Top 100 Sentimental Quotes
#1. For me, the most expensive thing in this world is the sentimental value.
Alon Calinao Dy
#2. If you do not have an alert and curious interest in character and dramatic situation, if you have no visual imagination and are unable to distinguish between honest emotional reactions and sentimental approaches to life, you will never write a competent short story.
Edward Joseph Harrington O'Brien
#3. The difference between sentiment and being sentimental is the following: Sentiment is when a driver swerves out of the way to avoid hitting a rabbit on the road. Being sentimental is when the same driver, when swerving away from the rabbit, hits a pedestrian.
Frank Herbert
#4. It's my feeling that any writer can get an emotion into a story without being sentimental as long as the emotion is dealt with honestly, with sufficient clarity, and detail.
Charles Baxter
#5. Women are not as sentimental as men, and are not so easily touched with the unspoken poetry of nature, being less poetical, and having less imagination; they are more fitted for practical affairs, and would make fewer failures in business.
Charles Dudley Warner
#6. I'm for conservation, but it's mostly a con. That's the trouble. It's sentimental. Buy an elephant a drink, a lion an acre.
Peter Beard
#7. It's an indication of how cynical our society has become that any kind of love story with a sad theme is automatically ridiculed as sentimental junk.
Winona Ryder
#8. College was at the heart of his sentimental imagination.
Rick Perlstein
#9. Fucking hope. Next thing you'd know, I'd be getting soft and sentimental and teary-eyed over puppies and kittens and rainbows.
Jennifer Estep
#10. ...so much has been laid on the sunset - heavy-handed metaphors, sentimental music. Everyone's always walking into them, and that is some very intense light. Maybe that's where the term "love is blind" comes from, because so many people are walking into sunsets, burning out their corneas.
Kirk Farber
#11. I think probably I'm quite sentimental; I like big emotional stories, I like being moved by things, but I think I'm very embarrassed by sentiment. I'm very embarrassed by corniness.
David Nicholls
#12. Let the emotional weight of a scene rest on the dialogue wherever possible. This is the easy way to avoid overinterpretation, which seems to be what turns a scene from sympathetic to sentimental.
Judith Guest
#13. We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.
John Banville
#14. In some ways you are as sentimental as Richard,' she said. 'But you could kill us, all of us, even Stephen's brother, and feel nothing.'
I met her honey brown eyes and said, 'I'd feel something.'
'What?' she asked.
'Safer,' I said.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#15. Give and you shall receive' is not sentimental idealism, it is a simple, practical rule. That which we can and must give to the land is work, and if that work is given in love it will not be drudgery.
Walter Ernest Christopher James
#16. I made the decision to quit show business. Give up the skintight dresses and manicured smiles. The false concern over sentimental lyrics. I would never again work to make people smile inanely and would take on the responsibility of making them think.
Maya Angelou
#17. Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket,
sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia. Given to sentimental impulses, he thought he'd look in on the Sailor's Grave, his old tin can's tavern on East Main Street.
Thomas Pynchon
#18. It is as futile and dangerous to aim at making of society one large family, as sentimental socialism seeks to do, as to aim at making of it one large team, as positivist socialism seeks to do.
Bertrand De Jouvenel
#19. I'm not going to get too sentimental, like those other sticker valentines, 'cause I don't know if you are loving some body. I only know it isn't mine.
Elvis Costello
#20. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect.
Jane Jacobs
#21. His being there was stirring up a lot of memories she'd have been happier to leave as sentimental sediment. Not that they weren't good memories. That was the trouble.
Diana Killian
#22. I'm very interested in science fiction, and I like new things. I've never been a really sentimental person.
Dave Davies
#23. Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#24. One can become so sentimental about a person's absence, but it's impossible to be consistently sentimental in his presence - when you're confronted with the quotidian selfishness and silence that, I'm given to understand, comprise most of a life. But we were just so new.
Jennifer DuBois
#25. stupidly sensitive and sentimental and was, like Luke said,
Jerry Cole
#26. Gay marriage is the last bastion of, to me ... as a legal, ceremonial, sentimental and religious side, it's one of the last steps. Retaining your job being one of the earlier steps, like, not getting kicked out of your job because you're gay.
Gus Van Sant
#27. Normally, anything done in the name of 'the kids' strikes me as either slightly sentimental or faintly sinister - that redolence of moral blackmail that adheres to certain charitable appeals and certain kinds of politician. (Not for nothing is baby-kissing the synonym for public insincerity.)
Christopher Hitchens
#28. In the chain of events, it is arbitrary to be sentimental about the passing of any one link.
Johnny Rich
#29. Intensely moving but never sentimental, Academy Street is a profound meditation on what Faulkner called 'the human heart in conflict with itself'. In Tess Lohan, Mary Costello has created one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction. What a marvel of a book.
Ron Rash
#30. I have so many pieces that once belonged to my mom and both of my grandmothers. All of these pieces are very sentimental, and I love to wear them. I also have many pieces from my father that I probably cherish the most. I love wearing his dress shirts.
Kourtney Kardashian
#31. He thinks everything sentimental is tender, everything brutal is a slice of realism ...
J.D. Salinger
#32. I'm not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don't. Move on and move out.
Gore Vidal
#33. I'm beginning to realise that I'm either overly sentimental, or am a hoarder who struggles to part with things. In all honesty, I'm probably both.
Fennel Hudson
#34. 'Little Women' has interesting gender connotations. There are generations of women who love the book. But there are a lot of men who think it's sentimental, gooey stuff.
Gillian Armstrong
#35. For the most part neoconservatives are people who were once liberals but sobered up. The neoliberal is one who has always been a liberal but now replaces the sentimental pieties with brusque slogans ("High-Tech!") and unpronounceable programs. All else stays the same.
Emmett Tyrrell
#36. Part of me really wants to believe that hope is entirely available to all of us. We don't have to embrace it. It would be sentimental and silly to say that we all need it, but it is absolutely available to all of us.
Colum McCann
#37. I'm sentimental about many things: the lumpy feel of a baby's unused feet, the metallic smell of the air before the first snow, the last scene in 'It's a Wonderful Life.' But Valentine's Day leaves me cold.
Nancy Gibbs
#38. The reason many of us leave off praying and become hard towards God is because we have only a sentimental interest in prayer.
Oswald Chambers
#39. I very much love a physical book myself. I think people who have had this experience of also seeing a book come together, from sitting down and writing the first word, to holding the binding in your hand, we have a deeper sentimental attachment to it than others might.
Edwidge Danticat
#40. Good writing must stay open to the questions and not fall prey to the pull of a polemic, otherwise, words simply become predictable, sentimental, and stale.
Terry Tempest Williams
#41. People relate to things that feel real to them. All the good, happy, over-sexed and moneyed endings on TV are not the way most of us feel in our lives. The success of 'E.R.,' I think, is not relying on overly sentimental stories that are solved where people's lives wrap up nicely with happy endings.
Anthony Edwards
#42. I sighed. Two goodbyes in one night. It was depressing. And it wasn't as though I had a whole Rolodex full of friends. But no sense being sentimental about it. Sentiment is stupid.
Barry Eisler
#43. It's wonderful that whenever Patsy Cline's name is mentioned, people's voices fall and they become right sentimental. And, rightly so.
Maya Angelou
#44. The meaning of life is creative love. Not love as an inner feeling, as a private sentimental emotion, but love as a dynamic power moving out in the world and doing something original.
Old Tom Morris
#45. Sometimes, people end up thankful for what they mourned. You cannot achieve this state by seeking tragedy, but you can keep yourself open more to sorrow's richness than to unmediated despair. Tragedies with happy endings may be sentimental tripe, or they may be the true meaning of love.
Andrew Solomon
#46. With fame, money and sex settled, he had to find something else to fight, and like any honorable man he chose to fight his own people. And that was how Byron the sentimental poet of graveyards and lost loves became the Satanic joker all England loved to hate.
John C. Dolan
#47. The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.
Tracey Ullman
#48. Now was not the time to be sentimental. As a child, she'd been ridiculously sentimental about loss, about time passing.
Maryanne O'Hara
#49. My search is always to find ways to chronicle, to share and to document stories about people, just everyday people. Stories that offer transformation, that lean into transcendence, but that are never sentimental, that never look away from the darkest things about us.
Chris Abani
#50. Anything you like; anything I like ... No past to make us sentimental, no future to embarrass us
Jean Rhys
#51. I get sentimental over the music of the '90s. Deplorable, really. But I love it all. As far as I'm concerned the '90s was the best era for music ever, even the stuff that I loathed at the time, even the stuff that gave me stomach cramps.
Rob Sheffield
#52. To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.
William Sloane Coffin
#53. There is perhaps no field aspiring to be scientific where flagrant personal bias, logic martyred in the cause of supporting a prejudice, unfounded assertions, and even sentimental rot and drivel, have run riot to such an extent as here.
Helen Thompson Woolley
#54. If you think my music is sentimental and self-absorbed, I agree with you.
James Taylor
#55. Love as a power can go anywhere. It isn't sentimental. It doesn't have to be pretty, yet it doesn't deny pain.
Sharon Salzberg
#57. Awe is the moment when ego surrenders to wonder. This is our inheritance - the beauty before us. We cry. We cry out. There is nothing sentimental about facing the desert bare. It is a terrifying beauty.
Terry Tempest Williams
#58. I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can't find the time, there are people who've never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous.
David Nicholls
#59. A fierce and sentimental addiction to forms makes us shudder at change. It is much easier to say that the system is all right-only the people need to be improved.
Charles Ferguson
#60. I try to open up my heart as much as I can and keep a real keen eye out that I don't get sentimental. I think we're all afraid to reveal our hearts. It's not at all in fashion.
Paul Simon
#61. If I had to describe what love meant, really, not in the abstract or the sentimental or the way I'd imagined it before, that I'd say it was completely irrational, made up of so many opposites, the kind that couldn't exist without the other: bliss and sadness, courage and fear, adoration and disgust.
Jill Bialosky
#62. He's on a bus to Las Vegas. He has a friend there who will give him a job."
She brightened up very suddenly. "Oh- to Las Vegas? How sentimental of him. That's where we were married."
"I guess he forgot," I said, "or he would have gone somewhere else.
Raymond Chandler
#63. Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.
Lorrie Moore
#64. Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action into violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude.
Karen Haber
#65. People change, no use getting sentimental about it. Move on, find someone else.
David Nicholls
#66. I'm a Lebanese woman who directs films. That's not it at all. I am not really a woman nor am I really an Arab. Because I am not an apologist for women, nor of sentimental "world" films.
Danielle Arbid
#67. I don't want my poems to be sentimental, though I do acknowledge that sentiment is probably rather under-reported in a lot of people's feelings a lot of the time.
Andrew Motion
#69. Dickens had, with all his genius, the narrow short sight of his day and class, sentimental tears for poverty but no vision to remove it except by inviting everybody to be as noble a fellow as himself. War
Stephen Leacock
#70. The real lover of cats is one who demands a clearer adjustment to the universe than ordinary household platitudes provide; one who refuses to swallow the sentimental notion that all good people love dogs, children, and horses while all bad people dislike and are disliked by such.
H.P. Lovecraft
#71. The guys in my band buy instruments and sell and trade them. But if I have something I hang onto it. Everything is sentimental to me.
Gary Clark Jr.
#72. What could have been simply bizarre, sentimental or contrived here becomes an utterly absorbing love story; This is early days in the festival, but Rust and Bone has to be a real contender for prizes, and, the odds will be shortening to vanishing point for Cotillard getting the best actress award.
Peter Bradshaw
#74. Love is not a sentimental attachment to a human being; love is a mode of conduct that comes from the heart.
Ma Jaya
#75. Whereas discipline without discipleship leads to rigid formalism, discipleship without discipline ends in sentimental romanticism.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#76. It was not a particularly good body, he'd be the first to admit, but one or two bits of it had sentimental value
Terry Pratchett
#77. She scissored the curls away, and - toms, grow easily sentimental over their haircuts, but I remember this sensation very vividly - it was not like she was cutting hair, it was as if I had a pair of wings beneath my shoulder-blades, that the flesh had all grown over, and she was slicing free ...
Sarah Waters
#78. Anyone can be sentimental about the nativity; any fool can feel like a Christian at Christmas. But Easter is the main event; if you don't believe in the resurrection, you're not a believer."
"If you don't believe in Easter," Owen Meany said. "Don't kid yourself - Don't call yourself a Christian.
John Irving
#79. Moreover, and we must not forget this, interests which are not very friendly to the ideal and the sentimental are in the way. Somestimes the stomach paralyzes the heart.
Victor Hugo
#80. Sentimentalist is the abuse with which people counter the accusation that they are cruel, thereby implying that to be sentimental is worse than to be cruel, which it isn't.
Brigid Brophy
#81. Because even at the age of fifteen, I used to go see all the Broadway shows and feel that they were sentimental, that they were pandering to the audience and trying to manipulate the audience. I had no use for practically any of the shows that were hits.
Richard Foreman
#82. Just because that was the start of a thousand sentimental stories didn't mean that it didn't actually happen.
Iain M. Banks
#83. In its sentimental mode, compassion is an exercise in moral indignation, in feeling good rather than doing good ... In its unsentimental mode, compassion seeks above all to do good ...
Gertrude Himmelfarb
#84. And the American people may be sentimental, but their government is not. The US State Department won't trade anything major for one man's life.
Andy Weir
#85. What counts now are the value-less facts, the material and the rational. All else is regarded with condescension as being of only sentimental value.
Jean Gebser
#86. The Mexican succumbs very easily to sentimental effusions, and therefore he shuns them.
Octavio Paz
#87. The child is really an artist, and the artist should be like a child, but he should not stay a child. He must become an artist. That means he cannot permit himself to become sentimental or something like that. He must know what he is doing
Hans Hofmann
#88. Kerouac lacks discipline, intelligence, honesty and a sense of the novel. His rhythms are erratic, his sense of character is nil, and he is as pretentious as a rich whore, sentimental as a lollypop.
Norman Mailer
#89. A woman's sentimental monkeyshines will always deceive her lover, who invariably waxes ecstatic where her husband necessarily shrugs his shoulders.
Honore De Balzac
#90. The sentimental want to be thrilled by everything.
Mason Cooley
#91. It was chilling to realize that the sentimental qualities most valued between people, like loyalty, constancy, and affection, are the ones most likely to impede change.
Ted Simon
#92. Men are much softer than women, more sentimental. They cry at the movies and pretend not to. The male of the species is weak. He doesn't tolerate pain well.
Will Christopher Baer
#93. In my work, and in my psyche, there's some very sentimental, traditional, conventional side that's always in argument with a more radical, sarcastic side. Some of my stories are really sentimental, but they're layered over with weird, satirical stuff.
George Saunders
#94. He's like everybody else in television. And Hollywood. And Broadway. He thinks everything sentimental is tender, everything brutal is a slice of realism and that everything that runs into physical violence is a legitimate climax to something that isn't even-
J.D. Salinger
#95. I am terminally sentimental about graduations. They are more individual than weddings, more conscious than christenings, or bar mitzvahs or bat mitzvahs. They are almost as much a step into the unknown as funerals-though I assure you, there is life after graduation.
Gloria Steinem
#96. To have serpentlike qualities devoid of dovelike qualities is to be passionless, mean, and selfish. To have dovelike without serpentlike qualities is to be sentimental, anemic, and aimless. We must combine strongly marked antitheses.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#98. Poverty and sickness have this miraculous power of completely changing one's priorities; one's sentimental and psychological values go out the window.
Sandor Marai
#100. The readers who commited suicide after reading 'Werther' were not ideal but merely sentimental readers.
Alberto Manguel
