Quotes & Sayings About Sentimentality

Holiness must have a philosophical and theological foundation, namely, Divine truth; otherwise it is sentimentality and emotionalism. Many would say later on, 'We want religion, but no creeds.' This is like saying we want healing, but no science of medicine; music, but no rules of music; history, but no documents. Religion is indeed a life, but it grows out of truth, not away from it. It has been said it makes no difference what you believe, it all depends on how you act. This is psychological nonsense, for a man acts out of his beliefs. Our Lord placed truth or belief in Him first; then came sanctification and good deeds. But here truth was not a vague ideal, but a Person. Truth was now lovable, because only a Person is lovable. Sanctity becomes the response the heart makes to Divine truth and its unlimited mercy to humanity. — Fulton J. Sheen

Old birds like Orlovius are wonderfully easy to lead by the beak, because a combination of decency and sentimentality is exactly equal to being a fool. — Vladimir Nabokov

It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be possible to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant's hut, and I know too how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and panelled halls. — Hugh Of Saint-Victor

That is the flaw in my personality. Vanity. And your flaw is sentimentality. They are the flaws which will inevitably kill us both. — John D. MacDonald

The romanticism and sentimentality in the relationship between Paris and Berlin is likely to vanish. It's the way it is with an old, married couple, although the established habits will remain in place. — Max Gallo

Sentimentality is a basking in feelings that in reality you don't take seriously enough to make the slightest sacrifice to or ever translate into action. — Hermann Hesse

Alexia had found pregnancy relatively manageable, up to a point. That point having been some three weeks ago, at which juncture her natural reserves of control gave way to sentimentality. Only yesterday she had ended breakfast sobbing over the fried eggs because they looked at her funny. The pack had spent a good half hour trying to find a way to pacify her. Her husband was so worried he looked to start crying himself. — Gail Carriger

The poet must decide not to impose his feelings in order to write without sentimentality. — John Barton

She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligene abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers; but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis or Clark of the female mind. — Andrea Dworkin

Man's sentimental attachment to objects is one of life's greatest consolations. — Orhan Pamuk

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment. — Norman Mailer

Over-sentimentality, over-softness, in fact washiness and mushiness are the great dangers of this age and of this people. Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail. — Theodore Roosevelt

I am in no doubt that if you use the term 'luv' in a letter or text message then you are incapable of truly understanding the emotion. Artists have not pored over heartache and unrequited sentimentality for years so that our generation could decide that four letters is simply one too many to express how we feel. — Jon Richardson

I know this body is impatient.
I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind.
Yet I loved, I love.
I want no sentimentality.
I want no more than home. — Robert Creeley

Maggie Smith has a unique sense of comedy, based on a somewhat ironic view of real life, making it both funnier and more sad. But perhaps her greatest ability, or at least the one that most intrigues me, is how she can convey deep and powerful emotion without a trace of sentimentality. — Julian Fellowes

I know for sure that love saves me. And that it is here to save us all. I know it's a sense, it's more close to us than air, more loud to us than hearing. I know it. I know that we can sit in it. Yes, love honey, and you know by that, I don't mean mush, or any, I don't mean romance, or sentimentality. I mean something is so, it can raise the dead. It can make a mountain move. I know it. I haven't done it, but i know it. As surely as I'm sitting here. — Maya Angelou

I know a 'crime against nature' when I see one. It is usually a sign of crimes against nature that we cannot bear to see them at all, that we recoil and hide our eyes, and no one has ever cringed at the sight of a soybean factory. I also know phony arguments when I hear them
unbridled appetite passing itself off as altruism, and human arrogance in the guise of solemn 'duty.' We must, as C.S. Lewis advises, 'reject with detestation that covert propoganda for cruelty which tries to drive mercy out of the world by calling it names such as 'Humanitarianism' and 'Sentimentality. — Matthew Scully

The upshot is a hermeneutics of suspicion; if someone tells you that he or she has converted to unbelief because of science, don't believe them. Because what's usually captured the person is not scientific evidence per se, but the form of science: "Even where the conclusions of science seem to be doing the work of conversion, it is very often not the detailed findings so much as the form" (p. 362). Indeed, "the appeal of scientific materialism is not so much the cogency of its detailed findings as that of the underlying epistemological stance, and that for ethical reasons. It is seen as the stance of maturity, of courage, of manliness, over against childish fears and sentimentality" (p. 365). — James K.A. Smith

It is quite funny really when you think that probably I would have married him if he'd been at all clever about it. But instead of putting it to me as a sensible business proposition he would drag in all this talk about love the whole time, and I simply can't bear those showerings of sentimentality. Otherwise I should most likely have married him ages ago. — Nancy Mitford

I think the feature reporter often walks a very thin line between a truly human story and one that slops over into mushiness or sentimentality. — Charles Kuralt

I think it's very disheartening and undermining to focus on nostalgia or youthful sentimentality as the lens through which you view art and culture, because then you feel like everything good already happened. I really just try to be in the present with music and just find the things that are invigorating and make me feel happy to be alive right now. — Carrie Brownstein

The present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia. — Walker Percy

Though reason must guide us in laying down standards and laws regarding animals, and in examining the arguments of those who reject such standards, it is usually best in any moral inquiry to start with the original motivation, which in the case of animals we may without embarrassment call love. Human beings love animals as only the higher love the lower, the knowing love the innocent, and the strong love the vulnerable. When we wince at the suffering of animals, that feeling speaks well of us even when we ignore it, and those who dismiss love for our fellow creatures as mere sentimentality overlook a good and important part of our humanity. — Matthew Scully

Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness. — Walker Percy

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

An understandable hunger for ... potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, ... immune to the methods of factory farming. — Alain De Botton

The endless ocean was his sole companion , and on some deeply sentimental level, it seemed sufficient. Almost apt. He aligned himself with Thoreau and Tolstoy, he felt like their peers. The kinship with nature devoted humans to a mythical state, a heightened persona beyond the reach of mere mortals. At least that was what he told himself on the lonely nights when insomnia played on his fears and the howling wind pierced through his soul. — Adelheid Manefeldt

Dying is overrated. Human sentimentality has twisted it into the ultimate act of love. Biggest load of bullshit in the world. Dying for someone isn't the hard thing. The man that dies escapes. Plain and simple. Game over. End of pain ... Try living for someone. Through it all-good, bad, thick, thin, joy, suffering. That's the hard thing. — Karen Marie Moning

This is part of what we disdain about sweeteners, the fact that we can taste without consequences. Our capitalist ethos loves a certain kind of inscription - insisting we can read tallies of sloth and discipline inscribed across the body itself - and artificial sweeteners threaten this legibility. They offer a way to cheat the arithmetic of indulgence and bodily consequence, just like sentimentality offers feeling without the price of complication. — Leslie Jamison

Questions invaded my mind and I was young and skeptical, wanting to believe in the power of the mind, wanting to believe in the power of intellectual force, terribly afraid of sentimentality in myself and others. — Sherwood Anderson

Calpurnia was to blame for this. It kept me from driving her crazy on rainy days, I guess. She would set me a writing task by scrawling the alphabet firmly across the top of a tablet, then copying out a chapter of the Bible underneath. If I reproduced her penmanship satisfactorily, she rewarded me with an open-faced sandwich of bread and butter and sugar. In Calpurnia's teaching, there was no sentimentality: I seldom pleased her and she seldom rewarded me. "Everybody — Harper Lee

Any woman who has devoted herself to raising children has experienced the hollow praise that only thinly conceals smug dismissal. In a culture that measures worth and achievement almost solely in terms of money, the intensive work of rearing responsible adults counts for little. One of the most intriguing questions in economic history is how this came to be; how mothers came to be excluded from the ranks of productive citizens. How did the demanding job of rearing a modern child come to be termed baby-sitting? When did caring for children become a 'labor of love,;' smothered under a blanket of sentimentality that hides its economic importance? — Ann Crittenden

The sentimental want to be thrilled by everything. — Mason Cooley

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty ... the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mark of cruelty. — James Baldwin

The cake had a trick candle that wouldn't go out, so I didn't get my wish. Which was just that it would always be like this, that my life could be a party just for me. — Janet Fitch

He remembered the Professor's advice to his eager employees during his first year: With us, feelings are described through images, and in the world of television, there are only seven feelings: well-being, Schadenfreude, sentimentality, shock, outrage, disgust, and anger. Nothing else. — Erik Valeur

If your teachers suggest that your poems are sentimental, that is only half of it. Your poems probably need to be even more sentimental. Don't be less of a flower, but could you be more of a stone at the same time? — Mary Ruefle

Only with great care. For thousands, carols will be their only link with a church. At the same time, sentimentality is perhaps the single most dangerous feature of our Church and culture-and the sentimental air is never thicker than at Christmas. The Incarnation is messy, dirty, and resonates with the crucifixion. We need a new wave of carol writing that can gradually swill out the nonsense and catch the piercing, joy-through-pain refrains of the New Testament. — Jeremy Begbie

India is desperately romantic, utterly unashamed of its sentimentality, its generosity, its fierce pride and massive heart. — Simon Beaufoy

The truth is that there are two men in Ibsen - an idealist, exalted to the verge of sentimentality, and a critic, hard, inexorable, remorseless, to the verge of cynicism. What we call his "social philosophy" is a modus vivendi arrived at between them. Both agree in repudiating "marriage for love"; — Henrik Ibsen

'Pity without rigor would be cowardly egotism, mere sentimentality.' — Matthew Pearl

One of the things I dread about becoming an adult is that sooner or later you begin letting sentimentality get in the way of simple logic. False feelings are allowed to clog the works like raw honey poured into the tiny wheels of a fine timepiece. — Alan Bradley

Fake Math owes its existence to a number of things and people who have inspired and assisted this book on its way into the world. — Ryan Fitzpatrick

Sentimentality, Mrs Revel. You know it is. Love isn't a drug that you take to blind you to your surroundings - you can make it that, yes, but it's a pity - love can be a lot more than that. — Agatha Christie

For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations ...
Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle. — Alain De Botton

A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour - all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest. — H.L. Mencken

Mr. and Mrs. Hankshaw were summoned from the waiting room where Saturday Evening Post fantasies had clouded their instinctive parental concern the way that Norman Rockwell's sentimental ideas cloud the purity of a blank canvas. — Tom Robbins

Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual. But the one who has love, courage and wisdom moves the world. — Ammon Hennacy

We sacrifice other species to our own not because our own has any objective metaphysical privilege over others, but simply because it is ours. It may be very natural to have this loyalty to our own species, but let us hear no more from the naturalists about the "sentimentality" of anti-vivisectionists. If loyalty to our own species - preference for man simply because we are men - is not sentiment, then what is? — C.S. Lewis

Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it. God's saving love in Christ, however, is marked by both radical truthfulness about who we are and yet also radical, unconditional commitment to us. The merciful commitment strengthens us to see the truth about ourselves and repent. The conviction and repentance moves us to cling to and rest in God's mercy and grace. — Timothy Keller

If you tell certain people that you like Kerouac, they assume that's all you read, like you don't know anything else about literature. I recognize all the things that people dislike about the way he writes - his tone and the sentimentality of it all. But those books were there for me at a very important point in my life. — Ben Gibbard

There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality. — Max Beckmann

The Rolling Stones have been the best of all possible worlds: they have the lack of pretension and sentimentality associated with the blues, the rawness and toughness of hard rock, and the depth which always makes you feel that they are in the midst of saying something. They have never impressed me as being kitsch. — Jon Landau

Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, 'neighborhood' is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense. — Jane Jacobs

I often wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn't made that decision. I suppose I would have sunk. I suppose I would have found some kind of hole and tried to hide or pass. After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. I would have hidden in my hole and been crippled by my sentimentality, doing what I was doing, and doing it well, but always looking for the wailing wall. And I would never have seen the world as the rich place that it is. You wouldn't have seen me here in Africa, doing what I do. — V.S. Naipaul

He taught me not to dwell or attach myself to things from the past that were no longer useful, and that sentimentality was for people who did not want to move forward in this world. — Gemma Liviero

Always retain the ability to walk away, without sentimentality, from a situation that felt unmanageable. That was a basic rule of survival. Don't lift a finger for a lost cause. — Stieg Larsson

The popular distinction between 'constructive' and 'destructive' criticism is a sentimentality: the mind too weak to perceive in what respects the bad fails is not strong enough to appreciate in what the good succeeds. To be without discrimination is to be unable to praise. The critic who lets you know that he always looks for something to like in works he discusses is not telling you anything about the works or about art; he is saying 'see what a nice person I am. — Brigid Brophy

Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts. — Norman Maclean

There should be philosophy and knowledge for the elect, religion and sentimentality for the masses — Christopher Hitchens

She doesn't approve of either sentimentality or graveyard humor at crime scenes. She says they waste time that should be spent working on the damn case, but the implication is that coping strategies are for wimps. — Tana French

There is no more subtle dissolvent of morals than sentimentality. — Woodrow Wilson

I was firmly in the out-of-sight-out-of-mind camp, and had cogent, unflinchingly honest declarations I frequently made about losing a shared context, and sentimentalism, and the general faint hearted ness of most people-but I knew there were people in the world who remained friends, for life, with bunk mates from sleepaway camp, and this was that group of people. — Gabrielle Hamilton

Detachment, lack of sentimentality, originality, a lot of things that sound rather empty. I know what they mean. Let's say, "visual impact" may not mean much to anybody. I could point it out though. I mean it's a quality that something has or does not have. Coherence. Well, some things are weak, some things are strong ... — Walker Evans

Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death. — Eugene V. Debs

Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home
"One swing set, well worn but structually sound, seeks new home. Make memories with your kid or kids so that someday he or she or they will look into the backyard and feel the ache of sentimentality as desperately as I did this afternoon. It's all fragile and fleeting, dear reader, but with this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may alos learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard how you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around."
Swing set currently resides near 83rd and Spring Mill. — John Green

The first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will fee like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or The Cure on the soundtrack. — Jonathan Tropper

As a devil's advocate Mr Neville was faultless. And yet, she knew, there was a flaw in his reasoning, just as there was a flaw in his ability to feel. — Anita Brookner

For him, that was an apology on bended knee. Anything more than he just managed, and he'll overload his sentimentality quota."
Richard Dalrymple gasped. "Never tell me he still has the sentimentality quota."
Miranda's look of surprise mirrored his. "Never tell me that the sentimentality quota truly exists. — Courtney Milan

Phillip cleared his throat and got to his feet. I need some fresh air. All this postbattle rah-rah-we-lived sentimentality is a bit cloying. — Jennifer Estep

Sentimentality is a quality that rarely has the slightest influence on action. — Hope Mirrlees

Sentimentality towards the undeserving is as dangerous as agreeing to putting one foot in the grave. — K.A. Hosein

I think sometimes good sentimentality is fun when it's balanced. — Cameron Crowe

The comics I read as a kid were much more influenced by TV and movies. Encountering superheroes as an adult without that kind of childhood sentimentality, it just doesn't allow you, or in my case at least, it wouldn't let me take the characters seriously. — Garth Ennis

We can no longer afford our historical sentimentality, even addiction, to the past. — Michael Frost

Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn between a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can't be ironic all the time. — Angela Carter

Contempt for one's own comrades, for the troops of the enemy, and, above all, fierce contempt for one's own person, are what war demands of everyone. Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality and human reasonableness. — William James

I like emotions, but I really don't like sentimentality, and I don't like when things break their spell. — Tony Gilroy

Being ill makes you feel what well people call sentimental, but what you feel is nonetheless genuine whatever they call it. — Elizabeth Goudge

You have to avoid caricature, at the one end of the spectrum, and sentimentality, at the other; which is not to say that such characters shouldn't be funny part of the time, or that their actions shouldn't evoke genuine feeling. — Robert Boswell

The fact is that if the writer's attention is on producing a work of art, a work that is good in itself, he is going to take great pains to control every excess, everything that does not contribute to this central meaning and design. He cannot indulge in sentimentality, in propagandizing, or in pornography and create a work of art, for all these things are excesses. They call attention to themselves and distract from the work as a whole. — Flannery O'Connor

How much more sensuality invites to art than does sentimentality. — Andre Gide

Americans, though apparently impressed by ghastly sentimentality and outrageous hypocrisy, are by nature much more politically cynical than Canadians. In their longer history they have had much more to be cynical about. They demand a vulgar show, enjoy it, guffaw, and forget it the next morning. When a new U.S. President takes office all bets are off and his campaign platform is dismantled and stored away. — Gordon Donaldson

Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact. — H.L. Mencken

I don't trust sentimentality in men; it goes with tyranny; you can't have one without the other. — Caitlin Thomas

Sentimentality is the supestructure erected upon brutality. — C. G. Jung

The neo-hippie-dips, the sentimentality-crazed iguana anthropomorphizers, the Chicken Littles, the three-bong-hit William Blakes- thank God these people don't actually go outdoors much, or the environment would be even worse than it is already. — P. J. O'Rourke

The sentimentality of baseball is very deeply rooted in the American baseball fan. It is the one sport that is transmitted from fathers to sons. — Michael Lewis

Sentiment isn't a bad thing. — Benjamin R. Smith

I love your kiss. Everything's sorted, and obvious, and understood, and civilised, your kiss says. It's a shut-eye lie, I know it is, because the music I didn't know before I knew you makes me open my eyes in a place of no sentimentality, where light itself is a kind of shadow, where everything is fragment-slanted. — Ali Smith

Sentimentality and emotionalism have nothing whatsoever to do with love. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

It was [John Gardner's] conviction that if the words in the story were blurred because of the author's insensitivity, carelessness, or sentimentality, then the story suffered from a tremendous handicap. But there was something even worse and something that must be avoided at all costs: if the words and the sentiments were dishonest, the author was faking it, writing about things he didn't care about or believe in, then nobody could ever care anything about it. — Raymond Carver

Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction, and sentimentality are good excuses. — Martin Amis

Children's books are looked on as a sideline of literature. A special smile. They are usually thought to be associated with women. I was determined not to have this label of sentimentality put on me so I signed by my intials, hoping people wouldn't bother to wonder if the books were written by a man, woman or kangaroo. — P.L. Travers

I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the
speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental. — David Foster Wallace

The ironic, too-cool meta satire, the sneering and mocking? Is actually just a contemporary version of the bourgeois sentimentality it's trying to mock. It is not new. Really it's almost quaint. The backlash has already outlasted it. — Tony Tulathimutte

Sentimentality is only emotion you haven't proven to the reader - emotion without vivid evidence. — Mary Karr

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love. — E. M. Forster

Deviation from the word of God is sentimentality and says 'you're right' to this one, and 'you're right' to that one, and the guy in the middle is an ass-hole. — Milton Rokeach

Intelligent and alert, wistful but enthusiastic, frank yet tactful, assured without conceit and tender without sentimentality. — Cecil Beaton