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Quotes about emotion

132 quotes from 84 people

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Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings — always darker, emptier, simpler.
Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900The Gay Science (1882), Sec. 179
- Thinking
We don’t have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.
Anaïs Nin1903–1977Diary entry, February 1932
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.
MOMary Oliver1935–2019Thirst (2006)
- Experience
Peace I do not find, and I have no wish to make war; and I fear and hope, and burn and am of ice.
Petrarch1304–1374Canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta), sonnet 134, lines 1-2
I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.
Sylvia Plath1932–1963Journal entry from July 1950 – 1953, p. 63 of the original, p. 55 of the collection
Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.
Sylvia Plath1932–1963Draft of letter to Richard Sassoon (December 1955), quoted in Joyce Carol Oates, “Raising Lady Lazarus,” The New York Times (November 5, 2000)
If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.
Sylvia Plath1932–1963The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 8
True!⁠—nervous⁠—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?
Edgar Allan Poe1809–1849The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)In context
“Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed!⁠—tear up the planks!⁠—here, here!⁠—it is the beating of his hideous heart!”
Edgar Allan Poe1809–1849The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)In context
- Truth & Lies
I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone —
And all I lov’d — I lov’d alone
Edgar Allan Poe1809–1849Alone (1829)In context
- Love
I know not how it was⁠—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.
Edgar Allan Poe1809–1849The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)In context
Every fool knoweth that hatreds are the cinders of affection.
Walter Raleigh1552–1618Letter to Sir Robert Cecil (10 May 1593)
- Love
Grief changes shape, but it never ends. People have a misconception that you can deal with it and say, ‘It’s gone, and I’m better.’ They’re wrong. When the people you love are gone, you’re alone.
Keanu Reevesborn 1964Interview with Dotson Rader, Parade (11 June 2006)
- Life & Death
God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly, not one.
Rumi1207–1273Masnavi II, 1552; 1554 (tr. Helminski, 1990)
- God
All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the “Pathetic Fallacy.”
John Ruskin1819–1900Modern Painters (1843-1860), Volume III, part IV, chapter XII (1856)