Quotes about emotions

[The art of the novel] does not simply consist in the author's telling a story about the adventures of some other person. On the contrary, it happens because the storyteller's own experience of men and things, whether for good or ill—not only what he has passed through himself, but even events which he has only witnessed or been told of—has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

Let us look for our light in our feelings. There is a warmth in them that contains many clarities.

Without fixed ideas, no fixed feelings. (Whoever has no constant opinions has no constant emotions.)

What man knows only through feeling can be explained only through enthusiasm.

In the combat between wisdom and feeling, wisdom never wins.

[T]he young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.

Even insects express anger, terror, jealousy, and love by their stridulation.

Through the principle of associated habit, the same movements of the face and eyes are practised, and can, indeed, hardly be avoided, whenever we know or believe that others are blaming, or too strongly praising, our moral conduct.

I cannot think well of a man who sports with any woman's feelings; and there may often be a great deal more suffered than a stander-by can judge of.

People who think they can control their negative emotions and manifest them when they want to, simply deceive themselves. Negative emotions depend on identification; if identification is destroyed in some particular case, they disappear. The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them. I think that, for an ordinary mechanical man, the most difficult thing to realise is that his own and other people's negative emotions, have no value whatever and do not contain anything noble, anything beautiful or anything strong. In reality negative emotions contain nothing but weakness and very often the beginning of hysteria, insanity or crime. The only good thing about them is that, being quite useless and artificially created by imagination and identification, they can be destroyed without any loss. And this is the only chance of escape that man has.

“As I listen to you I hear only ingenuousness and didactic theory.”

Lorcas compressed his lips. “Perhaps because you are hearing views which contradict your emotions.”