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Sentimentality Quotes

Browse 215 quotes about Sentimentality.

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Sentimentality Quotes

“In intertwining sentimentality, healing, narcissism, and authority, modern evangelicals give authority to those emotions themselves...The sentimental becomes evidence and authority in a world in which most evangelicals have given up intellectual pursuits and concerns over doctrine. Essentially, sentimentality represents an abandonment of theology and critical introspection in popular evangelicalism. Instead of crafting intellectual responses to the challenges to evangelicalism, popular evangelicals appeal to the power of feeling as an authority to counteract science and criticism of the Bible. They offer their audiences the opportunity to FEEL that evangelicalism is right rather than asking them to accept the veracity of doctrinal positions of evangelicalism.”

EmotionChristianityAuthorityPersuasionSentimentalityEvangelicalismEvangelicals
Book:HOMESPUN GOSPEL
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“I will say a few words about the connection of love and intellectual honesty. There are several different attitudes that may be adopted towards the spectacle of intolerable suffering. If you are a sadist, you may find pleasure in it; if you are completely detached, you may ignore it; if you are a sentamentalist, you may persuade yourself that it is not as bad as it seems; but if you feel genuine compassion you will try to apprehend the evil truly in order to be able to cure it. The sentimentalist will say that you are coldly intellectual, and that, if you really minded the sufferings of others, you could not be so scientific about them. The sentimentalist will claim to have a tenderer heart than yours, and will show it by letting the suffering continue rather than suffer himself.”

SufferingSentimentalityIntellectual HonestyScience And Reasoning
Book:The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell
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“If mind is seen not as a threat but as a guide to emotion, if intellect is seen neither as a guarantee of character nor as an inevitable danger to it, if theory is conceived as something serviceable but not necessarily subordinate or inferior to practice, and if our democratic aspirations are defined in such realistic and defensible terms as to admit of excellence, all these supposed antagonisms lose their force.”

CharacterDemocracyIntellectualSentimentalityIntellectualismIntellectualsAnti Intellectualism
Book:Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
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“The game is a thread, microscopic in breadth, a hint of gossamer drawing unsuspecting souls together in simple competition to the exclusion of all else, from a mother and infant playing peekaboo to two old men hunched over a chessboard and everything in between. And finally, it is the game's presence and past and its memory that inspires each of us to forgive time and aging and their inevitable accompanying attrition because the gray and hobbled old man before me was once lean and powerful and magnificent and some of what became of him was due to the investment he made in me...”

InspirationalFamilyGameSentimentality
Book:Before the Spotlight
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“Metaphors are tiny saviors leading the way out of sentimentality, small disciples of Pound, urging "Say it new! Say it new!" It's hard for emotion to feel flat if its language is suitably novel, to feel excessive if its rendering is suitably opaque. Metaphors translate emotion into surprising and sublime language, but they also help us deflect and diffuse the glare of revelation.”

MetaphorSentimentalityPound
Book:The Empathy Exams
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“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.”

NatureSeaLonelinessWindSolitudeOceanIsolationMortalityInsomniaBeing AloneSentimentalityMan And NatureTolstoyLonely NightsThoreauShunning Society
Book:Consequence
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“Elodie was a nostalgic person, but she hated the charge. The word was terribly maligned. People used it as a stand-in for sentimentality, when it wasn’t that at all. Sentimentality was mawkish and cloying, where nostalgia was acute and aching. It described yearning of the most profound kind: an awareness that time’s passage could not be stopped and there was no going back to reclaim a moment or a person or do things differently.”

TimeNostalgiaSentimentality
Book:The Clockmaker's Daughter
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“The sound... pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joys the house had known: the children who rushed through its rooms, the festivals, the love and work, the honestly earned slumber... All this I realized was more than I could ever abandon. ...And just as powerfully I realized I could not commit this desecration upon myself.”

LoveHopeDepressionMemoryRecoverySentimentality
Book:Darkness visible: a memoir of madness
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“She approached them all without a trace of sentimentality or condescension. The older Docklanders were accustomed to meeting middle-class do-gooders, who deigned to act graciously to inferiors. The Cockneys despised these people, used them for what they could get, and made fun of them behind their backs, but Sister Evangelina had no patronising airs and graces.”

Middle ClassSentimentalityTaking AdvantageCondescensionPatronizingDo Gooders
Author:Jennifer Worth
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“From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex. The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening. The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm. This world exists simply to satisfy the needs - including, importantly, the sentimental needs - of white people and Oprah.”

EnthusiasmSentimentalityTedBanality Of Evil
Author:Teju Cole
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“A critic can call any poem 'doggerel.' That is no more than a slur. 'Doggerel' or 'maudlin' or 'sappy' or 'sentimental' is in the ear of the listener. By the by, 'sentimental' is okay as it is defined as 'marked or governed by feeling, sensibility, or emotional idealism.' It is 'sentimentality' that is to be avoided, like the fiddleback spider, being as it is 'the quality or state of being sentimental to excess or in affectation.' Again we are faced with a judgement call and must keep a sharp eye on our outpourings to insure they are not overly gooey. The intellectual elite probably believe that most of the lyrics songwriters create are 'doggerel' of one kind or another--that is to say 'trivial"......the young songwriter has now been warned about the implacable nature of the enemy. Under a rather large umbrella, preferred twentieth-century taste in art of all kinds has been characterized by a kind of detachment, or sangfroid. It is simply not chic to be carried away in one's emotional reaction to a subject. All serious communication or complaint must be carefully wrapped in a protective coating of irony and/or satire.”

CriticismCriticsSongwritingSentimentalitySongwriterSentimentDoggerelHipsterism
Book:Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting
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“But it’s not just those early years without my parents that branded me. It’s the life I’ve led in America as a migrant, watching my parents pursue their dream in this country and then having to deal with its carcass, witnessing the crimes against migrants carried out by the U.S. government with my hands bound. As an undocumented person, I felt like a hologram. Nothing felt secure. I never felt safe. I didn’t allow myself to feel joy because I was scared to attach myself to anything I’d have to let go of. Being deportable means you have to be ready to go at any moment, ready to go with nothing but the clothes on your body. I've learned to develop no relationship to anything, not to photos, not to people, not to jewelry or clothing or ticket stubs or stuffed animals from childhood.”

AmericaSentimentalityMigrantsUndocumented ImmigrantsUndocumentedAttachments
Book:The Undocumented Americans
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“No nation deserves to exist if it permits itself to lose the stern and virile virtues; and this without regard to whether the loss is due to the growth of a heartless and all-absorbing commercialism, to prolonged indulgence in luxury and soft, effortless ease, or to the deification of a warped and twisted sentimentality.”

IfsNationsGrowthLosesLossVirtueDeserveRegardDuesLuxuryEasePermitTwistedIndulgenceHeartlessAbsorbingSentimentalityEffortlessCommercialism
Author:Theodore Roosevelt
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“In times of war, as everyone knows, who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable ... in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.”

PeopleKnowsWarReasonFactsPastRememberCoursesEnjoyHorrorCapableSpeciesSoldierGreat MenAllowingBrutalShieldsSentimentality
Author:Doris Lessing
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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.”

WritingSometimesLiteratureCareersCreativeTeacherEventsStudentsProduceOne DayMethodRemainsDemocraticWorkersGreedHungerFactoriesWorthwhileClientsCreative WritingFarmingImmuneTherapistsGreat WritersSentimentalityCounselingDemocratic SocietyFactory FarmingErraticAnathema
Author:Alain de Botton
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“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.”

LittlesStillsRealityLeftSidesLinesToo MuchOptimismEdgesCriticalSpeedTinyPsychologicalRangeFlawsMinorsImpatienceExquisiteBicycleBrillianceSentimentalityAircraftDealingsRunwayProximityHigh SpeedStrandedTractors
Author:Alain de Botton
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“Successful prime-time television of any genre produces some kind of emotional reaction in the viewers. There are a lot of different emotions to tap into. The emotion of the reward of discovery, the feeling of righteous anger, the feelings of pathos and sadness, or sentimentality of being moved by something.”

KindDifferentFeelingsEmotionSuccessfulSadnessProduceTelevisionEmotionalDiscoveryMovedRewardsReactionsGenrePrimeRighteousViewersSentimentalityPathosPrime TimeEmotional ReactionsDifferent EmotionsRighteous Anger
Author:Chris Hayes
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“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.”

ThinkingFeelsTryingArtCultureViewsFocusAliveHappenedRight NowNostalgiaLensesSentimentalityUnderminingInvigoratingArt And CultureDishearteningHappy To Be Alive
Author:Carrie Brownstein
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