All Quotes By Tag: Emotions

“Choices will continually be necessary and — let us not forget — possible. Obedience to God is always possible. It is a deadly error to fall into the notion that when feelings are extremely strong we can do nothing but act on them.”

“It’s when I hang on every word that you say, that I live over, and over, and over, and over.”

“I asked myself, “Do I sit here and admire the view, or do I keep going and see what is on the other side?” Mother Nature is beautiful. She has such a wide range of emotions, that is hard not to love them all.”

“But no: he was empty, he was confronted by a vast anger, a desperate anger, he saw it and could almost have touched it. But it was inert – if it were to live and find expression and suffer, he must lend it his own body. It was other people’s anger. “Swine!” He clenched his fists, he strode along, but nothing came, the anger remained external to himself.”

“And empty words are evil.”

“As a rule, we don’t like to feel to sad or lonely or depressed. So why do we like music (or books or movies) that evoke in us those same negative emotions? Why do we choose to experience in art the very feelings we avoid in real life?Aristotle deals with a similar question in his analysis of tragedy. Tragedy, after all, is pretty gruesome. […] There’s Sophocles’s Oedipus, who blinds himself after learning that he has killed his father and slept with his mother. Why would anyone watch this stuff? Wouldn’t it be sick to enjoy watching it? […] Tragedy’s pleasure doesn’t make us feel “good” in any straightforward sense. On the contrary, Aristotle says, the real goal of tragedy is to evoke pity and fear in the audience. Now, to speak of the pleasure of pity and fear is almost oxymoronic. But the point of bringing about these emotions is to achieve catharsis of them – a cleansing, a purification, a purging, or release. Catharsis is at the core of tragedy’s appeal.”

“A writer is one who communicates ideas and emotions people want to communicate but aren’t quite sure how, or even if, they should communicate them.”

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”

“The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.”

“Today, many will choose to live free of conditions and rules governing their own happiness. Why not you? Do not let another day go by where your dedication to other people’s opinions is greater than your dedication to your own emotions! Today’s a new day!”

“Do not let another day go by where your dedication to other people’s opinions is greater than your dedication to your own emotions!”

“Books can also provoke emotions. And emotions sometimes are even more troublesome than ideas. Emotions have led people to do all sorts of things they later regret-like, oh, throwing a book at someone else.”

“There is an emotional promiscuity we’ve noticed among many good young men and women. The young man understands something of the journey of the heart. He wants to talk, to “share the journey.” The woman is grateful to be pursued, she opens up. They share the intimacies of their lives – their wounds, their walks with God. But he never commits. He enjoys her… then leaves. And she wonders, What did I do wrong? She failed to see his passivity. He really did not ever commit or offer assurances that he would. Like Willoughby to Marianne in Sense and Sensibility.Be careful you do not offer too much of yourself to a man until you have good, solid evidence that he is a strong man willing to commit. Look at his track record with other women. Is there anything to be concerned about there? If so, bring it up. Also, does he have any close male friends – and what are they like as men? Can he hold down a job? Is he walking with God in a real and intimate way? Is he facing the wounds of his own life, and is he also demonstrating a desire to repent of Adam’s passivity and/or violence? Is he headed somewhere with his life? A lot of questions, but your heart is a treasure, and we want you to offer it only to a man who is worthy and ready to handle it well.”

“The heart is a strange beast and not ruled by logic.”

“Can he love her? Can the soul really be satisfied with such polite affections? To love is to burn – to be on fire, like Juliet or Guinevere or Eloise…”