Quotes about emotions

"Death: the only true emotion felt in an apathetic world"

"If emotion can create a physical action, then duplicating the physical action can re-create the emotion."

The idea that emotion can be separated from sex is a Christian illusion, one of the most ingenious but finally unworkable strategies in Christianity’s ancient campaign against pagan nature.

The hardship of it was a pleasure. Life was a pleasure; he looked back at its moments, many of them as shrouded in mist as the opposite bank of the Thames. Objectively, many of them held only misery, fear, confusion; but afterward, and even at the time, he had known an exhilaration stronger than the misery, fear, or confusion. A fragment of belief came to him from another epoch: Cogito ergo sum. For him that had not been true; his truth had been: Sentio ergo sum. I feel, so I exist. He enjoyed this fearful, miserable, confused life, and not only because it made more sense than nonlife. He could never explain that to anyone.

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

Whatever doubt might rise, he knew that he was right. But the rightness was an intellectual rightness and the doubt emotional.

Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.

...all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out. ("Writing and Analyzing a Story")

He ["the male"] is trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans and apes, and is far worse off than apes, because he is, first of all, capable of a large array of negative feelings that the apes aren't - hate, jealousy, contempt, disgust, guilt, shame, disgrace, doubt - and, secondly, he is aware of what he is and isn't.

The price of having these emotions, these passions, is that you have to control them, you have to bear them when they're too strong to bear.

If I didn't think, I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time.

We need not be afraid to touch, to feel, to show emotion. The easiest thing in the world is to be what you are, what you feel. The hardest thing to be is what other people want you to be. Don’t let them put you in that position.