Sentimentality Quotes - Page 8

• 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 bicycle.

  Alain de Botton

  Reality, Optimism, Lines

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2008.

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• How much more sensuality invites to art than does sentimentality.

  Andre Gide

  Art, Doe, Sensuality

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• I revolted from sentimentality, less because it was false than because it was cruel.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Sentimental

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• Tis going, I own, like the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, in quest of melancholy adventures--but I know not how it is, but I am never so perfectly conscious of the existence of a soul within me, as when I am entangled in them.

  Laurence Sterne

  Adventure, Knights, Soul

  Laurence Sterne, Melvyn New, Geoffrey Day (2006). “A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy: And, Continuation of the Bramine's Journal : with Related Texts”, p.156, Hackett Publishing

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• There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep.

  Rebecca West

  Grief, Cutting, Grace

  Rebecca West (1928). “The strange necessity: essays by Rebecca West”

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• Women and egoistic artists entertain a feeling towards science that is something composed of envy and sentimentality.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Women, Science, Artist

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• Sweetheart, do not love too long:
  I loved long and long,
  And grew to be out of fashion
  Like an old song.

  William Butler Yeats

  Fashion, Song, Loss

  William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.67, Wordsworth Editions

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• [T]he outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality.:; Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?

  George Orwell

  Men, Killing, Accepting

  George Orwell, Ian Angus, Sheila Davison (1998). “The Complete Works of George Orwell: I have tried to tell the truth, 1943-1944”

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• I used to pride myself on being impervious to the sentimentalities of soap opera, but when that loveliest of actresses, Rachel Gurney, of Upstairs, Downstairs, perished on the Titanic, I wept so convulsively and developed such anorexia that I had to be force-fed.

  S. J. Perelman

  Pride, Anorexia, Television

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