thank you for your reply, wysota. yes that works!!
here is my code for anyone who had a similar problem.

Qt Code: 
  1. class TextView(QtGui.QTextEdit):
  2.     def __init__(self,Ui_MainWindow, parent=None):
  3.         QtGui.QTextEdit.__init__(self, parent)
  4.         self.setReadOnly(True)
  5.         self.setAcceptRichText(True)
  6.     def insert(self, string,emoticonList):
  7.         cursor = self.textCursor()
  8.         if not emoticonList:
  9.             cursor.insertText(string)
  10.         else:
  11.             ls = shlex.split(str(string))
  12.             for word in ls:
  13.                 for emoticon in emoticonList[:]: 
  14.                     if word == emoticon:
  15.                         path = "image/emoticons/" + word
  16.                         icon = QtGui.QPixmap(path)
  17.                         image = icon.toImage()
  18.                         cursor.insertImage(image)
  19.                     else:
  20.                         cursor.insertText(word + " ")
  21.         self.setTextCursor(cursor)
  22.         end = "<br>"
  23.         fragment = QtGui.QTextDocumentFragment.fromHtml(end)
  24.         self.textCursor().insertFragment(fragment)
  25.     def insertReceiveMessage(self, msg):
  26.         cursor = self.textCursor()
  27.         cursor.insertText(msg)
  28.         self.setTextCursor(cursor)
  29.         end = "<br>"
  30.         fragment = QtGui.QTextDocumentFragment.fromHtml(end)
  31.         self.textCursor().insertFragment(fragment)
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thank you so much, wysota!