Only Emotion Quotes

Only emotion objectified endures. ~ Louis Zukofsky

Yes. Soften it as they would, their hearts were lighter. The children's faces, hushed and clustered round to hear what they so little understood, were brighter, and it was a happier house for this man's death! The only emotion that the Ghost could show him, caused by the event, was one of pleasure. ~ Charles Dickens

Love is the only emotion strong enough to sweep us off our feet, but remain unmoved when we are knocked to our knees. And if I am willing to embrace the former but flee from the latter, I've confused love with infatuation. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both. ~ Flannery O'Connor

…–now, be happy. But I'm not. I feel nothing. When I 'm honest with myself, I know that the only emotion I've felt in years is being tired. Not physically tired. Just tired. It's as if…as if there were nobody there to feel any more.
But that's not all. There's something much worse. It's doing something horrible to me. I'm beginning to hate people… ~ Ayn Rand

Logic can convince but only emotion can motivate. ~ Jonathan Alter

She had become so much more accustomed to hard work and opposition than to adulation that the only emotion she had felt had been one of acute discomfort. ~ Margaret Landon

The people of today have no nobility. They do not even know what it means to be noble of heart. There is no strength of character; there is only emotion. We live in a worldwide society of emotion-based actions, emotion-based thinking, emotion-based words. People do things because they feel like it, they think things ruled by their emotions to think it and they say things because in that moment it's what they are feeling. Character does, thinks and says from a place of core identity and truth. "This is my truth, thus I will do it, think it, speak it." Nobility means strength of character, a word of honor, immovability and mind over matter. The feelings and emotions of a noble person do not merely come and go with the tides; they are there in the first place because they wouldn't have been there if it were not already decided upon. That is nobility. ~ C. JoyBell C.

I can just barely tell when you're afraid because that is the only emotion I have been able to recognize. ~ S.K.N. Hammerstone

He hesitated for a moment. Then he said softly, 'I love you, Mother.' He took my hand and kissed it, and folded my fingers round the stem of the rose. He had stripped it of its thorns.
I was too moved to speak. But maternal affection was not the only emotion that prevented utterance; as I watched him walk away, his head high and his step firm, anger boiled within me. I knew I had to conquer it before I saw Nefret again, or I would take her by the shoulders and shake her, and demand that she love my son! ~ Elizabeth Peters

Yes, interest! The worm of interest. Are you surprised? No? Yes? One conclusion I have reached here after a year in my cell is that the only emotion people feel nowadays is interest or the lack of it. Curiosity and interest and boredom have replaced the so-called emotions we used to read about in novels or see registered on actors' faces. Even the horrors of the age translate into interest. Did you ever watch anybody pick up a newspaper and read the headline PLANE CRASH KILLS THREE HUNDRED? How horrible! says the reader. But look at him when he hands you the paper. Is he horrified? No, he is interested. When is the last time you saw anybody horrified? ~ Walker Percy

In poetry, only emotion endures. ~ X.J. Kennedy

I spent three and a half years writing the novel 'Chang & Eng,' about the conjoined brothers for whom the term 'Siamese twins' was contrived, and when I think of these afflicted people, my only emotion is one of profound sympathy. ~ Darin Strauss

Anger is the only emotion many men allow themselves to express. Growing up, we are taught to avoid anything that is seen as the least bit feminine. We are taught that men 'do' while women 'feel.' We learn to keep all emotions under wraps, to see them as unmanly. We cannot show we are hurt, afraid, worried, or panicked. The feeling we are allowed to express without being called feminine is anger. When men experience IMS, anger is often the primary emotion. ~ Jed Diamond

I certainly didn't feel like writing anymore. I couldn't explain why, but the only emotion that I could arouse were feelings of anger and after staying mad all day and half the night, I was just plain tired. Mad at what? Just about everything, for just about everything was done wrong or it wasn't done perfectly. Since nothing but perfection was acceptable, I stayed mad. ~ Dick Winters

He hated stupidity. It was the only emotion I had ever seen him display toward people - a ~ Ayn Rand

Centered by his touch, his faith in her, she petted his chest through the fine merino wool of his charcoal sweater […] Not that he'd ever bother to take the time to buy things like this for himself. But he loved it when she did – and the small, domestic act gave her intense pleasure. As feeding her chocolate habit gave him. It wasn't only emotion, raw and real, that Silence had stolen from her race, she thought, but the myriad quiet intimacies that colored the intricate tapestry of life. "Okay," she said, after another nuzzling kiss from her panther. "I'm ready. ~ Nalini Singh

His kiss was immediate, ruthless, frantic, greedy.
Our lips pressed against each other's, shaping, nipping, lapping.
His lips didn't ask for permission for me to open, he demanded, and I gave, using both hands to shape the sides of his head in case he had the crazy idea of stopping.
The kiss was messy, wet and ravenous.
About the best kiss I'd ever had, making me feel like I'd only ever want his mouth and taste again for the rest of my life.
His tongue drove me fucking crazy in a smooth, slick glide over mine until the only emotion I could feel thumping through my toffee-like veins was starved hunger. ~ V. Theia

It is tempting to believe that social evils arise from the activities of evil men and that if only good men (like ourselves, naturally) wielded power, all would be well. That view requires only emotion and self-praise - easy to come by and satisfying as well. To understand why it is that 'good' men in positions of power will produce evil, while the ordinary man without power but able to engage in voluntary cooperation with his neighbors will produce good, requires analysis and thought, subordinating emotions to the rational. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

A man wasn't equal to an animal, not one particle of him. Human life was stinking corrupt, and meanwhile there were beautiful creatures who lived with delicacy on the earth without doing anyone harm. "We should be dying." the judge almost wept. ~ Kiran Desai

But the poetry of that kiss, the wonder of it, the magic that there was in life for hours after it--who can describe that? It is so easy for an Englishman to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings. To the insular cynic and the insular moralist they offer an equal opportunity. It is so easy to talk of "passing emotion," and how to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open. ~ E. M. Forster

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

Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece. ~ Okakura Kakuzo

I've always felt that color is intrinsically personal. It evokes a tremendous amount of emotion. If there's a color you respond to, that's something you can incorporate into your home. No one can tell you it's wrong. ~ Nate Berkus

Meditation is actually a very simple exercise in resting in the natural state of your present mind, and allowing yourself to be simply and clearly present to whatever thoughts, sensations, or emotions occur. ~ Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

The beautiful is and remains beautiful though it arouse no emotion whatever, and though there be no one to look at it. In other words, although the beautiful exists for the gratification of an observer, it is independent of him. In this sense music, too, has no aim (object), and the mere fact that this particular art is so closely bound up with our feelings by no means justifies the assumption that its aesthetic principles depend on this union. ~ Eduard Hanslick

Zora Neale Hurston said fear is the greatest emotion and I said, 'No my dear sister.' Fear will make us move to save our own skins. Love also makes us save ourselves, but it will make us move to save others as well. ~ Sonia Sanchez

[Narratives] serve as powerful tools for high-level neural network integration. The combination of linear storyline and visual imagery woven together with verbal and nonverbal expressions of emotion activates and utilizes dedicated circuitry of both left and right hemispheres, cortical and subcortical networks, the various regions of the frontal lobes, and the hippocampus and amygdala. The cooperative and interactive activation involved in stories may be precisely what is required for scultpting and maintaining neural network integration while allowing us to combine sensations, feelings, and behaviors with conscious awareness. Further, stories link individuals into families, tribes, and nations and into a group mind linking each individual brain. It is likely that our brains have been able to become as complex as they are precisely because of the power of narratives and the group to support neural integration ~ Louis Cozolino

One of the big features of living alone was that you could talk to yourself all you wanted and address imaginary audiences, running the gamut of emotion. ~ Mary McCarthy

My paint is like a rocket, which describes its own space. I try to make the impossible possible. What is happening I cannot foresee, it is a surprise. Painting, like passion, is an emotion full of truth and rings a living sound, like the roar coming from the lion's breast. To paint is to destroy what preceded. I never try to make a painting, but a chunk of life. It is a scream; it is a night; it is like a child; it is a tiger behind bars. ~ Karel Appel

I let the music set the tone of the lyrics.I allowed myself to write more about relationships and emotions, in a girly way almost. ~ Jose Gonzalez

Love is a decision.

It's not an emotion that we see on movie screens or read about in books. It isn't the dramatic crescendo that leads to happily ever after.

Love is hard work.

It's the decision you make, knowing your differences, knowing your flaws, but choosing anyway, because you can't imagine life without that person. ~ Jenny Bravo

Who told you that one paints with colors? One makes use of colors, but one paints with emotions. ~ Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin

The appreciation of the merits of art of the emotions it conveys depends upon an understanding of the meaning of life ... ~ Leo Tolstoy

He got into the tub and ran a little cold water. Then he lowered his thin, hairy body into the just-right warmth and stared at the interstices between the tiles. Sadness--he had experienced that emotion ten thousand times. As exhalation is to inhalation, he thought of it as the return from each thrust of happiness.

Lazily soaping himself, he gave examples.

When he was five and Irwin eight, their father had breezed into town with a snowstorm and come to see them where they lived with their grandparents in the small Connecticut city. Their father had been a vagabond salesman and was considered a bum by people who should know. But he had come into the closed, heated house with all the gimcrack and untouchable junk behind glass and he had smelled of cold air and had had snow in his curly black hair. He had raved about the world he lived in, while the old people, his father and mother, had clucked sadly in the shadows. And then he had wakened the boys in the night and forced them out into the yard to worship the swirling wet flakes, to dance around with their hands joined, shrieking at the snow-laden branches. Later, they had gone in to sleep with hearts slowly returning to bearable beatings. Great flowering things had opened and closed in Norman's head, and the resonance of the wild man's voice had squeezed a sweet, tart juice through his heart. But then he had wakened to a gray day with his father gone and the world walking gingerly over the somber crust of ~ Edward Lewis Wallant

Where film is infinitely superior to any other medium is emotion and story and character. ~ Peter Jackson

All the emotions have something in common. People are quite aware of the sorrow there always is in lust, but they are not so aware of the lust there is in sorrow. ~ Graham Greene

We are all, in the private kingdom of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend. Someone who isn't embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and all that we have to offer, in the end, is love. ~ Steve Almond

A certain construct of emotions that really define who you are and who you will become and I feel very much that my childhood is very alive inside of me, very close to me, very much part of me. And it's a sometimes painful, sometimes joyous inexhaustible resource for poetry. ~ Edward Hirsch

I take great pride in the artistic development of cartoons. Our characters are made to go through emotions. ~ Walt Disney

Rosy lifted her arm, tried to say something, then pointed at the cafe, held her head, covered her mouth and - humiliation of humiliations - she began to cry. Right there in the street. "I'm so confused," she said but it came out as a great honking wail.
"Come here, you silly girl," Phyllis said.
The woman put her arms around Rosy, patted her back, and for the first time in forever, Rosy allowed herself to just cry.
A young mother with twins in a pram passed them. The children's eyes tracked Rosy for a second before their faces crumpled and they started to cry too.
"I'm sorry," Rosy said, and flapped her arms. "I'm sorry. ~ R.G. Manse

I hate when people ask what a book is about. People who read for plot, people who suck out the story like the cream filling in an Oreo, should stick to comic strips and soap operas ... Every book worth a damn is about emotions and love and death and pain. It's about words. It's about a man dealing with life. Okay? ~ J.R. Moehringer

Brandon pulled on her hair, tipping her head back and terminating the kiss. His breath rasped in harmony with hers. He nudged her mouth with his, caught her lips again, then turned his head and rubbed his cheek against hers. "I want you to forget I said this," he whispered as he increased the pressure on the back of her scalp and urged her forehead to his shoulder. "I don't even know what I mean by it."

His mouth dusted over the crown of her head. "But I think I need you, Natalya."

Her breath caught, the sudden overflow of emotion bringing unbidden moisture to her eyes. He'd reached right in and pulled the words out of her very soul. If anyone needed the other, she needed him. Needed the way he made it impossible to hide. ~ Tori St. Claire

Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly. ~ Doris Lessing

It's a completely useless emotion - jealousy. I don't go there. ~ Joy Behar

Statistics do not convey emotion. They shock us for a minute or two, and then we click again. ~ Madeleine M. Kunin

April 11, 2004
Does anyone know where I can find a copy of the rules of thought, feeling, and behavior in these circumstances? It seems like there should be a rule book somewhere that lays out everything exactly the way one should respond to a loss like this. I'd surely like to know if I'm doing it right. Am I whining enough or too much? Am I unseemly in my occasional moments of lightheartedness? At what date and I supposed to turn off the emotion and jump back on the treadmill of normalcy? Is there a specific number of days or decades that must pass before I can do something I enjoy without feeling I've betrayed my dearest love? And when, oh when, am I ever really going to believe this has happened? Next time you're in a bookstore, as if there's a rule book.
11:54 p.m.
Jim ~ Jim Beaver

But in some cases it is really more creditable to be carried away by an emotion, however unreasonable, which springs from a great love, than to be unmoved. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

She liked the word ineffable because it meant a feeling so big or vast that it could not be expressed in words.
And yet, because it could not be expressed in words, people had invented a word to express it, and that made Liesl feel hopeful, somehow. ~ Lauren Oliver

For upon reaching his destination, a man with a past full of misfortunes can both taste the bitter drops of his sorrow and grin in triumph despite them. In reaching the desired end of his voyage there is an outbreak of joy. Even in a pyrrhic victory, a man of past and present tragedies experiences the sweetness of that unfamiliar emotion. ~ Asaad Almohammad

If you have the emotion, it infects you and the audience. If you don't have it don't bother; just say your lines as truthfully as you are capable of doing. You can't fake emotion. ~ Sanford Meisner

Patsy Cline? Larger than life! She taught me emotion: raw, sincere, unashamed. ~ Reba McEntire

Why would men so mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought, was what ruined so many. Greed--the desire to crowd into a moment all the enjoyment it will hold, to squeeze from the hour all the emotion it will yield. Men commit themselves when but half-meaning to do so, sacrificing possible future fullness of ecstasy to the craving for immediate excitement. Greed--mortgaging the future--forcing the hand of Time, or of Fate. ~ Paz Marquez Benitez

You can't control your emotion,
but you can control your action ~ Hlovate

I like the rule that corrects emotion. ~ Georges Braque

Suffering ... is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread. ~ Michael Pollan

The intensest feeling of the beauty of a cloud lighted by the setting sun, is no hindrance to my knowing that the cloud is a vapour of water, subject to all the laws of vapours in a state of suspension; and I am just as likely to allow for, and act on, these physical laws whenever there is occasion to do so, as if I had been incapable of perceiving any distinction between beauty and ugliness. ~ John Stuart Mill

I'm profoundly changed. There's a bittersweet emotion that I feel from playing this role ... I want the world to be different because I was here. However lofty or crazy or delusional that may sound, I want people's lives to be better because I was here. ~ Will Smith

As a form of body language, when the mind is receptive to the sensory experience, writing speaks the truth about all thoughts and feelings. Now I don't want to be misunderstood here because this isn't a special talent or skill. It's present in all of us. The trick is to discover it, cultivate it and translate it from an internal state to an expressive sensuality. It is truly a creative impulse that unconsciously expresses emotions and can also arouse emotion in the person reading the book. The beauty and harmony of the writer never gets old and there are as many new things to learn each day, as there are varieties of adjectives, nouns and verbs in the world. It is the ultimate way to communicate with your reader. ~ Karl Wiggins

Just spending time together is not enough, he said. The sorts of activities you engage in are vital. Graham concluded you are driven to grow, to expand, to add to your abilities and knowledge. When you satisfy this motivation for self-expansion by incorporating aspects of your romantic partner or friend into your own skills, philosophies and self, it does more to strengthen your bond than any other act of love. This opens the door to one of the best things about misattribution of emotion. If, like those in the study, you persevere through a challenge - be it remodeling a kitchen yourself or learning how to dance the Dougie - that glowing feeling of becoming wiser, that buoyant sense of self-expansion, will be partially misattributed to the presence of the other person. ~ David McRaney

I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly. ~ Salvador Dali

There is something way more bigger than just being a writer. Being a writer doesn't mean you just write about things because you want that. It means that you are capable to feel this world and every emotion deepest than you can, and you're just sharing that with people all around the world. It means that there is something common between infinity and writing. Writing makes me feel immortal. You just can't stop, cause there are endless words inside of you… ~ Tamara Stamenkovic

It might seem that this knowledge is cold, devoid of emotion, empty. This is another illusion. ~ Frederick Lenz

Burning is the right way to paint it. You feel yourself getting so hot, day after day. Hotter and hotter. It gets to be too much. Even for stars. At some point they fizzle out or explode. Cease to be. But if you're looking up at the sky, you don't see it that way. You think those stars are still there. Some aren't. Some are already gone. Long gone. I guess, now, so am I. ~ Val Emmich

There is no counterfeit emotion that rivals the peace in a relationship with God. ~ Sarah Hawkes Valente

Sometimes happiness can come very simply, purely, merely if one is ready to embrace it with open arms. ~ Shampa Sharma

Many researchers say the dominant emotion experienced after loss is yearning or searching. And while you might feel more anger early on, it's accompanied by a whole host of other feelings. ~ Meghan O'Rourke

I think there are differences between men and women. There is more of a softness to women than there is to men, especially when it comes to those more intimate emotions: feeling love, feeling familial connections. ~ David Bezmozgis

I always start with emotion. That's where I start all of my improvisations, on the piano. I always start with the mood or the feel of where I am in that moment. ~ Laura Mvula