Human Emotion Quotes

I don't understand,' Dad says. 'You were such happy children.'

'I was never a happy child,' George says.

'True, but Henry was.'

'I'm not anymore. It's actually hard to imagine how my life could be any more shit at this point,' I say, and George holds up the copy of the book she's reading. The Road.

'Okay. Sure. It could get more shit if there was some kind of world-ending event and people started eating each other. But that's a whole different shit scale. On your average human-emotion scale, my life is registering as the shittiest of the shit. ~ Cath Crowley

I think, for one, we have to really accept that anger is a normal human emotion that can be a positive force for change. ~ Koren Zailckas

You know, Vik, you're amazingly human at times. (Alix)
I know. But I wonder if the feelings I have are real or just electrical stimulations in my cortex that simulate human emotion. I wish I knew if they were real or imagined. (Vik)
And that makes you completely human, sweetie. We all have those doubts. (Alix) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Jealousy is a human emotion," she said with a smile. "If you weren't jealous if another man flirted with me I'd be terribly disappointed. ~ Vera Jane Cook

Anger is a normal human emotion and all children experience it to some degree, but many parents have difficulty dealing with it. Often they mistakenly see their children's anger as an indication of their failure as parents. When a child throws a tantrum, most parents believe that they have lost control, and they feel helpless. Children need to express their angry feelings, but within reasonable limits. They must be taught that the feelings of anger are all right but that this doesn't mean that they child may kick the dog, hit someone, or break things. When a parent teaches a child how to ventilate her feelings in appropriate ways, he teaches a very important lesson. ~ Susan Forward

I just have a thing in my brain that when I'm about to do something that's genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I'll be like, 'Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.' ~ Drake

One of the most profound changes in my life happened when I got my head around the relationship between gratitude and joy. I always thought that joyful people were grateful people. I mean, why wouldn't they be? They have all of that goodness to be grateful for. But after spending countless hours collecting stories about joy and gratitude, three powerful patterns emerged: Without exception, every person I interviewed who described living a joyful life or who described themselves as joyful, actively practiced gratitude and attributed their joyfulness to their gratitude practice. Both joy and gratitude were described as spiritual practices that were bound to a belief in human interconnectedness and a power greater than us. People were quick to point out the differences between happiness and joy as the difference between a human emotion that's connected to circumstances and a spiritual way of engaging with the world that's connected to practicing gratitude. ~ Brene Brown

When a clown kills somebody, that's new - that's something you've never seen before. Here's someone you thought was good, and he's doing something so terrible that normal human emotion can't even deal with it - and then he turns around and does something good again. That's fascinating. It's not weird to be obsessed with that, it's weird not to be. ~ Dan Wells

Human emotion. Millions of souls, together they make the mood of a certain time. It doesn't matter that they disagree, that they hate, that they fight. All together they create it, this thing. This epoch. Times of war. Times of famine. Times of wealth and happiness. The mood of an era. What is stronger than that? ~ Bee Ridgway

Human emotion is not a linear experience. That which provokes emotion in one may provoke little, if anything, in another. ~ A. Zavarelli

The nuclear arms race is over, but the ethical problems raised by nonmilitary technology remain. The ethical problems arise from three "new ages" flooding over human society like tsunamis. First is the Information Age, already arrived and here to stay, driven by computers and digital memory. Second is the Biotechnology Age, due to arrive in full force early in the next century, driven by DNA sequencing and genetic engineering. Third is the Neurotechnology Age, likely to arrive later in the next century, driven by neural sensors and exposing the inner workings of human emotion and personality to manipulation. ~ Freeman Dyson

He could quite quickly become detached from the nuances of common human emotion. Particularly if he was engaged in some aspect of a scientific problem or research. His work excluded any consideration for the feelings of those around him. And he rarely excused himself or justified his behavior. It was as if he was compelled to focus all his energy on one subject and was unaware that others did not follow his obsession. ~ Theresa Breslin

We see North Koreans as automatons, goose-steeping at parades, doing mass gymnastics with fixed smiles on their faces - but beneath all that, real life goes on with the same complexity of human emotion as anywhere else. ~ Barbara Demick

Regret is the worst human emotion. If you took another road, you might have fallen off a cliff. I'm content. ~ William Shatner

Jerry Hirshberg, in his book The Creative Priority: Putting Innovation to Work in Your Business, writes, No one in a corporation deliberately sets out to stifle creative thought. Yet, a traditional bureaucratic structure, with its need for predictability, linear logic, conformance to accepted norms, and the dictates of the most recent "long-range" vision statement, is a nearly perfect idea-killing machine. People in groups regress toward the security of the familiar and the well-regulated. Even creative people do it. It's easier. It avoids the ambiguity, the fear of unpredictability, the threat of the unfamiliar, and the messiness of intuition and human emotion. ~ John C. Maxwell

To me, words are like stickpins. I can throw a word at you and it will bounce right off your body. But if I take that little stickpin and wire it to the back of an iron bar called human emotion, I can put that thing right through your heart. ~ Tony Robbins

The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs. ~ John Gardner

The greatest piece of acting or music or sculpture or what-have-you always has its roots in the truth of human emotion. ~ Sanford Meisner

If a man has to make a woman the center of his love, why should he integrate animality into this sacred human emotion? ... Is love incompelete without it? ... Is love the name of physical excersize ? ~ Saadat Hasan Manto

Oh, dear Hazel." Aphrodite folded her fan. "Such optimism, yet you have heartrending days ahead of you. Of course war is coming. Love and war always go together. They are the peaks of human emotion! Evil and good, beauty and ugliness. ~ Rick Riordan

Perhaps there's an innate human emotion inside us all that when we are presented with something we don't understand, we immediately want to kill it. ~ Todd Berger

Her eyes are different. Wary, guarded, tinged with that human emotion I despise the most: regret. ~ Karen Marie Moning

We didn't need light & shade, irony or humor. An iconic Daltrey bellow could convey an extrodinary range of human emotion; withering sadness, self pity, loneliness, abandonment, spiritual desperation, the loss of childhood, as well as the more obvious rage & frustration, joy & triumph. ~ Pete Townshend

Jealousy. Depression. Love. They pretty much demonstrate the whole range of human emotion. ~ Brandon Stanton

All the big pop acts that I've been into over the years - whether it's ABBA or Prince - managed to combine amazing melodies and honest human emotion. But coming out of the super-super-commerical pop industry in the 90s, maybe people forgot about the fact that pop music can do both of those things. ~ Robyn

How dangerous a master human emotion is! ~ Watchman Nee

Apart from Love, which is not a human emotion, of all the rest my last words would best read: It's all for the experience. ~ Vanna Bonta

As humans, we don't know what we should do. We don't have those instincts like God has given animals. We have to see to know where we are going. It is just a natural human emotion to look for people to emulate. ~ Tony Dungy

You can't apply mathematical formulas to people, Cresswell. There's no equation for human emotion, there are too many variables. ~ Kerri Maniscalco

The confessions can touch on every human emotion. They can be laugh-out-loud funny, for sure, they can be heart-breaking, they can be sexual or hidden acts of kindness, they can be romantic ... ~ Frank Warren

The cycle of optimism and euphoria leading to greed, fear and capitulation, giving way to hope and building back to optimism, drives the expansion and contraction of our financial world in a market cycle of collective human emotion. ~ Coreen T. Sol

In the moment when the eyes of the two men met, Javert, without having moved or made the least gesture, became hideous. No human emotion can wear an aspect so terrible as that of jubilation. He had the face of a fiend who has found the victim he thought he had lost. ~ Victor Hugo

Love in this life is expanded by our anticipation of the next life. Those who love under God are never satisfied with small love, or love bound by the flaws of human emotion. Those who love under God dream of another life where they can experience it and live it in God's perfect form, so they seek to build it in this life as much as possible. ~ Criss Jami

There was some reason to call Pole heartless. His blood ran thinly in an effete body; no human emotion was urgent in him, neither love of family nor of country, and certainly not of women. But now he was forced to remember that his mother was also a woman, and to realize that her fate had lain at his door. ~ Margaret Irwin

Procastination can be very satisfying.' He laughed ruefully, 'As you pointed out, it may be a very human emotion, but there's undoubtedly something satisfying about pretending the world is fine and you problems will keep until you're ready to deal with them. ~ Chloe Neill

I am an artist. Any artist knows that their creations, their pieces must express an array of human emotion and experience. From the juvenile and innocent, to the erotic and the dangerous, and everything in between. Because Life is all of these things and more. It is the artist's divine purpose to reflect what Experience has shown them and others. What truly sets us apart from each other is whether or not we truly know ourselves enough to reflect objectively; but, through our own unique 'voice'. ~ Solange Nicole

For those regarded as warriors ...
When engaged in combat, the vanquishing of thine enemy can be the warrior's only concern. Suppress all human emotion and compassion. Kill whoever stands in thy way, even if that be Lord God or Buddha himself. This truth lies at the heart of the art of combat. ~ Quentin Tarantino

I try to connect to human emotion. I'm always looking for something primal, something really base that is beyond language, that people understand beyond language. ~ Will Smith

Love is many things. It's every raw human emotion rolled up into one messy four letter word. There's no rule book and definitely no guarantees. ~ J.L. Berg

The herd instinct seems to be the strongest human emotion, one that the race is constantly breeding off as the mavericks are liquidated. Happiness is running with the crowd. ~ John Train

I have lived too completely, I think. I have known every human emotion. ~ Bela Lugosi

The problem isn't who is in charge. It's what is in charge. The problem is that people are encouraged to function as machines. Or, actually, as mechanisms. Human emotion and sympathy are unprofessional. They are inappropriate to the exercise of reason. Everything which makes people good - makes them human - is ruled out. The system doesn't care about people, but we treat it as if it were one of us, as if it were the sum of our goods and not the product of our least admirable compromises. ~ Nick Harkaway

We didn't need light & shade, irony or humor. An iconic Daltrey bellow could convey an extrodinary range of human emotion; withering sadness, self pity, loneliness, abandonment, spiritual desperation, the loss of childhood, as well as the more obvious rage & frustration, joy & triumph. ~ Pete Townshend

Music is an emotional experience, and that is what imprints itself on the soul. And I think for me, any great art is art which communicates human emotion. ~ Greg Lake

When someone's really good at encapsulating human emotion and putting it out in a form that can reach a variety of people, that's going to have a big effect when he's no longer there. ~ Albert Hammond, Jr.

Though in this genre we write about the fantastic, the stories work best when there is solid grounding in our world. Magic works best for me when it aligns with scientific principles. Worldbuilding works best when it draws from sources in our world. Characters work best when they're grounded in solid human emotion and experience. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Music is a fantastic peacekeeper of the world, it is integral to harmony, and it is a required fundamental of human emotion. ~ Xun Zi

A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity. ~ William James

When we pray the Psalms we are continuing a three-thousand-year-old tradition - a tradition practiced by Jesus and the Apostles. We pray the Psalms, not to express what we feel, but to learn to feel what they express. In praying the Psalms we learn to experience the whole range of human emotion in a way that is healthy and healing. ~ Brian Zahnd

Dive deeply into the miracle of life and let the tips of your wings be burnt by the flame, let your feet be lacerated by the thorns, let your heart be stirred by human emotion, and let your soul be lifted beyond the earth. ~ Vilayat Inayat Khan

Maybe the brokenness comes to teach you how to kneel. Stop trying to 'be strong'. We cry, to heal. We feel, to stay human. ~ Yasmin Mogahed

Love is the only human emotion that cannot be controlled. ~ Rush Limbaugh

My first movie, 'Thirteen,' and it was very real - almost too real. It was very gritty, with raw human emotion. I'd love to do something like that again. ~ Catherine Hardwicke

Since then I have searched for my heroes among small-t truths. I always find them among people learning the art of acceptance: not acceptance of defeat or acceptance of some inability to influence their own futures, but rather acceptance of life on the planet, acceptance of the grays rather than the black-and-whites, acceptance of the astonishing range of human emotion and human behavior. ~ Chris Crutcher

Yet it is worth noting that in this example we never witness a complete desacralization of the world, for in the Far East what is called the "esthetic emotion" still retains a religious dimension, even among intellectuals. But the example of the miniature gardens shows us in what direction and by what means the desacralization of the world is accomplished. We need only imagine what an esthetic emotion of this sort could become in a modern society, and we shall understand how the experience of cosmic sanctity can be rarefied and transformed until it becomes a purely human emotion - that, for example, of art for art's sake. ~ Mircea Eliade

I don't think fear necessarily is a core human emotion, but I do think fear of death is something that is at the core of every person's existence. ~ Zachary Cole Smith

Poker is a game where you don't have to have the best hand to win. Poker is really reading other people and reading human emotion, which certainly comes into play in business. ~ Charlie Ergen

Weather is cyclical. It's falling and then rising. It's movement. Swaying, drifting, and swirling. It's power. Gravity, evaporation, and erosion. It's a potpourri of human emotion. Happiness, sadness, elation, and disappointment. ~ Alex Z. Moores

In fact fear is probably the strongest human emotion, period. Whoever woke at four in the morning because they were feeling happy? ~ Robert Harris

I don't want to make any general statements, but I feel like so many stories that are presented as being about humanity and human emotion are just so convoluted and overly dramatic and focus on these certain little things that are supposedly meaningful, but just don't really mean anything. ~ Ellar Coltrane

Why do you suppose the poets talk about hearts?' he asked me suddenly. 'When they discuss emotional damage? The tissue of hearts is tough as a shoe. Did you ever sew up a heart?'
I shook my head. 'No, but I've watched. I know what you mean.' The walls of a heart are thick and strong, and the surgeons use heavy needles. It takes a good bit of strength, but it pulls together neatly. As much as anything it's like binding a book.
The seat of human emotion should be the liver,' Doc Homer said. 'That would be an appropriate metaphor: we don't hold love in our hearts, we hold it in our livers.'
I understood exactly. Once in ER I saw a woman who'd been stabbed everywhere, most severely in the liver. It's an organ with the consistency of layer upon layer of wet Kleenex. Every attempt at repair just opens new holes that tear and bleed. You try to close the wound with fresh wounds, and you try and you try and you don't give up until there's nothing left. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Without emotion, what's the point of being human? ~ Marie Lu

Some of the greatest reality television we ever had was the moon landings. When you think about it, that was human emotion and people, unscripted, working with each other - and millions and millions of people around the world, glued to their television sets to share real-time in a brand new, fascinating human experience. ~ Chris Hadfield

Laughter, that distinctively human emotion, laughter which springs from trust in the other, from willingness to put oneself momentarily in the other's place, even at one's own expense, is the special emotional basis of democratic procedures, just as pride is the emotion of an aristocracy, shame of a crowd that rules, and fear of a police state. ~ Margaret Mead

Here is The Boy with the Thorn in His Side, dying in your world. A man made monster with every human emotion, overdosed on worthlessness in a world that could never wrap it's head around him (so don't even try).
When it's all over just remember every single word you ever said was always just a bullet to his head. Bury him underground between friends and love - the only things that are gonna make it to the end with him. Look for his body buried beneath where the yellow weeds are growing and know he's still living in his nightmares. ~ Pete Wentz

I paused beneath the arched entrance, where the drawbridge had once been, imagining all the people who had passed in and out over the centuries, every one of them carrying a combination of desire, hope, jealousy, despair, grief, love, and every other human emotion; a combination that made each one as unique as a snowflake, yet linked all of them inextricably to every other human being from the dawn of time to the end of it. ~ Sara Gruen

I'm not an autobiographical writer, but I am a writer who deals with human emotion on all levels. ~ P.J. Harvey

In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other's blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven's love. ~ Aberjhani

Some men turn away from all this cheap emotion with a kind of heroic despair ... But this too can be an error. For if our emotions really die in the desert, our humanity dies with them. ~ Thomas Merton

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self. ~ John Banville

Every trial that ever burdened a mortal man, every temptation that ever stormed a human heart, and every blessing that ever delighted a needy soul have been skillfully designed by the Creator for one purpose: to draw men to Himself. ~ Jim Berg

Through poverty, godhunger, the family debacle, I kept a sense of worth. I could limn and paint like no-one else in this human-wounded land: I was worth the while of living. Now my skill is dead. I should be. ~ Keri Hulme

What is happening to our world is almost too colossal for human comprehension to contain ... To contemplate its girth and its circumference, to attempt to define it, to try and fight it all at once, is impossible. The only way to combat it is by fighting specific wars in specific ways. ~ Arundhati Roy

This is the singular fantasy of human intimacy: that one plus one will somehow, someday, equal one. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish - separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two. ~ Barbara Brown Taylor

It requires far more strength to experience emotion than to suppress it. ~ Wendy Walker

The organic constitution of the Church is not immutable; but Christian society, just as human society, is subject to perpetual evolution. ~ Pope Pius X

There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won. ~ Will Durant

I love brief habits and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things…My nature is designed entirely for brief habits…I always believe that here is something that will give me lasting satisfaction - brief habits, too, have this faith of passion, this faith in eternity - and that I am to be envied for having found and recognized it…But one day its time is up; the good thing parts from me, not as something that has come to nauseate me but peacefully and sated with me as I am with it - as if we had reason to be grateful to each other as we shook hands to say farewell. Even then something new is waiting at the door, along with my faith - this indestructible fool and sage! - that this new discovery will be just right, and that this will be the last time. That is what happens to me with dishes, ideas, human beings, cities, poems, music, doctrines, ways of arranging the day, and life styles. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

She'd been acutely aware that terror, betrayal, and cruelty had a human face, but she had not sufficiently appreciated that courage, kindness, and love had a human face as well. ~ Dean Koontz

There is absolutely no power in our human effort to live holy. It is only by His grace. And the result of receiving grace is we get better at living like Christ, which is something we all want, right? ~ Joyce Meyer

finding easy scapegoats for complicated problems had been a human pastime since the first mob of cavemen struck someone down with a rock. ~ Neal Shusterman

I believe as human beings we are out of balance, out of synch with the earth. ~ Kevin Richardson

The definition of Man recited itself in my head ...
And God created man in His own image. And God decreed that man should have one body, one head, two arms and two legs: that each arm should be joined in two places and end in one hand: that each hand should have four fingers and one thumb: that each finger should bear a flat finger-nail ... Then God created woman, also, in the same image, but with these differences, according to her nature: her voice would be of higher pitch than man's: she should grow no beard: she should have two breasts ...
And any creature that shall seem to be human, but is not formed thus is not human. It is neither man, nor woman. It is a blasphemy against the true image of God, and hateful in the sight of God. ~ John Wyndham

They are the humans, who are uniquely adorned with the priceless characteristic of empathizing. They are the humans who shed tears full of purity and piety, when they see even a complete stranger in pain and misery. They are the humans who come together to save a kid in the neighborhood when he is trapped under the wreckage of his fallen home, regardless of caste, creed and religion. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Neither the heart cut by a sliver of glass in a wasteland of thorns, nor the atrocious waters seen in the corners of certain houses, waters like eyelids and eyes, could hold your waist in my hands when my heart lifts its oak trees toward your unbreakable thread of snow. Night sugar, spirit of crowns, redeemed human blood, your kisses banish me, and a surge of water with remnants of the sea strikes the silences that wait for you surrounding the worn-out chairs, wearing doors away. ~ Pablo Neruda

Two deep human desires were at war ... the longing for stability, for form, for permanence, which in its essence is the desire for death, and the opposing hunger for movement, change, instability and risk, which are life. Men came from the east and built these American towns because they wished to go no farther, and the towns they built were shaped by the urge to go onward. ~ Rose Wilder Lane

Society must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature. ~ Erich Fromm

Man is greater than the gods. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Her tiny hand gripped mine with a surprising warmth, and in a shocking wash of emotion, I felt everything I knew shift. The scent of cinnamon and baby powder hit me, and as my eyes widened, my heart melted, making room for her. ~ Kim Harrison

Afterwards, sometimes she dared to remember being in his arms. How, after only clumsy couplings with others, she and this man had straightaway come together as a perfect fit. How they moved together, in effortless synchronicity and with such deep pleasure. How when their exercise left them exhausted, she cried a little, so Vinius wiped her eye with his index finger, murmuring kindly, 'No tears!' before they both fell into profound sleep.
How her troubled mind had drowned in peace, her body melting against his...

He was dead. No point speculating. Cherish the past for what it was, an ideal, a signal that human happiness might be a possibility. Raise your standards. Make a decent life, Lucilla. Life is all there is. If it's only once, it must be good... He had been right. If perfection only happened once, that was better than never. Now nothing for her would ever again entail complete despair. So thank you, Gaius Vinius Clodianus, son of Marcus, thank you for your good deed, a deed that brightened somebody's dark world. ~ Lindsey Davis

People abuse their own friends and family, but it is only after performing many meritorious acts that one gets a human birth. ~ Sathya Sai Baba

I think the biggest thing - and this I think is true of songs but also of movies and books and art in general - is when you have this moment where you hear a song or whatever and you say, "Hey, I've felt that exact way as a human being," and there's no easy way to describe it. ~ Craig Finn

Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way. ~ Yasunari Kawabata

Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with glaring colors will baby people become interested - for a while at least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day. ~ Emma Goldman

War had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history; it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups. ~ Jane Goodall

It is only the untalented director who imagines him or herself in every part, wants his or her own thoughts and emotions portrayed; it is only the untalented who make their own limitations those of the actors as well. ~ Liv Ullmann

How can you measure progress if you don't know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the "market" put a price on things - food, clothes, electricity, running water - when it doesn't take into account the REAL cost of production? ~ Arundhati Roy

Musick is certainly a very agreeable Entertainment, but if it would take the entire Possession of our Ears, if it would make us incapable of hearing Sense, if it would exclude Arts that have a much greater Tendency to the Refinement of human Nature; I must confess I would allow it no better Quarter than Plato has done, who banishes it out of his Common-wealth. ~ Joseph Addison

There is much meaning in the word endure. For example, when dealing with unstable human feelings and uneven pathways in life, without endurance to hold you up, you may fall into a pit in the brush. ~ Zicheng Hong