Quotes About Sentimental Love

“To laugh is to risk appearing a fool.
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach out to another is to risk involvement.
To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self.
To place your ideas and dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To hope is to risk pain.
To try is to risk failure.
But risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.”

— William Arthur Ward

“If I had to describe what love meant, really, not in the abstract or the sentimental or the way I'd imagined it before, that I'd say it was completely irrational, made up of so many opposites, the kind that couldn't exist without the other: bliss and sadness, courage and fear, adoration and disgust.”

— Jill Bialosky

“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

“I'm glad I found you," Kane said quietly, stepping back as Avery stood.
"I think it was more like me finding you, handsome." For Kane, the sentimental memories were so strong; all he could do was stand there as they held their babies, thinking about their lives, their future,and his love for Avery.
"I can't imagine my life without you," Kane proclaimed sweetly.
"Good. I don't want you to.”

— Kindle Alexander

“Love is not first a feeling. Though the feelings come later and grow thick in the basic loam of love, they don't constitute the sum and substance of love. Love is doing whatever good God says you must do for another, to please God, whether (at first) it pleases you or not. You must do so because He says so; and you don't wait until you feel like doing so. Love begins with obedience toward God in which one gives to another whatever the other needs. Love is not a gooey, sticky sentimental thing; it is hard to love. Often it hurts to love. Love meant going to the cross through the garden of Gethsemane. Christ did not feel like dying for your sins, Christian, but He did so nonetheless. The Scriptures teach that he endured the cross while focusing on the subsequent joy that it would bring.”

— Jay E. Adams

“Fynn, I love you.' When Anna said that, every word was shattered with the fullness of meaning she packed into it. Her 'I' was a totality. Whatever this 'I' was for Anna it was packed tight with being. Like the light that didn't fray, Anna's 'I' didn't fray either; it was pure and all of one piece. Her use of the word 'love' was not sentimental or mushy, it was impelling and full of courage and encouragement. For Anna, 'love' meant the recognition of perfectibility in another. Anna 'saw' a person in every part. Anna 'saw' a 'you'. Now that is something to experience, to be seen as a 'you', clearly and definitely, with no parts hidden. Wonderful and frightening. I'd always understood that it was Mister God who saw you clearly and in your entirety but then all Anna's efforts were directed to being like Mister God, so perhaps the trick is catching if only you try hard enough.”

— Fynn

“One grim Weltanschauung for this new era was well expressed by the Venetian nationalist demagogue in Michael Dibdin's novel, Dead Lagoon: There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves! They will not lightly be forgiven.”

— Samuel P. Huntington

“Risks
To laugh is to risk appearing a fool,
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach out to another is to risk involvement,
To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self.
To place your ideas and dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return,
To live is to risk dying,
To hope is to risk despair,
To try is to risk failure.
But risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing.
He may avoid suffering and sorrow,
But he cannot learn, feel, change, grow or live.
Chained by his servitude he is a slave who has forfeited all freedom.
Only a person who risks is free.”

— William Arthur Ward

“Nihilism is a disease of the soul. It can never be completely cured, and there is always the possibility of relapse. There is always a chance for conversion
a chance for people to believe that there is hope for the future and a meaning to struggle ... Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one's soul. This turning is done through one's own affirmation of one's worth
an affirmation fueled by the concern of others. A love ethic must be at the center of a politics of conversion.
A love ethic has nothing to do with sentimental feelings or tribal connections. Rather it is a last attempt at generating a sense of agency among a downtrodden people.”

— Cornel West

“Peter didn't answer. He pulled his legs up to his chest, wrapped his arms around them, and put his chin on his knees. Ever the contradiction, Tanngnost thought. One moment a cold-hearted killer, the next a sentimental boy, always the eternal optimist despite a lifetime of tragedy. Of course, that's his glamour. The very thing that draws the children to him, makes them love him despite so many contradictions. (The Child Thief)”

— Brom

“A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labours of men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference among the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbors, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood.”

— George Eliot

“I love jazz music and sad music. I'm a sentimental guy. I'm a romantic guy.”

— Fred Durst

“And quite right too. Thinking back, actually, 'self-infatuation' strikes me as a rather ill-chosen word. It isn't so much that I like or love myself. Rather, I'm sentimental about myself. (I say, is this normal for someone my age?) What do I think of Charles Highway? I think: 'Charles Highway? Oh, I like him. Yes, I've got a soft spot for old Charles. He's all right is Charlie. Chuck's ... okay.”

— Martin Amis

“Yet her heart did not thirst for emotions like the hearts of sentimental women; she was not searching for a man's unique love nor for the gratification of a passion. All she required was the admiration of every man she met, acknowledgment of capitulation, the homage of universal tenderness.”

— Guy De Maupassant

“I would hate to think I'm promoting sadness as an aesthetic. But I grew up in not just a family but a town and a culture where sadness is something you're taught to feel shame about. You end up chronically desiring what can be a very sentimental idea of love and connection. A lot of my work has been about trying to make a space for sadness.”

— Mike Mills

“Hen Anne stopped and talked to me for the first time. I can't remember what we said, maybe our names and where we came from. at the end of the conversation I invited her to dinner at my house that night. It was Christmastime, or nearly, and I made a pizza and bought a bottle of wine. We talked until very late. That was when Anne told me she'd been to Mexico several times. Overall, her adventures were very similar to mine. Anne thought this was because the lives or the youths of any two individuals would be fundamentally alike, in spite of the obvious or even glaring differences. I preferred to think that somehow she and I had both explored the same map, fought the same doomed campaigns, received a common sentimental education. At five in the morning, or perhaps later, we went to med and made love.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“I love 'Love Actually.' 'Love Actually,' there's, like, nine stories in that movie. Three of them are good. But watching that movie, I get emotional, I get choked up, my wife makes fun of me. I don't know if as you get older you get sappier and sentimental.”

— Ike Barinholtz

“We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.”

— John Banville

“'Little Women' has interesting gender connotations. There are generations of women who love the book. But there are a lot of men who think it's sentimental, gooey stuff.”

— Gillian Armstrong

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

— Helen Rowland

“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.

“Without sounding overly sentimental about the process, I'd say trying to describe how you tend to conceive of a book is like describing how you tend to fall in love.”

— Jess Walter

“We will paste upon the curled pages words
Like charming and romantic and sentimental
Forgetting that charming is witchcraft
Romantic is love
And sentiment is what makes us human”

— Emilie Autumn

“I have so many pieces that once belonged to my mom and both of my grandmothers. All of these pieces are very sentimental, and I love to wear them. I also have many pieces from my father that I probably cherish the most. I love wearing his dress shirts.”

— Kourtney Kardashian

“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 if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter
it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.”

— Colum McCann

“Pooh! away with love! Nay, my dear, we loved each other so dearly we should never have been happy with any one else; but that's a different thing. People aren't like what they were when we were young. All the love nowadays is just silly fancy, and sentimental romance, as far as I can see.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

“Love is not only the cardinal fact in the individual life, but the most important concern of the community; after all, the way in which the young people of this generation pair off determines the fate of the nation; all the other affairs of the state are subsidiary to that. And we leave it to flushed and blundering youth to stumble on its own significance, with nothing to guide it but shocked looks and sentimental twaddle and base whisperings and cant-smeared examples.”

— H.G. Wells

“It's an indication of how cynical our society has become that any kind of love story with a sad theme is automatically ridiculed as sentimental junk.”

— Winona Ryder

“There is a bit [in Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal?] where I talk about 'keeping the heart awake to love and beauty.' That's very difficult in our world, even when things are going well. It's not a world with much room for love and beauty. The daily news is [filled with] everything that goes wrong in our world, and everything horrible and unpleasant. I think that saturates your mind with negativity. I really think we need something to counteract that. I don't think it's Pollyanna or sentimental to focus on the ways we support one another on the micro level.
(from "It is the Imagination that Counts")”

— Jeanette Winterson

“Love is not a sentimental attachment to a human being; love is a mode of conduct that comes from the heart.”

— Ma Jaya

“I hope that I state your case fairly: One of my great fears is misrepresenting you, even to myself, now that you are not here to set me right. The truth is that you did not believe in idealism. All love was suspect; even a saint's was just differed self-interest. And it was impossible to argue without sounding either sentimental or naive. Cynicism has all the smart words on it's side; idealism uses a nursery school dictionary. And you studied early to disguise your childhood pain. But it is not universal.”

— Michael Arditti

“Men have, for the most part, done with lamenting their lost faith. Sentimental tears over the happy, simple Christendom of their fathers are a thing of the past. They are proclaiming now their contempt for Christ's character, and their disgust at the very name of love. Scorn and hatred, difference and division, must be more than ever our lot, if we would be the followers of Christ in these days. Conventional religion and polite unbelief are gone forever.”

— Neville Figgis

“The love of God is no mere sentimental feeling; it is redemptive power!”

— Charles Clayton Morrison

“To love as Christ loves is to let our love be a practical and not a sentimental thing.”

— Charles Villiers Stanford

“What could have been simply bizarre, sentimental or contrived here becomes an utterly absorbing love story; This is early days in the festival, but Rust and Bone has to be a real contender for prizes, and, the odds will be shortening to vanishing point for Cotillard getting the best actress award.”

— Peter Bradshaw

“Love as a power can go anywhere. It isn't sentimental. It doesn't have to be pretty, yet it doesn't deny pain.”

— Sharon Salzberg

“Sometimes, people end up thankful for what they mourned. You cannot achieve this state by seeking tragedy, but you can keep yourself open more to sorrow's richness than to unmediated despair. Tragedies with happy endings may be sentimental tripe, or they may be the true meaning of love.”

— Andrew Solomon

“Sade has a curious ability to render every aspect of sexuality suspect, so that we see how the chaste kiss of the sentimental lover differs only in degree from the vampirish love-bite that draws blood, we understand that a disinterested caress is only quantitatively different from a disinterested flogging.”

— Angela Carter

“Regardless, heterosexual marriage is largely in trouble today because people see it as a selfish means of pleasing self, rather than a committed relationship in which the focus is on meeting the needs of the partner, that sense of selfishness and the redefinition of love as to something that is purely sentimental and emotional, has been destructive.”

— Mike Huckabee

“Although the progress of civilisation has undoubtedly contributed to assuage the fiercer passions of human nature, it seems to have been less favourable to the virtue of chastity, whose most dangerous enemy is the softness of the mind. The refinements of life corrupt while they polish the intercourse of the sexes. The gross appetite of love becomes most dangerous when it is elevated, or rather, indeed, disguised by sentimental passion.”

— Edward Gibbon

“I very much love a physical book myself. I think people who have had this experience of also seeing a book come together, from sitting down and writing the first word, to holding the binding in your hand, we have a deeper sentimental attachment to it than others might.”

— Edwidge Danticat

“I was so sentimental about you I'd break any one's heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It's broken and gone. Everything I believe in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it?”

— Ernest Hemingway

“As soon as a man stands up and says he is right or his church is right, and all others are wrong, he is himself all wrong. He does not know that upon the proof of all the others depends the proof of his own. Love and charity for the whole human race, that is the test of true religiousness. I do not mean the sentimental statement that all men are brothers, but that one must feel the oneness of human life.”

— Swami Vivekananda

“Pure love is in the will alone; it is no sentimental love, for the imagination has no part in it; it loves, if we may so express it, without feeling, as faith believes without seeing.”

— Francois Fenelon

“True love, unlike popular sentimental substitutes, is willing to suffer. Love is not "luv." Love is the cross. Our problem at first, the sheer problem of suffering, was a cross without Christ. We must never fall into the opposite and equal trap of a Christ without a cross.”

— Peter Kreeft

“The only creative power I know is that of what might roughly be called 'love'; not of course a sentimental love: a far more impersonal and less individual emotion. I sometimes think that migratory birds may have it for each other. They fly in the same direction, and have never been seen to interfere with each other's flights.”

— Phyllis Bottome

“I try not to be sentimental and obsessive about possessions. I love collecting, but I hate owning.”

— Karl Lagerfeld

“Love is sentimental measles.”

— Charles Kingsley

“If fathers are sometimes sulky at the appearance of the destined son-in-law, is it not a fact that mothers become sentimental and, as it were, love their own loves over again.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray

“I'm sentimental about Jesus on the cross. Jesus was a Jew, and also I believe he was a catalyst, and I think he offended people because his message was to love your neighbour as yourself; in other words, no one is better than somebody else. He embraced all people, whether it was a beggar on the street or a prostitute, and he admonished a group of Jews who were not observing the precepts of the Torah. So he rattled a lot of people's cages.”

— Madonna Ciccone