Selected emotion quotes

1. I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don't remember ever having seen one weep.

2. Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

3. Peace begins with a smile.

4. The greatest science in the world; in heaven and on earth; is love.

5. Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.

6. Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy.

7. When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

8. Art attests to what is inhuman in man.

9. There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.

10. Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

11. Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.

12. Live to the point of tears.

13. No, this trick won't work... How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?

14. To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.

15. To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.

16. Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.

17. In the meantime, it just makes it a little harder to smile. But so does the world.

18. During the 1960s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered.

19. The truth is, laughter always sounds more perfect than weeping. Laughter flows in a violent riff and is effortlessly melodic. Weeping is often fought, choked, half strangled, or surrendered to with humiliation.

20. Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

21. I watched them from the window, thy children at their play, And I thought of all my own dear friends, who were far, oh, far away, And childish loves, and childish cares, and a child's own buoyant gladness Came gushing back again to me with a soft and solemn sadness; And feelings frozen up full long, and thoughts of long ago, Seemed to be thawing at my heart with a warm and sudden flow.

22. By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.

23. I'm not always depressed: only when I think and feel.

24. There's nothing on my mind that couldn't be expressed by a long insane outburst of hysterical rage.

25. You will never know the feeling of a driver when winning a race. The helmet hides feelings that cannot be understood.

26. I write just because the fire of my emotion is burning. Had I not, I would not have been able to find peace.

27. Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

28. Commanded love of all men indiscriminately is an obliteration of distinction between love and hate, and therefore is not love at all.

29. A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.

30. The man who laughs has simply not yet had the terrible news.

31. Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our desires.

32. Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

33. I wouldn't worry too much about your heart. You can always put that award where your heart ought to be.

34. About six months ago, I listened to Siamese Dream. That was the first time I'd ever really heard my own album, because I had separated from the experience of making the record. And it really moved me. It made me cry, it's so beautiful.

35. One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.

36. The piano is always true to me. In times of despair, happiness, and joy, its mood is always my own.

37. A quick temper will make a fool of you soon enough.

38. By adopting a certain physical posture, a resonant chord is struck in spirit.

39. This music is forever for me. It's the stage thing, that rush moment that you live for. It never lasts, but that's what you live for.

40. Reason must be the universal rule and guide; all things must be done according to reason without allowing oneself to be swayed by emotion.

41. One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

42. Sober perseverance is more effective than enthusiastic emotions, which are all too capable of being transferred, with little difficulty, to something different each day.

43. Ce qu'on ne peut dire et ce qu'on ne peut taire, la musique l'exprime.

44. The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

45. The outsider will say, 'in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.' And if, when reason has said its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of England dropped into a child's ears by the cawing of rooks in an elm tree, by the splash of waves on a beach, or by English voices murmuring nursery rhymes, this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion she will make serve her to give to England first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world.

46. So long as I was in your sight I was your heart, your soul, your treasure; And evermore you sobb'd and sigh'd Burning in flames beyond all measure: --Three days endured your love to me, And it was lost in other three!

47. Music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.

48. It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.

49. Mozart combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart's - the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering - a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.

50. Who has reached the extreme limits of scale with the same infallible precision, equally guarded against the false refinement of artificial elegance and the roughness of spurious force? Who has better known how to breathe anguish and dread into the purest and most exquisite forms?

51. As with all great artists, Mozart expressed not only the soul, the taste and the aroma of his epoch, but also the spiritual world of man-man for all ages, in all the complexity of his desires, his struggles and ambivalence. Some of us, who only identify in Mozart a certain aristocratic refinement, may find these words strange. Often we meet with a condescending attitude towards him, to his music, reminiscent of chiming bells in a music box! ...'It's very nice, but not for me' say such people, 'give me passion - Beethoven, Brahms, tragic, monumental...' Such comments only reveal one thing, these people don't know Mozart.

52. Les grandes pensees viennent du coeur.

53. Translated: Great thoughts come from the heart.

54. Emotion has taught mankind to reason.

55. Oh, bother.

56. More happens in her face in 10 seconds than happens in most women's faces in 10 years. ~ Arthur Penn

57. * Hatred is a thing of the heart, contempt a thing of the head. Hatred and contempt are decidedly antagonistic towards one another and mutually exclusive. A great deal of hatred, indeed, has no other source than a compelled respect for the superior qualities of some other person; conversely, if you were to consider hating every miserable wretch you met you would have your work cut out: it is much easier to despise them one and all. True, genuine contempt, which is the obverse of true, genuine pride, stays hidden away in secret and lets no one suspect its existence: for if you let a person you despise notice the fact, you thereby reveal a certain respect for him, inasmuch as you want him to know how low you rate him - which betrays not contempt but hatred, which excludes contempt and only affects it. Genuine contempt, on the other hand, is the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.

58. ...impassioned, lucid Schopenhauer...

59. What may at first occur on this head, is, that as nothing can be contrary to truth or reason, except what has a reference to it, and as the judgments of our understanding only have this reference, it must follow, that passions can be contrary to reason only so far as they are accompany'd with some judgment or opinion. According to this principle, which is so obvious and natural, `tis only in two senses, that any affection can be call'd unreasonable. First, When a passion, such as hope or fear, grief or joy, despair or security, is founded on the supposition or the existence of objects, which really do not exist. Secondly, When in exerting any passion in action, we chuse means insufficient for the design'd end, and deceive ourselves in our judgment of causes and effects. Where a passion is neither founded on false suppositions, nor chuses means insufficient for the end, the understanding can neither justify nor condemn it. `Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. `Tis not contrary to reason for me to chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. `Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledge'd lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter. A trivial good may, from certain circumstances, produce a desire superior to what arises from the greatest and most valuable enjoyment; nor is there any thing more extraordinary in this, than in mechanics to see one pound weight raise up a hundred by the advantage of its situation. In short, a passion must be accompany'd with some false judgment. in order to its being unreasonable; and even then `tis not the passion, properly speaking, which is unreasonable, but the judgment.

60. I am the only being whose doom No tongue would ask no eye would mourn I never caused a thought of gloom A smile of joy since I was born In secret pleasure - secret tears This changeful life has slipped away As friendless after eighteen years As lone as on my natal day

61. Nicht durch Zorn, sondern durch Lachen todtet ma

62. 'I wish you would mention the joy she had for life, that's what she gave me. It was her love of life that carried her through everything. The middle of the road was never for her - it bored her. She wanted the pinnacle of excitement. If she was happy, she wasn't just happy, she was ecstatic. And when she was sad, she was sadder then anyone. She lived eight lives in one, and yet I thought she would outlive us all. She was a great star, and a great talent, and for the rest of my life I will be proud to be Judy Garland's daughter. It wasn't suicide, it wasn't sleeping pills, it wasn't cirrhosis. I think she was just tired, like a flower that blooms and gives joy and beauty to the world and then wilts away.' ~ Liza Minnelli

63. I think I am easy to make fun of. I try not to pay too much attention. You can't let critics dictate what you do... The thing that fascinates me, is the emotion in music, the way it can make me cry or laugh or be angry. I'm not trying to be hip or cool, and I'm not scared to put everything I have into songs. Passion is the greatest thing that music can evoke. We live in a society where I think people often find it hard to express themselves, but sometimes a song can do that for you. It might not be groundbreaking, but there is something about the simplicity of presenting songs where it's all about the lyric and the melody. People don't need to get through a whole lot of production to get to the root of the song. It's just music doing what music does best... A lot of things in the mainstream are repetitive and soulless and have been churned out without any real conviction. It is really unfair to call Coldplay insufferable, when they obviously care about what they do. James [Blunt] too. Too much of the music industry is controlled by lawyers and businessmen, making music like it's a product on the factory line. That's what I call insufferable.

64. I don't know what the fuck you just said, little man, but you touch a brother's heart

65. You're a Leonard Cohen song

66. The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray:

67. ...as you'll know, the word 'fuck' sort of is used quite a lot in my house. Now, that's not to say, I think to say 'fuck this' or 'fuck you' a lot more, so it should be entered into the English language, because it has a lot more impact when you say, 'I fucking hate this thing.'

68. ...their existense is putrid. It is absolutely putrid.

69. These creatures are among us, although morphologically they do not differ from us; we must not posit a difference of essence, but a difference of behavior. In my science fiction I write about about them constantly. Sometimes they themselves do not know they are androids. Like Rachel Rosen, they can be pretty but somehow lack something; or, like Pris in We Can Build You, they can be absolutely born of a human womb and even design androids - the Abraham Lincoln one in that book - and themselves be without warmth; they then fall within the clinical entity 'schizoid,' which means lacking proper feeling. I am sure we mean the same thing here, with the emphasis on the word 'thing.' A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that 'No man is an island,' but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.

70. Love at the lips was touch As sweet as I could bear; And once that seemed too much; I lived on air

71. Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other's eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the experience of either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centrepoint of God's creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature.

72. I sit Biting On the End of my pen Chewing It up Just like It was your head

73. Most of all I admire Mozart's capacity to be both deep and rational, a combination often said to be impossible. ~ Allan Bloom

74. Mozart's joy is made of serenity, and a phrase of his music is like a calm thought; his simplicity is merely purity. It is a crystalline thing in which all the emotions play a role, but as if already celestially transposed. Moderation consists in feeling emotions as the angels do. ~ Andre Gide

75. In Mozart's music, all intensity are crystallized in the clearest, the most beautifully balanced and proportioned, and altogether flawless musical forms. ~ Phil Goulding

76. Mozart resolved his emotions on a level that transformed them into moods uncontaminated by mortal anguish, enabling him to express the angelic anguish that is so peculiarly his own. ~ Yehudi Menuhin

77. Mozart is happiness before it has gotten defined. ~ Arthur Miller

78. A light, bright, fine day this will remain throughout my whole life. As from afar, the magic notes of Mozart's music still gently haunts me. ~ Franz Schubert

79. Sometimes the impact of Mozart's music is so immediate that the vision in the mind remains blurred and incomplete, while the soul seems to be directly invaded, drenched in wave upon wave of melancholy. ~ Stendhal

80. I never heard so much content in so short a period. ~ Pinchas Zukerman

81. Thank God he's gone!

82. 'But NOOOOOOO!!!!'

83. 'Alla! Alla! ALLA!!!'

84. Rochester: Oh oh.

85. Hate only hatred.

86. Away with this shit!

87. Hope raises no dust.

88. Love is like dying.

89. 'Oh Hell Yeah!'

90. 'We loved him.'

91. That tears it!

92. Freude herrscht

93. I am smiling.

94. I'm mortified!

95. I see red!

96. Hot Ziggety!

97. 'Ah ah!'

98. Happy ass

99. I love you dad

100. The Sonnets