Sentimentality Quotes - Page 3

• Because there is a fear of sentimentality, love is not very often addressed - and it is really the one motivation in all of our lives.

  Helene Aylon

  Love, Motivation, Our Lives

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• If you're striving for strong emotion and strong sentiment, and you're authentic with it and honest with it, then you're on the right side of the line. But if you step into sentimentality, there is a false move or a false tone to it.

  Lasse Hallstrom

  Strong, Moving, Sides

  "Josh Duhamel, Julianne Hough, Director Lasse Hallstrom, Author Nicholas Sparks, and Producer Marty Bowen Talk SAFE HAVEN". Interview with Sheila Roberts, collider.com. February 11, 2013.

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• 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

  Teacher, Writing, Careers

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2009.

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• Animal lovers are a special breed of humans, generous of spirit, full of empathy, perhaps a little prone to sentimentality, and with hearts as big as a cloudless sky

  John Grogan

  Dog, Heart, Animal

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

  Walker Percy

  Hate, Hatred, Honest

  Walker Percy (2011). “Signposts in a Strange Land”, p.77, Open Road Media

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• The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with God is how he shall make the experience--which is both natural and supernatural--understandable, and credible, to his reader. In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well- nigh insurmountable one. Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Religious, Writing, Men

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• Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed and when I'm writing, there are no bees to sting me out of my sentimentality. For me at least, fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.

  John Green

  Memories, Lying, Writing

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• 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

  Children, Book, Men

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• Sentimentality is loving something more than God does.

  J. D. Salinger

  Doe, Loving Something

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• Houses are the abiding joys; they are the most emotion-stirring of all things. An automobile is regarded with fond affection, a typewriter becomes the inseparable companion, clothes can stir sentimentality, and the bit of bric-a-brac is a toy one would weep to see torn away - but houses are real, deep, emotional things. How much excitement in the cutting of a window, what enormous importance in the angle of a roof!

  Rose Wilder Lane

  Real, Cutting, Emotional

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• Our quilts were more than useful, they had the faint sentimentality of a pressed flower. And no more beauty. We did not value them for their appearance, but for the memories in them, for their good wearing qualities and the thrift they represented.

  Rose Wilder Lane

  Quilts, Memories, Flower

  Rose Wilder Lane (1985). “Old Home Town”, p.19, U of Nebraska Press

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• if you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago. ... you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. Otherwise what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentimemnt falls to sentimentality - you can write about life, but never write life itself.

  Sarah Orne Jewett

  Fall, Writing, Heart

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• Cynicism is the other thing that goes with sentimentality.

  Margaret Mead

  Cynicism

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• The psychiatrist knows only too well how each of us becomes the helpless but not pitiable victim of his own sentiments. Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality.

  Carl Jung

  Brutality, Victim, Psychiatrist

  Carl Gustav Jung (1978). “The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: The spirit in man, art, and literature”

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• 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

  Powerful, Real, Unique

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• 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

  Photography, Strong, Mean

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• Even the favorite reviews, the audience response is the movie is too slow, deliberately slow. But for the Chinese audience, the biggest complaint is it happens too quick. I think the historical background that build into our genes is different. American people has never been occupied. The deep sadness and sentimentality, the cultural background that relates to melodrama that we relate to and grow up with, the propaganda, I didn't imagine the difference is so big. It's a very interesting cultural phenomenon.

  Ang Lee

  Growing Up, Sadness, Thinking

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• 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

  Strong, Art, Nice

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• I'm not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don't think you get a true picture of people without it in writing... It's a kind of poetry, it's an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don't think anything is true that doesn't have it, that doesn't have poetry in it.

  Nelson Algren

  Writing, Mean, Emotional

  Nelson Algren (1999). “The Man with the Golden Arm”, p.415, Seven Stories Press

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• Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just; a God who is all love, but not holy; a God who as a heaven for every body, but a hell for none; a God who can allow good and bad to be side by side in time, but will make no distinction between good and broad in eternity. Such a God is an idol of your own, as truly an idol as any snake or crocodile in an Egyptian temple. The hands of your own fancy and sentimentality have made him. He is not the God of the Bible, and beside the God of the Bible there is no God at all.

  J. C. Ryle

  Hands, Idols, Snakes

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• Patriotism has become a mere national self assertion, a sentimentality of flag-cheering with no constructive duties.

  H. G. Wells

  Cheer, Self, Patriotism

  "The Future in America: A Search After Realities". Book by H. G. Wells, 1906.

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• 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

  Hippie, Iguanas, People

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• The most practical teaching of the Gita, and one for which it is of abiding interest and value to the men of the world with whom life is a series of struggles, is not to give way to any morbid sentimentality when duty demands sternness and the boldness to face terrible things.

  Bal Gangadhar Tilak

  Struggle, Teaching, Men

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• 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.

  Steig Larsson

  Survival, Causes, Lost

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• 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

  Brother, Children, Helping Others

  "The Issue". Eugene V. Debs' speech in Girard, Kansas, May 23, 1908.

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