Quotes about heart
page 8

“My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

Nature, Sea

“Today in my heart
a vague trembling of stars
and all roses are
as white as my pain.”

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director

Pain, Star

“Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep.”

William Shakespeare Hamlet

Source: Hamlet

Sleep, Fight

“A woman with romance in her life lived as grandly as a queen, because her heart was treasured.”

Nora Roberts book Bed of Roses

Source: Bed of Roses

Life

“Life is going to give you just what you put in it. Put your whole heart in everything you do, and pray, then you can wait.”

Maya Angelou book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Source: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Life, Waiting

“When you pray, rather let your heart be without words then your words without heart.”

John Bunyan (1628–1688) English Christian writer and preacher

Variant: In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.

“In difficult times carry something beautiful in your heart.”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

Beauty, Time

“I had to wait for someone special. Someone who would make my heart feel as if it's been trampled by elephants, thrown into the amazon, and eaten by piranhas.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Love in the Afternoon

Feeling, Waiting

“No good friends, no bad friends; only people you want, need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart.”

Stephen King book It

Source: It (1986), Ch. 16 : Eddie's Bad Break, §8
Context: Maybe, he thought, there aren't any such things as good friends or bad friends — maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they're always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for, too, if that's what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.

People, Housing

“What a strange world we live in… Said Alice to the Queen of hearts”

Lewis Carroll book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Source: Alice in Wonderland

World

“Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart, or in the head?”

William Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice

Source: The Merchant of Venice

“Sometimes you break your heart in the right way, if you know what I mean.”

Gregory David Roberts book Shantaram

Source: Shantaram

Way, Heartbreaking, Depressing

“It's a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart.”

Joel Coen (1954) American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor

Source: O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Fools

“Among the things you can give and still keep are your word, a smile, and a grateful heart.”

Zig Ziglar (1926–2012) American motivational speaker

Smile

“There are many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream -- whatever that dream might be.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Love, Dreams, Way, Sad

“The mediator between head and hands must be the heart!”

Thea von Harbou Metropolis

Source: Metropolis

“… every person has a star, every star has a friend, and for every person carrying a star there is someone else who reflects it, and everyone carries this reflection like a secret confidante in the heart.”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

Secret, Star, Personality

“… it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.”

Steve Martin book Shopgirl

Source: Shopgirl

Question, Hurt

“Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, "To hell with you."”

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer

Quoted in "Feeling Rejected? Join Updike, Mailer, Oates..." by Barbara Bauer and Robert F. Moss, New York Times (21 July 1985), section 7, page 1, column 1
General sources

Hell

“You have a head and a heart? Reveal only one of them, I say; If you reveal both at once, doubly they'll damn you, for both.”

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) German poet

“There is a place in the heart that will never be filled; a space. And even during the best moments, and the greatest times, we will know it.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Time

“Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

“He's sensitive and I don't want him to break his heart over somebody who doesn't care about him.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.”

William Shakespeare book Much Ado About Nothing

Source: Much Ado About Nothing

Love

“If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.”

Francois Mauriac (1885–1970) French author

Reading

“The heaviness of loss in her heart hadn't eased, but there was room there for humour, too.”

Nalo Hopkinson book Brown Girl in the Ring

Source: Brown Girl in the Ring

Loss

“Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart..”

Pablo Casals (1876–1973) Catalan cellist and conductor

Beauty, Music, Way

“Sadness flies on the wings of the morning, and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.”

Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944) French novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright

Sadness, Light

“The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.”

William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream

Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream

Dreams

“At the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy.”

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director

Art

“He that is thy friend indeed,
He will help thee in thy need:
If thou sorrow, he will weep;
If thou wake, he cannot sleep:
Thus of every grief in heart
He with thee doth bear a part.
These are certain signs to know
Faithful friend from flattering foe.”

William Shakespeare book The Passionate Pilgrim

Source: The Passionate Pilgrim

Faith, Sleep, Help, Parting

“The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Victor Frankenstein in Ch. 5

Life, Health, Beauty, Dreams

“That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Dead

“Knowledge is a great gift, and the thirst to seek it even greater. Use what you know… Head and heart… You are not made to give greater weight to one than the other.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Valley of Silence

Knowledge

“You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.”

Mark Twain book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Source: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Law

“Life will not break your heart. It'll crush it.”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

Life

“Could it think, the heart would stop beating.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

O coração, se pudesse pensar, pararia.
Source: The Book of Disquietude ["Livro do Desassossego"], by Bernardo Soares (Pessoa's semi-heteronym), translated by Richard Zenith (1996), text 1

Thinking

“Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

Fear, Sea

“Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Source: Nausea

“He always ran away from the battle with himself. Even in his own heart's privacy, he excused himself, saying, "If she hadn't said so-and-so, it would never have happened.”

D.H. Lawrence book Sons and Lovers

Source: Sons and Lovers

“If my heart were a compass, you'd be North.”

Kenneth Oppel Skybreaker

Source: Skybreaker

“Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Pt. 1, ch. 10
Atticus Finch & Maudie Atkinson
Source: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Context: "I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.
“Your father's right," she said. "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."

People, Music, Singing

“It is as if my heart and my brain did not belong to the same person. Feelings come quicker than lightning and fill my soul, but they bring me no illumination; they burn me and dazzle me.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau book Confessions

Source: Confessions

Feeling, Soul, Personality

“Be careful with whom you associate, especially when you feel emotionally vulnerable, because negative people can steal the dream right out of your heart.”

Joel Osteen (1963) American televangelist and author

Source: Become a Better You: 7 Keys to Improving Your Life Every Day

People, Dreams, Feeling

“To my thinking, a great librarian must have a clear head, a strong hand, and, above all, a great heart. And when I look into the future, I am inclined to think that most of the men who achieve this greatness will be women.”

Melvil Dewey (1851–1931) American librarian and educator

Women, Men, Thinking, Strong

“They have not the heart for this battle. So think of your families, think of your homes, and remember it is they you are fighting for.”

Christopher Paolini book Brisingr

Source: Brisingr

Family, Home, Thinking, Fight

“There is no man on the face of the earth who can satisfy the deepest longings of a woman's heart--God made us in such a way that we can never be truly satisfied with anything or anyone less than Himself”

Nancy Leigh DeMoss (1958) American radio host

God, Way

“False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”

William Shakespeare Macbeth

Source: Macbeth

Falseness

“I fear feeling my heart break a second time, because I'm not sure I could survive it. I'd rather live alone than risk the pain.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Face the Fire

Pain, Fear, Feeling, Time

“In a word, live together in the forgiveness of your sins, for without it no human fellowship, least of all a marriage, can survive. Don’t insist on your rights, don’t blame each other, don’t judge or condemn each other, don’t find fault with each other, but accept each other as you are, and forgive each other every day from the bottom of your hearts…”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Letters and Papers from Prison

Marriage, Forgiveness

“One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.”

Haruki Murakami book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Source: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Pain, Forgiveness, Silence, Loss

“Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it, "Italy".”

Robert Browning Men and Women

"De Gustibus", ii.
Men and Women (1855)
Context: Italy, my Italy!
Queen Mary's saying serves for me
(When fortune's malice
Lost her Calais):
"Open my heart, and you will see
Graved inside of it ‘Italy.'"

“We are all civilized people, wich means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behaviour.”

Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) American playwright

People

“The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?”

Dorothy Day (1897–1980) Social activist

Loaves and Fishes (1963)

“I keep remembering — I keep remembering. My heart has no pity on me.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 130 
Context: Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.

Fear, Suffering

“When God puts love and compassion in your heart toward someone, He’s offering you an opportunity to make a difference in that person’s life. You must learn to follow that love. Don’t ignore it. Act on it. Somebody needs what you have.”

Joel Osteen (1963) American televangelist and author

Source: Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential

Love, Life, God, Learning

“When I die of heart failure the next time you frighten me like that, you can put that on my gravestone—‘I didn’t mean to startle her.”

Patricia Briggs (1965) American writer

Source: Masques

Failure, Time

“Strength enough to build a home,
Time enough to hold a child,
Love enough to break a heart”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Love, Home, Time

“But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man’s best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Life, Death, Forgetting

“For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.”

Orhan Pamuk (1952) Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literature recipient

Source: My Name is Red

World, Home, Lovers

“A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle…”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Books, Reading

“An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquillity.”

Alberto Moravia (1907–1990) Italian writer and journalist

Un male incerto provoca inquietudine, perché, in fondo, si spera fino all'ultimo che non sia vero; ma un male sicuro, invece, infonde per qualche tempo una squallida tranquillità.
Source: Il Disprezzo (Milano: Bompiani, 1954) p. 77; Angus Davidson (trans.) Contempt (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005) p. 75.

Hope, Evil, Time

“Science can teach us, and I think our hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supporters, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make the world a fit place to live.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

"Fear, the Foundation of Religion"
1920s, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)
Source: Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
Context: Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing – fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by the help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hears can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.

World, Support, Thinking, Effort

“His eyes met mine and the rest of the room faded away. ―I‘m always going to keep your heart safe, even if mine has to stop beating for that to happen,‖ he told me softly.”

P. C. Cast book Tempted

Source: Tempted

“You women listen more to your heart and less to all the nonsense. That's why you live longer.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Women

“Never had she danced so beautifully; the sharp knives cut her feet, but she did not feel it, for the pain in her heart was far greater.”

Hans Christian Andersen book The Little Mermaid

Source: The Little Mermaid

Pain, Feeling, Dance

“The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Source: Lover's Gift

Books, Youth

“Happiness does not depend on outward circumstances, but on the state of the heart.”

J.C. Ryle (1816–1900) Anglican bishop

Source: A Call to Prayer

Happiness, Dependency

“When I cannot sing my heart, I can only speak my mind.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

"Julia" (1968); these lines were adapted from lines of Sand and Foam (1926) by Khalil Gibran: "When life does not find a singer to sing her heart she produces a philosopher to speak her mind."
Lyrics

Singing

“The joy in life is his who has the heart to demand it.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Life, Joy

“The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

Feeling

“… and when you meet someone and fall in love, and they fall in love with you, you ask them "Will you take my heart-- stains and all?" and they say "I will," and they ask you the same question and you say, "I will," too.”

Douglas Coupland Microserfs

Source: Microserfs

Love, Question

“I am nothing special; of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts, and I've led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Duke, Miracles, p. 2
Source: 1990s, The Notebook (1996)

Love, Life, Soul, love

“For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

Personality

“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

Life

“I love you, with a love so great that it simply couldn't keep growing inside my heart, but had to leap out and reveal itself in all its magnitude.”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

Love

“Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point. French. Pascal. The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

“I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

“We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

Lie

“My soul is full of longing
For the secret of the Sea,
And the heart of the great ocean
Sends a thrilling pulse through me.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

The Secret of the Sea, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Secret, Soul, Sea

“A lady who sets her heart upon a lad in uniform must prepare to change lovers pretty quickly, or her life will be but a sad one.”

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) novelist

Source: The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. written by himself

Life, Sadness, Lovers, Change

“Anybody who believes that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach flunked geography.”

Robert Byrne (1928–2013) American chess player and writer

Way

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of… We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart." - Blaise Pascal”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

Truth

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction..., p. 1 (1843).
Context: Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.

People, World, Religion, Soul

“Look, I am living. On what? Neither
childhood nor future
lessens…. Superabundant existence
wells in my heart.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Duino Elegies

Source: Duino Elegies

Future, Childhood