62 Emotional Quotes

In the journey of life, emotions play a fundamental role in shaping our experiences and connections. Whether it's moments of joy, sorrow, love, or contemplation, the words of others often resonate deeply with our own feelings. To capture this powerful connection, we've curated a collection of the top 62 emotional quotes that speak to the heart. These quotes, sourced from a variety of voices and perspectives, offer solace, inspiration, and a deeper understanding of the human spirit. Join us as we explore these moving pieces of wisdom, each one a testament to the extraordinary range of emotions that define our existence.

1. “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

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

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

4. “Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

5. “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

6. “That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity - the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don't attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself.” - Nick Hornby

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

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. “The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.” - Alain De Botton

12. “It is important not to suppress your feelings altogether when you are depressed. It is equally important to avoid terrible arguments or expressions of outrage. You should steer clear of emotionally damaging behavior. People forgive, but it is best not to stir things up to the point at which forgiveness is required. When you are depressed, you need the love of other people, and yet depression fosters actions that destroy that love. Depressed people often stick pins into their own life rafts. The conscious mind can intervene. One is not helpless.” - Andrew Solomon

13. “Life's harder, the deeper you feel things, was all I could think as I put the books away. Feelings, who needs them? Sometimes they're like a gift, when you feel love or happiness. Sometimes they're a curse.” - John Marsden

14. “Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.” - Jean Racine

15. “Happiness is the pleasantest of emotions; because of this, it is the most dangerous. Having once felt happiness, one will do anything to maintain it, and losing it, one will grieve.” - Kij Johnson

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

17. “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

18. “Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world's greatest creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn't mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.” - Terry Pratchett

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

20. “But human beings are like that, she thought. We've replaced nearly all our emotions with fear.” - Paulo Coelho

21. “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

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

23. “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

24. “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

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

26. “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

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

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

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. “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

32. “Civilized people don't feel.” - Mervyn Peake

33. “Politicians and others are stuck in a horrible world where being emotional in any way counts as being unbalanced, and unable to think clearly. For me, emotions are thought.” - Hofesh Shechter

34. “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

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

36. “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

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

38. “What is love for, if not to intensify our affections—both in life and death? But, O, do not be bitter. It is tragically self-destructiveto be bitter.” - John Piper

39. “...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

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

41. “Because people are more than emotions. People have thoughts and reasons for doing things.” - Veronica Rossi

42. “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

43. “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

44. “It was the face of a human being who’d been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever.” - Ryu Murakami

45. “Metaphor is awkward, but emotion, by its nature, leaves you no more scalable approach.” - Rachel Hartman

46. “Learning to have patience and not forcing the relationship is part of the twin soul process. If you are trying to force your will onto the other person, chances are you’re not ready to really connect yourself. There should be no blame here - only deep and unconditional love. ” - Chimnese Davids

47. “Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at see, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for.” - Julian Barnes

48. “It is hard for people to think clearly because their emotional needs keep getting in the way. The trick is to make thinking clearly an emotional need.” - George Hammond

49. “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

50. “I believe that it may be normal, healthy, and even productive to experience mild to moderate depression from time to time as part of the variable emotional spectrum, either as an appropriate response to situations or as a way of turning inward and mentally chewing over problems to find solutions.” - Andrew Weil

51. “A flock of sheep near the airport or a high voltage generator beside the orchard: these combinations open up my life like a wound, but they also heal it. That's why my feelings always come in twos.” - Yehuda Amichai

52. “No man stops caring as long as he breathes. As long as he has a mind and memory, he will care. This is what separates us from the animals. We have feelings.” - F. Sionil José

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

54. “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

55. “You know he loves you, right? (Amanda)Yeah, but emotions don't have brains. (Ash)- About Nick” - Sherrilyn Kenyon

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

57. “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

58. “Man is slave of emotions when they arise, and master of them when they don't.” - Raheel Farooq

59. “I hear another man cry, “Oh, sir my want of strength lies mainly in this, that I cannot repent sufficiently!” A curious idea men have of what repentance is! Many fancy that so many tears are to be shed, and so many groans are to be heaved, and so much despair is to be endured. Whence comes this unreasonable notion? Unbelief and despair are sins, and therefore I do not see how they can be constituent elements of acceptable repentance; yet there are many who regard them as necessary parts of true Christian experience. They are in great error. Still, I know what they mean, for in the days of my darkness I used to feel in the same way. I desired to repent, but I thought that I could not do it, and yet all the while I was repenting. Odd as it may sound, I felt that I could not feel. I used to get into a corner and weep, because I could not weep; and I fell into bitter sorrow because I could not sorrow for sin. What a jumble it all is when in our unbelieving state we begin to judge our own condition! It is like a blind man looking at his own eyes. My heart was melted within me for fear, because I thought that my heart was as hard as an adamant stone. My heart was broken to think that it would not break. Now I can see that I was exhibiting the very thing which I thought I did not possess; but then I knew not where I was. Remember that the man who truly repents is never satisfied with his own repentance. We can no more repent perfectly than we can live perfectly. However pure our tears, there will always be some dirt in them: there will be something to be repented of even in our best repentance. But listen! To repent is to change your mind about sin, and Christ, and all the great things of God. There is sorrow implied in this; but the main point is the turning of the heart from sin to Christ. If there be this turning, you have the essence of true repentance, even though no alarm and no despair should ever have cast their shadow upon your mind.” - Charles H. Spurgeon

60. “The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” - Charles Darwin

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

62. “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