe even...good.” - James Patterson

56. “Families start out, most of the time, with unconditional acceptance of one another. That acceptance starts in childhood and continues into adulthood. Somewhere in there, between childhood and adulthood, the ability to distinguish right versus wrong is born.” - Bart Hopkins

57. “Your only problem, perhaps, is that you scream without letting yourself cry.” - Friedrich Nietzsche