Quotes about Emotion

Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.

He never raised his voice, even in the midst of volatile situations.

Today we are apt to downplay or disregard the importance of good thinking to strong faith; and some, disastrously, even regard thinking as opposed to faith. They do not realize that in so doing they are not honoring God, but simply yielding to the deeply anti-intellectualist currents of Western egalitarianism, rooted, in turn, in the romantic idealization of impulse and blind feeling found in David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and their nineteenth- and twentieth-century followers.

We know, for example, that feelings move us, and that we enjoy being moved.

In people without rock-solid character, feeling is a deadly enemy of self-control and will always subvert it. The mongoose of a disciplined will under God and good is the only match for the cobra of feeling.

Saint Thomas Aquinas remarks that "love is born of an earnest consideration of the object loved." And: "Love follows knowledge." Love is an emotional response aroused in the will by visions of the good. Contrary to what is often said, love is never blind, though it may not see rightly. It cannot exist without some vision of the beloved.

Every emotion, though horizontally provoked, nevertheless reflects something about the vertical dimension: our relationship with God.

The reason we don't want to feel is that feeling exposes the tragedy of our world and the darkness of our hearts.

"King David was shaken. He went up to the room over the gateway and wept. As he went, he said: 'O my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you — O Absalom: my son, my son!'"

"Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire."

Every time I say I love you I mean it more than the last time.

Never ask why I love you, just accept that I do, and that I will for the rest of my life.