Crying is cleansing. There's a reason for tears, happiness or sadness. — Dionne Warwick
When we have emotions of fear and pity toward the hero of a tragedy, we explore aspects of our own vulnerability in a safe and pleasing setting. — Martha C. Nussbaum
A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . . — Antonin Artaud
Drama is exposure; it is confrontation; it is contradiction and it leads to analysis, construction, recognition and eventually to an awakening of understanding. — Peter Brook
The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help. — Irvin D. Yalom
There are thousands of causes for stress, and one antidote to stress is self-expression. That's what happens to me every day. My thoughts get off my chest, down my sleeves and onto my pad. — Garson Kanin
Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full. — Carl Jung
To see your drama clearly is to be liberated from it. — Ken Keyes Jr.
Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water. — Christopher Morley
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom. — Hannah Arendt
The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free. — Rollo May
It's better to cry than be angry, because anger hurts others while tears flow silently through the soul and cleans the heart. — Pope John Paul II
And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things. — Maurice Sendak
You get a show where people are jumping up and dancing, but it's not a critical event in the sense of profound catharsis. Essentially it's celebratory. — Archie Shepp
The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
Better still - your history has shown how powerful a moral catharsis expressed through popular resistance to injustice can sometimes be; I have in mind the grassroots opposition to the Vietnam War. — Breyten Breytenbach
A tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself . . . with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions. — Aristotle
Catharsis is about cleansing and healing at one and the same time - healing memories and attitudes, healing the spirit and the heart. — Desmond Tutu
If architecture is the history of all phallic emotion, the Empire State Building is utter catharsis, and we are sitting in its silhouette. — Timothy Levitch
By directing combat and war pieces, I could experience catharsis and successfully avoid committing a murder in real life. In this sense, I'm really grateful for that because I was conscious that I had such homicidal traits, to be honest. — Yoshiyuki Tomino
I didn't have a catharsis for my childhood pain, most of us don't, and until I learned how to forgive those people and let it go, I was unhappy. — Tyler Perry
From their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things. — Maurice Sendak
Catharsis comes from the ancient Greek word...which literally translated means 'to pass a hard stool' — Tim Sandlin
You're free because you don't have to expose yourself, and you can go wild, and let your id completely out of its box, and nobody will see you because you're operating through a surrogate. It's an opportunity to crack open your shell, to melt down yourself, and just let yourself go. It's a form of catharsis for me. — Wayne White
Dancing is so wonderful. Once they start the music, your whole day, if it's been rotten, seems to melt away. You get carried away in the tune that you're moving to. It's a marvelous catharsis, to be able to get on top and tap dance. — Donald O'Connor
Sometimes when we weep in the movies we weep for ourselves or for a life unlived. Or we even go to the movies because we want to resist the emotion that's there in front of us. I think there is always a catharsis that I look for and that makes the movie experience worthwhile. — Edward Zwick
It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. — Andrei Tarkovsky
The thing should have plot and character, beginning, middle and end. Arouse pity and then have a catharsis. Those were the best principles I was ever taught. — Anne Rice
Kitsch parodies catharsis...It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts. — Theodor Adorno
When I write, I tend toward melancholy, and the few times that I've tried pure joy in music, it doesn't really work that well. The joy can be through catharsis. I think that's what I do well, and observation. — Michael Stipe
I sometimes think it's like a weird elastic band. The more tragic your work is, the quicker you snap back. There's a catharsis in telling a miserable old tale; you get rid of demons. — Anne-Marie Duff
We tell each other stories so we can understand the world better and there's catharsis and we understand the models of what a hero could be and what the hero's journey as a human being is all about. But unfortunately, I think sometimes those stories too can be very prohibitive and confining. — Chris Pine
I love acting. It's the one job I know of where you can go in, go through complete catharsis - emotionally, physically sometimes and mentally - and at the end of the day say, 'See you in the pub, guys. — Peter Mullan
The act of writing is a kind of catharsis, a liberation, but I never really concerned myself with that. I write because it interests me. — Nathalie Sarraute
I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found. And this belief, which mounts now to the catharsis of knowledge and conviction, is for me--and I think for all of us--not only our own hope, but America's everlasting, living dream. — Thomas Wolfe
Every time that I hear the orchestra tuning up, I get chills all over my body. You know, catharsis after catharsis. It's better than sex! — Rosie O'Donnell
Catharsis isn't art. You can't rely on catharsis to get a laugh. Because guess what? People do laugh when something's shocking, but that is, to me, the absolute fakest of laughs. That's not something that sustains a television series, or a movie, or even 45 minutes of a stand-up set at Carolines. — Mindy Kaling
A movie can and should have some real dissonance throughout - rage, heartache, tears, conflict, catharsis and all the other elements Aristotle demanded of a good story - but the chord has to be resolved. — Josh Radnor
I don't feel that catharsis in a play necessarily takes place during the course of a play. Often it should take place afterward. — Edward Albee
I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life. Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. They’re pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood. — Sarah Ruhl
Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end…crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis (nomads). — Khaled Hosseini
I still wrestle with the catharsis of acting. I don't end up playing a lot of likable characters, so I find myself living in a lot of unlikable skin. As a result of that I don't always feel good. — James Ransone
"Born To Run," that expands every time we go out. It just seems to you - more of your life fills it in, fills in the story. And when we hit it every night, it's always a huge catharsis. It's fascinating to see the audience singing it back to me. It's quite wonderful, you know, to see people that intensely singing your song. — Bruce Springsteen
It can stand in the way of narration in cases where we want the protagonist to actually go through some kind of catharsis while our own (non-fictional) experiences and stories lead to something banal or completely uninteresting. — Sasa Stanisic
The classical music scene was completely unfamiliar to me. A lot of people think of older generations and stuffiness. But it's not. You listen to the Overture of 1812, and you can hear a rock n' roll catharsis. — Lola Kirke
Opera once was an important social instrument -- especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television. — Luciano Berio
Traditional murder mysteries are interesting because they're ostensibly about a horrible thing - murder - but underneath that, they're about restoring order to a messed-up world. By the end of a whodunit, the detective has taken the reader through all the reasons why this terrible thing happened. Through that explanation, and by seeing the killer captured, the reader feels a sense of catharsis. — Malinda Lo
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of catharsis quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about catharsis to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of catharsis quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
