Quotes about sentiment
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“It was the cause of America that made me an author. The force with which it struck my mind and the dangerous condition the country appeared to me in, by courting an impossible and an unnatural reconciliation with those who were determined to reduce her, instead of striking out into the only line that could cement and save her, A Declaration Of Independence, made it impossible for me, feeling as I did, to be silent: and if, in the course of more than seven years, I have rendered her any service, I have likewise added something to the reputation of literature, by freely and disinterestedly employing it in the great cause of mankind, and showing that there may be genius without prostitution. Independence always appeared to me practicable and probable, provided the sentiment of the country could be formed and held to the object: and there is no instance in the world, where a people so extended, and wedded to former habits of thinking, and under such a variety of circumstances, were so instantly and effectually pervaded, by a turn in politics, as in the case of independence; and who supported their opinion, undiminished, through such a succession of good and ill fortune, till they crowned it with success. But as the scenes of war are closed, and every man preparing for home and happier times, I therefore take my leave of the subject. I have most sincerely followed it from beginning to end, and through all its turns and windings: and whatever country I may hereafter be in, I shall always feel an honest pride at the part I have taken and acted, and a gratitude to nature and providence for putting it in my power to be of some use to mankind.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

The Crisis No. XIII
1770s, The American Crisis (1776–1783)

Home, Time, Wedding, Country

“Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. Explanation: Paine explained the need to speak out against a tyrannical power, notably Britain and King George III, because not doing so could be a dangerous action on its own. A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. This first part actually has two sections on its own. In the first half, Paine says it’s important to note the “wrongs” that occur when injustices are clear — not doing so gives them the “appearance of being right.” In the second half, he notes that people’s first reactions to those complaints are always to side on the side of “custom” — that is, to oppose attacks against institutions. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason. Explanation: Most Americans are not in favor of impeachment at this moment. It’s a reaction against a guarded institution — and citizens are going to behave in ways that make it seem they’re against the idea, by giving a “defense of custom,” as Paine put it. It should be noted, however, that the same held true for a different president — Richard Nixon. At the onset of investigations, a majority of Americans felt it was a waste of time. As they learned more about his actions as president, the public (including a significant number of Republicans) became more supportive of his ouster. 1770s, Common Sense (1776) Source: Chris Walker (September 25, 2019): A Look Back At Thomas Paine, And Why Impeachment Makes ‘Common’ Sense (Even If You Think It’s A Losing Cause) [Opinion]. In: HillReporter.com. Archived https://web.archive.org/web/20190929202745/https://hillreporter.com/a-look-back-paine-and-why-impeachment-makes-sense-even-if-you-think-its-a-losing-cause-opinion-46555 from the original https://hillreporter.com/a-look-back-paine-and-why-impeachment-makes-sense-even-if-you-think-its-a-losing-cause-opinion-46555 on September 29, 2019.

Time, Thinking, Appearance, Fashion

“We are socialists because we see the social question as a matter of necessity and justice for the very existence of a state for our people, not a question of cheap pity or insulting sentimentality. The worker has a claim to a living standard that corresponds to what he produces. We have no intention of begging for that right… Since the political powers of the day are neither willing nor able to create such a situation, socialism must be fought for. It is a fighting slogan both inwardly and outwardly. It is aimed domestically at the bourgeois parties and Marxism at the same time, because both are sworn enemies of the coming workers’ state. It is directed abroad at all powers that threaten our national existence and thereby the possibility of the coming socialist national state.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

“Those Damn Nazis: Why Are We Socialists?” https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/haken32.htm written by Joseph Goebbels and Mjölnir, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken, Nazi propaganda pamphlet (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher, 1932) 1930s

Time, Justice, Question, People

“If ever anyone did something which might provoke communal sentiments, Premchand not only put down the incident but endeavoured to eradicate the very basis of such differences. Considerations of high and low, Hindu and Muslim, and untouchability were all anathema to him.”

Premchand (1880–1936) Hindi writer

When he was superintendent of the schools boarding house of the National School quoted in "Munshi Premchand: The Voice of Truth", page =1915.

Communication

“The sentiment 'everything that is happening is supposed to be happening' can be a cop out that prevents us from becoming conscious and deliberately creating. On the other hand, the obsessive control over our reality that comes with trying to use the law of attraction to our advantage to deliberately create can be nothing more than resistance. It too can prevent us from being conscious.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

Reality, Law

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

1930s, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (1932)

People, Justice, Question

“Victory shall be ours, but has to be in our hearts only the Greek sentiment. Anyone ready to listen servily to the foreign [powers] is a traitor.”

Ioannis Kapodistrias (1776–1831) Greek politician and diplomat, first Governor of the modern Greek state

On a conversation with Georgakis Mavromichalis after his arrival (1828), during the Greek War of Independence.

In Georgios Tertsetis, "Kolokotronis' Memoirs", Apologa about Capodistrias

Victory, Heart

“Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Review of the book My Hope for America (1964) by Lyndon B. Johnson
Cannibals and Christians (1966)

“I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Life

“I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,
is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic
person has a desperate confidence that they won't.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

Confidence, Idea, Thinking, Personality

“Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Literary Essays, vol. II (1870–1890), Rousseau and the Sentimentalists

Beauty, Love, World, Beauty

“The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Life, Freedom, Happiness

“People change, no use getting sentimental about it. Move on, find someone else.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

People, Change

“Men are always ready to die for us, but not to make our lives worth having. Cheap sentiment and bad logic.”

Louisa May Alcott book Jo's Boys

Source: Jo's Boys

Men

“Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Source: Letters and Social Aims

People, Tea

“The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

Life

“What’s broken is broken—and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I live…I’m too old to believe in such sentimentalities as clean slates and starting all over.”

Margaret Mitchell book Vom Winde verweht (1937 German edition)

Source: Gone with the Wind

“What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)
Context: Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change. … Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often have problems with power. There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites — polar opposites — so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love.
It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject the Nietzschean philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we've got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on. What has happened is that we have had it wrong and confused in our own country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience.
This is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.

Peaceful, Love, Justice

“I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

"Mr. Chesterton in Hysterics," in The Clarion, (14 November 1913), re-published in The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17 (1982), p. 219.
Variant: I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
Source: Young Rebecca: Writings, 1911-1917

People

“In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

Source: All the Pretty Horses

“She felt as if she bled her regret and loneliness from her very pores, and yet she could not shape those feelings into any sentiment she could imagine her parents could bear reading.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Feeling, Imagination, Parent, Reading

“To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Life

“I want to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive.”

John Irving book A Prayer for Owen Meany

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

Death, Feeling

“Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.”

Lorrie Moore Birds of America

Source: Birds of America

Life, Sadness

“The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.”

Philip Gourevitch We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

Source: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

Problem, Memory, Evil, Cry

“I drive around the streets
an inch away from weeping,
ashamed of my sentimentality and
possible love.”

Charles Bukowski book Love Is a Dog from Hell

Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell

Love

“If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.”

Christopher Isherwood book A Single Man

Source: A Single Man

World, Time

“I follow after my father, who likes to protect mankind, and I really don’t want to see a bunch of demons eating people. Call me sentimental. (Kat)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Devil May Cry

People

“Call me sentimental, but there's no-one in the world that I'd like to see get dysentery more than you”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

World

“There isso mortifying as to fall in love with someone who does not share one's sentiments.”

Georgette Heyer book Venetia

Source: Venetia

Love

“I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

Hope, Thinking, Personality

“Love heals. Heals and liberates. I use the word, not meaning sentimentality, but a condition so strong that it may be that which holds the stars in their heavenly positions and that which causes the blood to flow orderly in our veins.”

Maya Angelou book Mom & Me & Mom

Source: Mom & Me & Mom

Love, Star, Strong

“Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Source: The Complete Essays

Wisdom, Stupidity, Suffering

“Mistress, I have never asked anything of you in my servitude. But now, I beg you this: do not make me keep passing these adolescent sentiments back and forth all night.”

Richelle Mead (1976) American writer

Source: Shadow Heir

Night

“Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Love, Search

“There is nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Source: Gravity's Rainbow

“Blood is thicker than water, my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I’d often disputed. But it turned out that it didn’t matter whether she was right or wrong. They both flowed out of my cupped palms.”

Cheryl Strayed book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Water

“Let us beware of common folk, common sense, sentiment, inspiration, and the obvious.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Sense

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human […] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

Fear

“And remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.”

L. Frank Baum book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

this is a line spoken by Frank Morgan's depiction of the Wizard of Oz in the 1939 film, which debuted 20 years after Baum's death. It did not actually appear in the "Wonderful Wizard of Oz". The ending of "Steam Engines of Oz" wrongly attributes this phrase to Baum when it would've originated from the 1939 adaptation script writers Langley/Ryerson/Woolf.
Misattributed
Variant: A heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others
Source: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Heart, Love

“I like that people can just look at you and know that you are taken, that you are mine.” He closed his eyes and laughed. “And yes, I know that sentiment is at the top of the Women’s Liberation Movement’s list of things not to say to a modern woman.”

Patricia Briggs book River Marked

Source: River Marked

Women, People

“Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.”

D.H. Lawrence book Lady Chatterley's Lover

Source: Lady Chatterley's Lover

Age, Feeling, Falseness

“I get sentimental over the music of the ’90s. Deplorable, really. But I love it all. As far as I’m concerned the ’90s was the best era for music ever, even the stuff that I loathed at the time, even the stuff that gave me stomach cramps.”

Rob Sheffield (1966) American music journalist

Source: Love Is a Mix Tape

Love, Music, Time

“Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostagic and hopeful all at the same time.”

Nick Hornby book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

Hope, Music, Way, Feeling

“Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?’
‘You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.”

Yasunari Kawabata book Thousand Cranes

Source: Thousand Cranes

Pain, Feeling

“Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)

Soul

“My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Men

“If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.”

Charlotte Brontë book Shirley

Source: Shirley (1849), Ch. 1: Levitical

Thinking, Passion

“The challenge now presented is more than a challenge to our Constitution — it is a blatant affront to the conscience of this generation of Americans. Discrimination based on race or color is reprehensible and intolerable to the great American majority. In every national forum, where they have chosen to test popular sentiment, defenders of discrimination have met resounding rejection. Americans now are not willing that the acid of the few shall be allowed to corrode the souls of the many.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Special message to Congress on the right to vote (1965)

Color, Soul

“Mr. Jorrocks then called upon the company in succession for a toast, a song, or a sentiment. Nimrod gave, "The Royal Staghounds"; Crane gave, "Champagne to our real friends, and real pain to our sham friends."”

Robert Smith Surtees (1805–1864) English writer

Jorrocks's Jaunts and Jollities (1838) ch. 12

Pain, Success

“History is the necessary food of good and noble sentiments. It ought to give us at once humility and confidence in the face of greatness.”

Vincent Massey (1887–1967) Governor General of Canada

Address to the Women's Canadian Club, Montreal, Quebec, March 26, 1958
Speaking Of Canada - (1959)

Food, Confidence, History

“The diverse natures of men, combined with the necessity to satisfy in some manner the sentiment which desires them to be equal, has had the result that in the democracies they have endeavored to provide the appearance of power in the people and the reality of power in an elite.”

Vilfredo Pareto book Manual of Political Economy

page 97.
Manual of Political Economy

Men, People, Democracy, Nature

“Honour both spirit and form, the sentiment within as well as the symbol without.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

Source: Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (1960), p. 308

“So, music does not attempt to imitate Nature's sounds, but it does interpet and embody emotions awakened by Nature through a convention of its own, in a way to be aesthetically pleasing. In some such way, we, taking our hint from Nature, construct decoratively pleasing harmonies and symphonies of color expression of our sentiments.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Quote of Metzinger in 'The Wild Men of Paris', by Gelett Burgess https://monoskop.org/images/f/f3/Burgess_Gelett_1910_The_Wild_Men_of_Paris.pdf, in 'The Architectural Record, Vol XXVII, May 1910, p. 414

Music, Color, Way, Nature

“The wrecks of slavery are fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment.”

William Dean Howells (1837–1920) author, critic and playwright from the United States

Their Wedding Journey http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3365/3365.txt (1872)

“… You will join with me now in repeating the prayer of the three martyrs whom we mourn - 'God save Ireland!' And all of you, men, women, and boys and girls that are to be men and women of holy Ireland, will ever keep the sentiment of that prayer in your heart of hearts.”

John Martin (1812–1875) (1812-1875) Irish nationalist activist

Women, Men, God, Girl

“This poet is now, most of the time, an elder statesman like Baruch or Smuts, full of complacent wisdom and cast-iron whimsy. But of course there was always a good deal of this in the official rôle that Frost created for himself; one imagines Yeats saying about Frost, as Sarah Bernhardt said about Nijinsky: “I fear, I greatly fear, that I have just seen the greatest actor in the world.”
Sometimes it is this public figure, this official rôle — the Only Genuine Robert Frost in Captivity — that writes the poems, and not the poet himself; and then one gets a self-made man’s political editorials, full of cracker-box philosophizing, almanac joke-cracking — of a snake-oil salesman’s mysticism; one gets the public figure’s relishing consciousness of himself, an astonishing constriction of imagination and sympathy; one gets sentimentality and whimsicality; an arch complacency, a complacent archness; and one gets Homely Wisdom till the cows come home.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Other Frost”, pp. 30–31
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Wisdom, World, Fear, Home

“Goodness was more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That's why they became evil. That's why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love. even of people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, he said, it had to be fought for.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: A Fear of Love

Love, Men, People, Truth

“He was acting on a reason other than the avoidance of pain. The sentiment was loyalty, and it felt glorious.”

Vanna Bonta book Flight: A Quantum Fiction Novel

Source: Flight: A Quantum Fiction Novel (1995), Ch. 3

Pain, Loyalty

“Let's face it, minorities are people who probably look and act and think differently from us and have faults we don't have. We may dislike the way they look and act, and we may hate their faults. And it’s better if we admit to disliking and hating them, than if we try to smear over our feelings with pseudo-liberal sentimentality. If we’re frank about our feelings, we have a safety valve; and if we have a safety-valve, we’re actually less likely to start persecuting.... I know that theory is unfashionable nowadays. We all keep trying to believe that, if we ignore something long enough, it’ll just vanish––
‘Where was I? Oh yes... Well, now, suppose this minority does get persecuted – never mind why – political, economic, psychological reasons – there always is a reason, no matter how wrong it is – that’s my point. And, of course, persecution itself is always wrong; I’m sure we all agree there. But, the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy. Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can’t you see what nonsense that is? What’s to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?’
‘And I’ll tell you something else. A minority has its own kind of aggression. It absolutely dares the majority to attack it. It hates the majority — not without a cause, I grant you. It even hates the other minorities – because all minorities are in competition: each one proclaims that its sufferings are the worst and its wrongs are the blackest. And the more they all hate, and the more they're all persecuted, the nastier they become! Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn’t! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed?”

Christopher Isherwood book A Single Man

pps. 53-54
A Single Man (1964)

Love, Hate, People, Way

“You rebel against the tribal and look for the individual, for your own voice as against the stereotypical voice of the tribe or the tribe's stereotype of itself. You have to establish yourself against your predecessor, and doing so can well involve what they like to call self-hatred. I happen to think that—all those protestations notwithstanding—your self hatred was real and a positive force in its very destructiveness. Since to build something new often requires that something else be destroyed, self-hatred is valuable for a young person. What should he or she have instead—self-approval, self-satisfaction, self-praise? It's not so bad to hate the norms that keep a society from moving on, especially when the norms are dictated by fear as much as by anything else and especially when that fear is of the enemy forces of the overwhelming majority. But you seem now to be so strongly motivated by a need for reconciliation with the tribe that you aren't even willing to acknowledge how disapproving of its platitudinous demands you were back then, however ineluctably Jewish you may also have felt. The prodigal son who once upset the tribal balance—and perhaps even invigorated the tribe's health—may well, in his old age, have a sentimental urge to go back home, but isn't this a bit premature in you, aren't you really too young to have it so fully developed?”

Philip Roth book The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

Nathan Zuckerman to Philip Roth
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

Hate, Health, Age, Fear

“Nothing relieves Irish despair. The Irishman's complaint lies not with his circumstance, which might be rendered brilliant by labour or luck, but with injustice of existence itself. Death! How could a benevolent Deity gift us with life, only to set such a cruel term upon it? Irish despair knows no remedy. Love fades; fame is fleeting. The only cures are booze and sentiment. That's why the Irish are such noble drunks and glorious poets. No one sings like the Irish or mourns like them. Why? Because they're angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh.”

Steven Pressfield book Killing Rommel

Zachary Stein, p. 27
Killing Rommel (2008)

Love, Life, Death, Angels

“The reason Wilde did his best work after turning homosexual is that women simply reinforced his own feminine sentimentality. … Heterosexuality inhibited his imagination because woman is physically and psychologically internal.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 571

Women, Imagination

“Philosophers are generally persuaded, that the sensations of heat and cold are occasioned by the presence or absence, in degree, of certain principle or quality denominated fire or heat… It is most probable, that all substances whatever contain more or less of this principle. Respecting the nature of the principle, however, there is a diversity of sentiment : some supposing it a substance, others a quality, or property of substance. Boerhaave, followed by most of the moderns, is of the former opinion; Newton, with some others, are of the latter; these conceive heat to consist in an internal vibratory motion of the particles of bodies.”

John Dalton (1766–1844) English chemist, meteorologist and physicist

Meteorological Observations and Essays: Mit Tabellen, 1834 p. 18

Nature

“When I was born, one of those twisted
angels who live in the shadows said:
"Carlos, get ready to be a misfit in life!"
(…)
My God, why have you forsaken me
if you knew that I wasn't God,
if you knew that I was weak.
World so large, world so wide,
if my name were Clyde,
it would be a rhyme but not an answer.
World so wide, world so large,
my heart's even larger.
I shouldn't tell you,
but this moon
but this brandy
make me sentimental as hell.”

Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–1987) Brazilian poet

Quando nasci, um anjo torto
Desses que vivem na sombra
Disse: Vai Carlos! Ser gauche na vida.
(...)
Meu Deus, por que me abandonastes
se sabias que eu não era Deus,
se sabias que eu era fraco.
Mundo mundo vasto mundo,
se eu me chamasse Raimundo
seria uma rima, não seria uma solução.
Mundo mundo vasto mundo,
mais vasto é meu coração.
Eu não devia te dizer
mas essa lua
mas esse conhaque
botam a gente comovido como o diabo.
"Poema de sete faces" ["Seven-sided Poem"]
Alguma Poesia [Some Poetry] (1930)

Life, God, World, Angels

“Great Britain, will now have to determine its attitude toward the conflict, and it has the following possibilities: It can accept that the situation will never return to what it was before April 2, in which case we would maintain an attitude of negotiating for the recovery of our sovereignty. Or it can proceed toward the restoration of its colonial regime, with which there would be no security or definitive peace, and the responsibility of deepening the conflict would fall on Great Britain. In any case, the nation united, on its feet, motivated by the sentiment a united cause, will continue marching toward improving and strengthening itself.”

Leopoldo Galtieri (1926–2003) Argentine military dictator

As quoted in "Galtieri bars peace if Britain restores its 'colonial rule'" http://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/16/world/galtieri-bars-peace-if-britain-restores-its-colonial-rule.html, The New York Times (June 16, 1982)

Peace, Motivation

“Girls are apt to imagine noble and enchanting and totally imaginary figures in their own minds; they have fanciful extravagant ideas about men, and sentiment, and life; and then they innocently endow somebody or other with all the perfections for their daydreams, and put their trust in him.”

Honoré de Balzac book A Woman of Thirty

Les jeunes filles se créent souvent de nobles, de ravissantes images, des figures tout idéales, et se forgent des idées chimériques sur les hommes, sur les sentiments, sur le monde; puis elles attribuent innocemment à un caractère les perfections qu'elles ont rêvées, et s'y confient.
Source: A Woman of Thirty (1842), Ch. I: Early Mistakes.

Life, Men, Imagination, Girl

“Solidarity is not a matter of sentiment but a fact, cold and impassive as the granite foundations of a skyscraper. If the basic elements, identity of interest, clarity of vision, honesty of intent, and oneness of purpose, or any of these is lacking, all sentimental pleas for solidarity, and all other efforts to achieve it will be barren of results.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

"A Plea for Solidarity," The International Socialist Review VOL XIV No. 9 (March 1914) https://books.google.com/books?id=olFIAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA534&ots=GTTSOWeGxG&dq=eugene%20v.%20debs%20%22a%20plea%20for%20solidarity&pg=PA534#v=onepage&q&f=false

Effort

“I always wish, in reading my favourite poets, to know what first suggested my favourite poems. Few things would be more interesting than to know under what circumstances they were composed, — how much of individual sentiment there was in each, or how, on some incident seemingly even opposed, they had contrived to ingraft their own associations. What a history of the heart would such annals reveal! Every poem is in itself an impulse.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

History, Reading, Heart

“He had a personality that was hopeless. He had a profound distrust of people's possibilities, and it came out in his personality. … There was an almost indecent pleasure he took in being sentimental about all the worst things.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

On Richard Nixon
Interview for French TV (1998)

People, Pleasure, Personality

“To conceive that compulsion and punishment are the proper means of reformation, is the sentiment of a barbarian; civilisation and science are calculated to explode so ferocious an idea. It was once universally admitted and approved; it is now necessarily upon the decline.”

William Godwin (1756–1836) English journalist, political philosopher and novelist

Vol. 2, bk. 7, ch. 5
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Idea, Universe, Science

“Shortly before the 1860 election, Frederick Douglass offered a succinct summary of the dilemma confronting opponents of slavery like Lincoln, who worked within the political system rather than outside it. Abstractly, Douglass wrote, most northerners would agree that slavery was wrong. The challenge was to find a way of 'translating antislavery sentiment into antislavery action'. The constitution barred interference with slavery in the states where it already existed. For Lincoln, as for most Republicans, antislavery action meant not attacking slavery where it was but working to prevent slavery's westward expansion. Lincoln, however, did talk about a future without slavery. The aim of the Republican Party, he insisted, was to put the institution on the road to "ultimate extinction", a phrase he borrowed from Henry Clay. Ultimate extinction could take a long time. Lincoln once said that slavery might survive for another hundred years. But to the South, Lincoln seemed as dangerous as an abolitionist, because he was committed to the eventual end of slavery. This was why his election in 1860 led inexorably to secession and civil war.”

Eric Foner (1943) American historian

"Our Lincoln" http://www.ericfoner.com/articles/012609nation.html (26 January 2009), The Nation 2000s

War, Way, Time, Future

“Men and women, in and of themselves, are desirable. There can not be too many inhabitants of the right kind, distributed in the right place. Great work, there is for each and every one of them to perform. The country needs all the intelligence, and skill, and strength of mind and body it can get. whether we draw such from those within our gates, or from those without, seeking entrance. But since we are confronted by the clamor of multitudes who desire the opportunity offered by American life, we must face the situation unflinchingly, determined to relinquish not one iota of our obligations to others, yet not so sentimental as to overlook our obligations to ourselves.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

Life, Women, Men, Intelligence

“The Churchyard abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

The Life of Gray
Lives of the English Poets (1779–81)

“The Senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight I mean the harlot, Slavery. For her, his tongue is always profuse in words.”

Charles Sumner (1811–1874) American abolitionist and politician

"The Crime against Kansas," speech in the Senate (May 18, 1856). The claims made against Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina so angered Butler's cousin, Democrat Representative Preston Brooks, that Brooks assaulted Sumner with a cane in the Senate chamber a few weeks later

Love, Books, World, Courage

“Only a radical cleaning of social and artistic life as, in the domain of art, is already done by Dada, which is anti-sentimental and healthy to the core, since it is anti-art. Only unscrupulously striking down any systematically bred amateurism in any field, can prepare civilization for the 'New Vision's happiness which is greatly and purely alive in a dew people.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote from Van Doesburg's article: 'Is a Universal Plastic Notion Possible Today?', as cited in 'Bouwkundig weekblad' [a Dutch architectural magazine], XLI 39, 1920, pp. 230–231
this quote of Theo van Doesburg is one of his earliest Dada expressions
1920 – 1926

Life, People, Art, Happiness

“Might and spirit will win and incalculable political and social consequences will follow upon victory. Victory must therefore be ours. England is not played out. Her mission is not accomplished. She can, if she would, take the place of esteemed honour among the democracies of the world, and if peace is to come with healing on her wings the democracies of Europe must be her guardians…History, will, in due time, apportion the praise and the blame, but the young men of the country must, for the moment, settle the immediate issue of victory. Let them do it in the spirit of the brave men who have crowned our country with honour in times that have gone. Whoever may be in the wrong, men so inspired will be in the right. The quarrel was not of the people, but the end of it will be the lives and liberties of the people. Should an opportunity arise to enable me to appeal to the pure love of country - which I know is a precious sentiment in all our hearts, keeping it clear of thought which I believe to be alien to real patriotism - I shall gladly take that opportunity. If need be I shall make it for myself. I wish the serious men of the Trade Union, the Brotherhood and similar movements to face their duty. To such it is enough to say 'England has need of you'; to say it in the right way. They will gather to her aid. They will protect her when the war is over, they will see to it that the policies and conditions that make it will go like the mists of a plague and shadows of a pestilence.”

Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) British statesman; prime minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to the Mayor of Leicester, declining to speak at a recruitment meeting (September 1914), quoted in David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (Metro, 1997), p. 175
1910s

Love, Men, War, People

“Deacon Uriel Gadd was a man of integrity, granite-rough and lichen-coated. The punishment in his rheumatism, clearly sent of God, and the defection of his son Elijah, had weakened him only in making him somewhat less contemptuous of his sentimental son Aaron. All other persons he divided into fools, scoundrels and the blessedly elect, with only himself indisputably in the last class.”

Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 6

God, Fools, Personality

“I think there is a dangerous rise in defeatist sentiment in this country. I have said that repeatedly, and I mean it and I believe it.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

Ottawa Citizen, June 3, 2002: About Canada
2002

Thinking, Country

“You are like all cruel men, sentimental; you are like all sentimental men; squeamish.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

“Poor Little Warrior!” p. 80
Short fiction, Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)

Men

“Even when altruism is allowed (as, for example, in Gary Becker's model of rational allocation), it is assumed that the altruistic actions are undertaken because they promote each person's own interests; there are personal gains to the altruist's own welfare, thanks to sympathy for others. No role is given to any sense of commitment about behaving well or to pursuing some selfless objective. All this leaves out, on the one hand, the evil passions that early theorists of capitalism contrasted with self-interest and, on the other, the social commitments that Kant analyzed in The Critique of Practical Reason and that Adam Smith discussed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.”

Amartya Sen (1933) Indian economist

1990s, Foreword to The Passions and the Interests (1996)

Sense, Passion, Evil, Personality

“Poetic trifles from solitary rambles whilst chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy.. now written from memory, confined to fourteen lines, this seemed best adapted to the unity of sentiment, the verse flowed in unpremeditated harmony as my ear directed but are far from being mere elegiac couplets.”

William Lisle Bowles (1762–1850) English priest, poet and critic

From Preface to The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 - With Memoir, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes by George Gilfillan (1855) Ballantyne & Co , Edinburgh , kindle ebook edition ASIN B0082VAFKO.

Memory

“The last piece of advice I shall venture to offer the Liberal party is this, that they shall not dissociate themselves, even indirectly or unconsciously, or by any careless words, from the new sentiment of Empire which occupies the nation. To many the word "Empire" is suspect as indicating aggression and greed and violence and the characteristics of other empires that the world has known; but the sentiment that is represented now by Empire in these islands has nothing of that in it. (Cheers.) It is a passion of affection and family feeling, of pride and of hopefulness; and the statesman, however great he may be, who dissociates himself from that feeling must not be surprised if the nation dissociates itself from him.”

Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1847–1929) British politician

Cheers
Speech at Chesterfield (16 December 1901), reported in The Times (17 December 1901), p. 10.

World, Family, Hope, Feeling

“In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.”

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer

Queer: A Novel (1985)

Sadness, Mountain

“France has always more or less influenced manners in England; and when your fountain is choked up and polluted, the stream will not run long, or not run clear, with us, or perhaps with any nation. This gives all Europe, in my opinion, but too close and connected a concern in what is done in France. Excuse me, therefore, if I have dwelt too long on the atrocious spectacle of the 6th of October, 1789, or have given too much scope to the reflections which have arisen in my mind on occasion of the most important of all revolutions, which may be dated from that day, I mean a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

“What a man calls his "conscience" is merely the mental action that follows a sentimental reaction after too much wine or love.”

Helen Rowland (1875–1950) American journalist

Brides
A Guide to Men (1922)

Love, Wine

“"You love God, don't you?" Nicholson asked, with a little excess of quietness. "Isn't that your forte, so to speak? From what I heard on that tape and from what Al Babcock —" "Yes, sure, I love Him. But I don't love Him sentimentally. He never said anybody had to love Him sentimentally," Teddy said. "If I were God, I certainly wouldn't want people to love me sentimentally. It's too unreliable."”

Jerome David Salinger book Nine Stories

Nine Stories (1953), Teddy (1953)

Love, God, People

“While this day was legally established many years ago as an occasion to be devoted to the memory of our country's dead, it can not but each year refresh the sentiment of respect and honor in which our country holds their living comrades. Of those great armies that maintained the long struggle from 1861 to 1865, which ranked in size with any the world had ever before seen, but a few shattered ranks now remain. The old valor yet lives. The old devotion to country, the old loyalty to the flag remain: But the youth and physical vigor which caused them to be characterized as the boys in blue are gone from these heroes of a former generation.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Ways to Peace (1926)

Youth, World, Boy, Memory

“In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, — if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Speech to the Constitutional Convention (September 17, 1787); reported in James Madison, Journal of the Federal Convention, ed. E. H. Scott (1893), p. 742.
Constitutional Convention of 1787

People, Thinking

“Children learn the fundamental principles of natural law at a very early age. Thus they very early understand that one child must not, without just cause, strike or otherwise hurt, another; that one child must not assume any arbitrary control or domination over another; that one child must not, either by force, deceit, or stealth, obtain possession of anything that belongs to another; that if one child commits any of these wrongs against another, it is not only the right of the injured child to resist, and, if need be, punish the wrongdoer, and compel him to make reparation, but that it is also the right, and the moral duty, of all other children, and all other persons, to assist the injured party in defending his rights, and redressing his wrongs. These are fundamental principles of natural law, which govern the most important transactions of man with man. Yet children learn them earlier than they learn that three and three are six, or five and five ten. Their childish plays, even, could not be carried on without a constant regard to them; and it is equally impossible for persons of any age to live together in peace on any other conditions.

It would be no extravagance to say that, in most cases, if not in all, mankind at large, young and old, learn this natural law long before they have learned the meanings of the words by which we describe it. In truth, it would be impossible to make them understand the real meanings of the words, if they did not understand the nature of the thing itself. To make them understand the meanings of the words justice and injustice before knowing the nature of the things themselves, would be as impossible as it would be to make them understand the meanings of the words heat and cold, wet and dry, light and darkness, white and black, one and two, before knowing the nature of the things themselves. Men necessarily must know sentiments and ideas, no less than material things, before they can know the meanings of the words by which we describe them.”

Lysander Spooner (1808–1887) Anarchist, Entrepreneur, Abolitionist

Section IV, p. 9–10
Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882), Chapter I. The Science of Justice.

Men, Children, Truth, Age

“Their hearts and sentiments were free, their appetites were hearty.”

Robert Williams Buchanan (1841–1901) Scottish poet, novelist and dramatist

City of the Saints.

Heart

“In a region of mind without coed irony, where women are draped like Ash Wednesday statues (as too hot to handle) and stoned to death on an accusation of adultery (as too insignificant to cry over), men, among themselves, have achieved an elegant ease of confraternity and sentimentality.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Death, Women, Men, Cry

“Many of us associate the Christian faith as a list of do's and dont's, to be sure. But the Christian life is to be oriented in relationship, why is there so much talk of formula? Could it be that the reason we are more interested in forumla than relationship is that we would like to deal with our need for religion without dealing with the complications of relationship? That even though we have chosen the Christian faith instead of "poppycock religion," we ultimately want the same thing as the pagan? And what is that? Easy answers, comfortable sentiments, beliefs that make us feel good. So we go through the motions. We go to our churches, we read our self-help books, we watch our religious television, and we check each item off our to-do list as if we were doing work for pay. One thing I am sure of. This is not the kind of real-life faith I'm looking for.”

Donald Miller (1971) American writer

Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)

Life, Books, Faith, Religion

“There are two main reasons that Kant refuses to allow that sympathy or any other empirical sentiment or desire could constitute the foundation of morality. One is that no sentiment of this kind can yield the kinds of objective and universal principles that morality requires. They can approximate to this only by claiming a greater empirical uniformity in human nature than experience shows to be there. […] Kant’s other main reason for rejecting sympathy or love as the basis of morality involves his view of the empirical psychology of these feelings as they arise in us in our social condition, and especially in the “civilized” condition of modern European society.”

Allen W. Wood (1942) academic

Kantian Ethics (2008)

Love, Feeling, Nature, Universe

“Consider the most famous pure dystopian tale of modern times, 1984, by George Orwell (1903-1950), published in 1948 (the same year in which Walden Two was published). I consider it an abominably poor book. It made a big hit (in my opinion) only because it rode the tidal wave of cold war sentiment in the United States.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

"Nowhere!" Asimov's Science Fiction (September 1983)
General sources

War, Books, Time

“I desire to sever all connection with the Society of American Artists. In deference to some of its older members, who perhaps from sentimental motives requested me to reconsider my resignation last year, I shall explain… For the last three years my paintings have been rejected by you, one of them the Agnew portrait, a composition more important than any I have ever seen on your walls.Rejection for three years eliminates all elements of chance, and while in my opinion there are qualities in my work which entitle it to rank with the best in your Society, your Society's opinion must be that it ranks below much that I consider frivolous and superficial. These opinions are irreconcilable.”

Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) American painter

Letter to the Society of American Artists (1892-05-07).

Motivation, Chance, Painting

“There are things which we feel to be good and true, though in the cold light of reason and calculation many things remain incomprehensible and dark. And though the society in which we live considers such actions thoughtless, or reckless, or I don't know what else, what can we say if once the hidden forces of sympathy and love have been roused in us? And though it may be that we cannot argue against the reasoning sentiment and to act from impulse, one would almost conclude that some people have cauterized certain sensitive nerves within them, especially those which, combined, are called conscience. Well, I pity those people; they travel through life without compass, in my opinion.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo, from The Hague, c. 11 January 1883; as cited in Dear Theo: the Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh; ed. Irving Stone and Jean Stone (1995), ISBN 0452275040
1880s, 1883

Love, Life, People, Travel

“Months later, Roger Cohen would write in The New York Time that preventing an attack on Banja Luka was "an acto of consummate Realpolitik" on our part, since letting the Federation [of Bosnia-Herzegovina] take the city would have "derailed" the peace process. Cohen, one of the most knowledgeable journalists to cover the was, misunderstood our motives in opposing an attack on Banja Luka. A true practitioner of Realpolitik would have encouraged the attack regardless of its human consequences. In fact, humanitarian concerns decided the case for me. Given the harsh behavior of Federation troops during the offensive, it seemed certain that the fall of Banja Luka would lead to forced evictions and random murders. I did not think the United States should contribute to the creation of new refugees and more human suffering in order to take a city that would have to be returned later. Revenge might be a central part of the ethos of the Balkans, but American policy could not be party of it. Our responsibility was to implement the American national interest, as best as we could determine it. But I am no longer certain we were right to oppose an attack on Banja Luka. Had we known then that the Bosnian Serbs would have been able to defy or ignore so many of the key political provisions of the peace agreement in 1996 and 1997, the negotiating team might not have opposed such an attack. However, even with American encouragement, it is by no means certain that an attack would have taken palce - or, if it had, that it would have been successful. Tuđman would have had to carry the burden of the attack, and the Serb lines were already stiffening. The Croatian Army had just taken heavy casualties on the Sarva. Furthermore, if it fell, Banja Luka would either have gone to the Muslims or been returned later to the Serbs, thus making it of dubious value to Tuđman. There was another intriguing factor in the equation - one of the few things that Milošević and Izetbegović had agreed on. Banja Luka, they both said, was the center of moderate, anti-Pale sentiment within the Bosnian Serb community, and should be built up in importance as a center of opposition to Pale. Izetbegovic himself was ambivalent about taking the city, and feared that if it fell, it would only add to Croat-Bosnian tensions.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 166-167

Fear, Peace, Behavior, Communication

“…I had no love for politics. I treasured the privacy of my family life. My mother respected both these sentiments. Then my brother, Sanjay was killed in the prime of his life. It broke a mother’s heart. It did not break a Prime Minister’s will. Without even a day’s break, she carried on her noble task single-minded in fulfilling her pledge to her people
There is a loneliness that only a bereaved mother can know…she called to me in her loneliness. I went to her side. At her instance, I left my love for flying at her instance I joined her as a political aide. From her I learned my first political lessons. It was she who urged me to respond to the insistent demand from the constituency and the part to take my brother’s place as Member of Parliament for Amethi. With her blessings I was made General Secretary of my party asking me to accept the challenge of stepping into her shoes.
In accepting this challenge I fulfilled a national duty and a filial duty of a son to a mother.”

Rajiv Gandhi (1944–1991) sixth Prime Minister of India

In Memorable Quotes from Rajiv Gandhi and on Rajiv Gandhi (2009) http://books.google.co.in/books?id=L5bTCgLM1lYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false, Quote 37 Quote

Love, Life, People, Family

Quotes about sentiment page 2

Quotes about sentiment
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