Quotes About Sentimentality

#1. He managed to create an atmosphere of sticky sentimentality that disgusted me.

Elizabeth Peters

#2. Sentimentality is the only sentiment that rubs you the wrong way.

W. Somerset Maugham

#3. One of Sir Topher's rules was to never indulge in sentimentality, never return for what was left behind.

Melina Marchetta

#4. Family is everything!" he always said when he went overboard with sentimentality. "If you don't have family, what do you have?

Sonal Panse

#5. Sentimentality is the respect the cold-hearted pay to feeling.

Mason Cooley

#6. When I talked to my medical friends about the strange silence on this subject in American medical magazines and textbooks, I gained the impression that here was a subject tainted with Socialism or with feminine sentimentality for the poor.

Alice Hamilton

#7. I don't like mushiness. I'm a very emotional person but I hate sentimentality. I don't like great demonstrations of emotion. But as I'm getting older, I'm getting much more open about all that.

Anthony Hopkins

#8. Because the Lord loves us He chastens and rebukes us. Modern sentimentality has reduced God to a tolerant indulgent grandfatherly being who winks at our transgressions.

Vance Havner

#9. And if I have a strong point, it's that I like to believe it's not cheap or schmaltzy sentimentality.

Toots Thielemans

#10. 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

#11. Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.

Doris Lessing

#12. They are a special breed-like normal accountants, but without the soppy sentimentality. These are the oncologists of market capitalism.

Sean O'Grady

#13. 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

#14. The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.

Milan Kundera

#15. Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.

Jane Jacobs

#16. 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

#17. I was not exploiting any real individual's story in writing ROOM, of course I was aware that my novel, by commenting on such situations, would run the risk of falling into those traps of voyeurism, sensationalism and sentimentality.

Emma Donoghue

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

Ellen Glasgow

#19. 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

#20. In film, it's very important to not allow yourself to get sentimental, which, being British, I try to avoid. People sometimes regard sentimentality as emotion. It is not. Sentimentality is unearned emotion.

Ridley Scott

#21. Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

Norman Mailer

#22. Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.

E. M. Forster

#23. Most shows find themselves descending into sentimentality or earnestness at some point but, with 'Community,' the joke is always on.

Miranda Raison

#24. 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

#25. It would be very easy to drool with sentimentality over the Ryder Cup. But, at the end of the day, it is simply two teams trying to knock seven bells out of each other, in the nicest possible way.

Peter Alliss

#26. 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

#27. India is desperately romantic, utterly unashamed of its sentimentality, its generosity, its fierce pride and massive heart.

Simon Beaufoy

#28. Intelligent and alert, wistful but enthusiastic, frank yet tactful, assured without conceit and tender without sentimentality.

Cecil Beaton

#29. 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

#30. There is no more subtle dissolvent of morals than sentimentality.

Woodrow Wilson

#31. Love without truth devolves into sentimentality. Truth without love becomes cold and calculated.

Robert Barron

#32. I think cynicism is more enduring than sentimentality.

Alexander Payne

#33. She would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing had to be done. She would become adept with axes.

Margaret Atwood

#34. Nature does not play favourites, it regards its creations without sentimentality. Therefore the wise person also acts in this way.

Lao-Tzu

#35. 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

#36. Earnestness can ferment into sentimentality.

Marc Webb

#37. Nostalgia. It haunts us, it destroys us, and sometimes, its sentimentality consumes us piece by piece so that we may realize our once-familiar circumstance may never again return. It is a state of mind best indulged infrequently.

Bryant A. Loney

#38. The first casualty of the conflict must be our own sentimentality

Max Brooks

#39. Profound as race prejudice is against the Negro American, it is not practically as far-reaching as the prejudice against women. For stripping away the sentimentality which makes Mother's Day and Best American Mother Contests, the truth is that women suffer all the effects of a minority.

Pearl S. Buck

#40. The idea of African brotherhood is often just a cover-up for laziness. We must see what is achievable in our circumstances and evaluate all decisions. In terms of regional economic integration, sentimentality is not enough. We really have to be frank and honest.

Benjamin Mkapa

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. The same hunger sends us to prayer and sugar and sweetener and text: the rush of comfort that comes from quick taste, the body suddenly filled with a sensation beyond itself - foreign and seductive. Sentimentality

Leslie Jamison

#44. You can't forgive without loving. And I don't mean sentimentality. I don't mean mush. I mean having enough courage to stand up and say, 'I forgive. I'm finished with it.'

Maya Angelou

#45. 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

#46. The sight of a Black nun strikes their sentimentality; and, as I am unalterably rooted in native ground, they consider me a work of primitive art, housed in a magical color; the incarnation of civilized, anti-heathenism, and the fruit of a triumphing idea.

Alice Walker

#47. 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

#48. From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality.

August Wilson

#49. Sentimentality is a failure of feeling. p.903

Wallace Stevens

#50. In dread fear of sentimentality, another thing true is not said-that for its staff the paper is a source of pride and, I do believe, an object of affection and-yes, love.

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger

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

Walker Percy

#52. Love heals. Heals and liberates. I use the word love, not meaning sentimentality, but a condition so strong that it may be that which holds the stars in their heavenly positions and that which causes the blood to flow orderly in our veins.

Maya Angelou

#53. There's really nothing wrong with sentimentality ... Nothing I wrote is sentimental.

James Purdy

#54. It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

James Baldwin

#55. 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

#56. To the modern spirit, disillusioned, or at least unillusioned, the great evil to be avoided is sentimentality.

Irwin Edman

#57. The deceits which her spinster's sentimentality has practiced on her original good judgment are legendary and colossal; she has this way of speaking of children's hearts as if they were something holy; it is hard for a parent to know what to say.

Alice Munro

#58. Lady Maccon wondered if she had ever been so foolish over Lord Maccon. Then she recalled that her affection generally took the form of threats and verbal barbs. She gave herself a pat on the back for avoiding sentimentality.

Gail Carriger

#59. I always say that I don't want to be sentimental, that the photographs shouldn't be sentimental, and yet, I am conscious of my sentimentality.

Robert Frank

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. If spirituality is not religion or cynicism or sentimentality or narcissism, then what is it? ... we can confidently say ... that spirituality is fearlessness. It is a way of looking boldly at this life we have been given, here, now, on earth, as this human being.

Elizabeth Lesser

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. I think sometimes good sentimentality is fun when it's balanced.

Cameron Crowe

#66. 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

#67. As sentimentality towards animals can be overindulged, so, too, can grim realism, seeing only the things we want in animals and not the animals themselves.

Matthew Scully

#68. Sentimentality is loving something more than God does.

J.D. Salinger

#69. 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

#70. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.

Henry David Thoreau

#71. I distinguish sentiment from sentimentality. Sentimentality makes your skin crawl. It's like too much sugar. But, sentiment is a great feeling.

Josh Radnor

#72. The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.

Flannery O'Connor

#73. 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

#74. Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like a beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts.
The danger is grayout.

Margaret Atwood

#75. Critics have a problem with sentimentality. Readers do not. I write for readers.

Mitch Albom

#76. In the future I'm going to devote less time to sentimentality and more time to reality.

Anne Frank

#77. 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

#78. She had something that is gone from the world, from the female world. A sweetness without sentimentality, a limpidity without naivety. She was so easy to hurt, to tease. And when she teased, it was like a caress.

John Fowles

#79. Sentiment, crystallized, grows into sentimentality. It lost all spontaneity, which was the essence of feeling. It was dated
old-fashioned.

Margaret Ayer Barnes

#80. The poet must decide not to impose his feelings in order to write without sentimentality.

John Barton

#81. There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.

Max Beckmann

#82. Hildegard had long felt that sentimentality was a luxury she could not afford.

Muriel Spark

#83. Sentimentality could blind a man to the truth. Those who appear the most trustworthy deserve the most suspicion.

Tom Rob Smith

#84. We can no longer afford our historical sentimentality, even addiction, to the past.

Michael Frost

#85. It's counterproductive. The problem with sentimentality is that it kills the emotion.

Jean-Pierre Dardenne

#86. I like emotions, but I really don't like sentimentality, and I don't like when things break their spell.

Tony Gilroy

#87. 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

#88. Fearful of sentimentality, I disown my tears and melting heart.

Mason Cooley

#89. Our sentimentality toward animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them. Sentimentality is nothing but the infinitely degraded form of bestiality, the racist commiseration.

Jean Baudrillard

#90. Sentimentality is a form of fatigue.

Leonora Carrington

#91. 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

#92. Whether romance existed in him or not, sentimentality had no place at all.

Dorothy Dunnett

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

H.G.Wells

#94. It's because you're always fighting sentiment. You're fighting sentimentality all of the time because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way.

Bret Easton Ellis

#95. 'Pity without rigor would be cowardly egotism, mere sentimentality.'

Matthew Pearl

#96. Sentimentality is a quality that rarely has the slightest influence on action.

Hope Mirrlees

#97. 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

#98. In her also I found what I liked best - an unfailing, kindly welcome without a hint of sentimentality, unruffled good sense, the unobtrusive talent for making all things at all times as cheerful and comfortable as circumstances allowed.

C.S. Lewis

#99. In order to avoid sentimentality and to be able to write the screenplay with the kind of humor and irony necessary to keep the story moving, I needed to distance myself as much as I could from the characters, to try to get to a point where I could view them objectively.

Hirokazu Koreeda

#100. I didn't want to be on the losing side. I was fed up with Jewish weakness, timidity and fear. I didn't want any more Jewish sentimentality and Jewish suffering. I was sickened by our sad songs.

Lionel Blue