75 Emotions Quotes

Emotions are at the core of every human experience, shaping our lives, decisions, and interactions with the world. They inspire artists, fuel passions, cultivate connections, and even drive us to our greatest achievements. Throughout history, countless thinkers, writers, and philosophers have pondered the complexities of our emotional landscapes, offering profound insights and wisdom. Whether you’re seeking comfort, motivation, or a deeper understanding of your feelings, our curated collection of the top 75 emotions quotes promises to resonate with every facet of your emotional journey. Dive in and explore the powerful words that capture the essence of what it means to feel deeply and vividly.

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

4. “The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure... I'm lonely... I'm a failure... I'm lonely...) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

5. “I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?' 'I don't know. I'm only me.' 'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

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

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. “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

9. “I don't like hope very much. In fact, I hate it. It's the crystal meth of emotions. It hooks you fast and kills you hard. It's bad news. The worst. It's sharp sticks and cherry bombs. When hope shows up, it's only a matter of time until someone gets hurt.” - Jennifer Donnelly

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

11. “She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obscured the already vague circumstances of its origins.” - Tom Robbins

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

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

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

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

19. “Im a girl who has been tamping down her emotions and keeping them tightly guarded her whole life. And that works really well for me... And now I felt like my shell had a dangerous crack in it. Without much more effort on his part, it would split wide open and my enormous river of emotions would gush out - the bad and the good. It was pretty much the scariest thing I'd ever thought of." - Maximum Ride.” - James Patterson

20. “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

21. “Please don't give me words; give me a hug. Don't tell me that I'm holding up so well; break down with me and admit our shared wretchedness. Don't feign some bright mountaintop; walk with me through the dark valley where neither of us can utter a word.” - Robert Dykstra

22. “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

23. “As a rule, we don't like to feel to sad or lonely or depressed. So why do we like music (or books or movies) that evoke in us those same negative emotions? Why do we choose to experience in art the very feelings we avoid in real life?Aristotle deals with a similar question in his analysis of tragedy. Tragedy, after all, is pretty gruesome. […] There's Sophocles's Oedipus, who blinds himself after learning that he has killed his father and slept with his mother. Why would anyone watch this stuff? Wouldn't it be sick to enjoy watching it? […] Tragedy's pleasure doesn't make us feel "good" in any straightforward sense. On the contrary, Aristotle says, the real goal of tragedy is to evoke pity and fear in the audience. Now, to speak of the pleasure of pity and fear is almost oxymoronic. But the point of bringing about these emotions is to achieve catharsis of them - a cleansing, a purification, a purging, or release. Catharsis is at the core of tragedy's appeal.” - Brandon W. Forbes

24. “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

25. “Resentment is often a woman's inner signal that she has been ignoring an important God-given responsibility - that of making choices.” - Brenda Waggoner

26. “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

27. “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

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

29. “Our love has been the thread through thelabyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust.” - Audrey Niffenegger

30. “Emotions are like muscles. Most of them go highly unattended, it's usually the weaker, undefined ones that cause injury to the rest, and there is most certainly memory response in play.” - Erica Goros

31. “Haydon had found his charm again. He could do that at the drop of a hat. He drew you and he repelled you. I remember that exactly. He danced all ways for you, playing your emotions against each other because he had none of his own.” - John le Carré

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

33. “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

34. “One of the greatest gifts from God is the eternal perspective. It is a level of fearlessness, a level of understanding where one can experience even emotional harmony with God.” - Criss Jami

35. “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

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

37. “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

38. “People who seek psychotherapy for psychological, behavioral or relationship problems tend to experience a wide range of bodily complaints...The body can express emotional issues a person may have difficulty processing consciously...I believe that the vast majority of people don't recognize what their bodies are really telling them. The way I see it, our emotions are music and our bodies are instruments that play the discordant tunes. But if we don't know how to read music, we just think the instrument is defective.” - Charlette Mikulka

39. “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

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

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

42. “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

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

44. “A Man who has never lied to a woman has no respect for her feeling.” - William Nsubuga

45. “PTSD is a whole-body tragedy, an integral human event of enormous proportions with massive repercussions.” - Susan Pease Banitt

46. “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

47. “...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

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

49. “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

50. “We heard of this woman who was out of control. We heard that she was led by her feelings. That her emotions were violent. That she was impetuous. That she violated tradition and overrode convention. That certainly her life should not be an example to us. (The life of the plankton, she read in this book on the life of the earth, depends on the turbulence of the sea) We were told that she moved too hastily. Placed her life in the stream of ideas just born. For instance, had a child out of wedlock, we were told. For instance, refused to be married. For instance, walked the streets alone, where ladies never did, and we should have little regard for her, even despite the brilliance of her words. (She read that the plankton are slightly denser than water) For she had no respect for boundaries, we were told. And when her father threatened her mother, she placed her body between them. (That because of this greater heaviness, the plankton sink into deeper waters) And she went where she should not have gone, even into her sister's marriage. And because she imagined her sister to be suffering what her mother had suffered, she removed her sister from that marriage. (And that these deeper waters provide new sources of nourishment) That she moved from passion. From unconscious feeling, allowing deep and troubled emotions to control her soul. (But if the plankton sinks deeper, as it would in calm waters, she read) But we say that to her passion, she brought lucidity (it sinks out of the light, and it is only the turbulence of the sea, she read) and to her vision, she gave the substance of her life (which throws the plankton back to the light). For the way her words illuminated her life we say we have great regard. We say we have listened to her voice asking, "of what materials can that heart be composed which can melt when insulted and instead of revolting at injustice, kiss the rod?" (And she understood that without light, the plankton cannot live and from the pages of this book she also read that the animal life of the oceans, and hence our life, depends on the plankton and thus the turbulence of the sea for survival.) By her words we are brought to our own lives, and are overwhelmed by our feelings which we had held beneath the surface for so long. And from what is dark and deep within us, we say, tyranny revolts us; we will not kiss the rod.” - Susan Griffin

51. “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

52. “‎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

53. “It’s not that I didn’t understand or believe the gospel before. I did. But the truth of the gospel hadn’t moved from my mind to my heart. There was a huge gap between my intellect and my emotions. The Puritan Jonathan Edwards likened his reawakening to the gospel to a man who had known, in his head, that honey was sweet, but for the first time had that sweetness burst alive in his mouth.” - J.D. Greear

54. “and it was the pretending that might explain how she could smile so brightly while her mind felt nothing - as if, at these times, there existed a disconnection between outer and inner, a shutting off, and the key to her happiness lay in warding off pain, or dodging it, or pushing it into the shape of something else - like shame or anger or even hope.” - sue saliba

55. “She laughed. 'It won't last. Nothing lasts. But I'm happy now.''Happy,' I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception--especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they're scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.” - Hunter S. Thompson

56. “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

57. “I first got very thin after Ashley. I felt like my stomach was doing backflips - like my emotions had taken over and made me full.” - Cheryl Cole

58. “There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn't. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say ‘I think’ we don't leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.” - Jeanette Winterson

59. “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

60. “Emotions can get in the way of truth-seeking. People do not process information in a neutral way.” - Cass R. Sunstein

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

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

63. “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

64. “Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them.” - David Nicholls

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

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

67. “Not being liked was so much worse than being invisible.” - Rebecca Donovan

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

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

70. “We are what we are, Nial, neither as good or as evil as others paint us. And what we are doesn't change how truly we feel, only how free we are to follow those feelings.” - Melissa Marr

71. “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

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

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

74. “Why couldn’t I find one action that would make the need to binge automatically disappear? Because there is no magic action to make that horrible prebinge feeling go away. The cool thing is that we are designed so that the feeling will pass through us on its own—in time. All we have to do is sit there and feel what is going on inside of us. We must experience the feelings. To help us deal with the feelings, we can call someone on our support team. We can also express the feelings by focusing on our breath or even hitting a pillow. The important thing to remember is that no matter how terrible, feelings do pass. It takes patience and trust—not food . . .” - Jenni Schaefer

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