Feelings

Half our mistakes in life arise from feeling where we ought to think, and thinking where we ought to feel. ~~ John Churton Collins

When asked, most folks will gladly tell us about ourselves, who we are, what we're feeling, and where we should be heading. And if we don't honor ourselves by listening to our lives, we'll believe them. ~~ Susan L. Taylor

It is terribly amusing how many different climates of feeling one can go through in one day. ~~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The feeling of inferiority rules the mental life and can be clearly recognized as the sense of incompleteness and unfulfillment … both of individuals and of humanity. ~~ Alfred Adler

Do continue to believe that with your feeling and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate in yourself this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it. ~~ Rainer Maria Rilke

We're all proud of making little mistakes. It gives us the feeling we don't make any big ones. ~~ Andrew A. Rooney

How to get sicker: Think about all the awful things that could happen to you; be depressed, self-pitying, envious, and angry; blame everyone and everything for your illness; go to see lots of different doctors -- run from one to another, spend half your time in waiting rooms, gets lots of conflicting opinions and lots of experimental drugs; and complain about your symptoms to other people who are unhappy and embittered--reinforce each other's feelings of hopelessness. ~~ Steven James

When the governed laugh, the governors cannot but have an uneasy feeling that they may well be laughing at them. ~~ Malcolm Muggeridge

It is better to bind your child to you by a feeling of respect, and by gentleness, than by fear. ~~ Terence

Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words. ~~ George Eliot

The Hawaiian people have been from time immemorial lovers of poetry and music, and have been apt in improvising historic poems, songs of love, and chants of worship, so that praises of the living or wails over the dead were with them but the natural expression of their feelings. ~~ Lydia Kamekeha Liliuokalani [Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen]

Ah, the feeling you get holding a diamond in your hand!… It's like holding a bit of the moon. ~~ Anna Magnani

Wicked people sometimes perform good actions. I suppose they wish to see if this gives as great a feeling of pleasure as the virtuous claim for it. ~~ Nicolas Chamfort

A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all. To transmit that feeling, he writes. ~~ William Sansom

Death cannot alter facts--only feelings. ~~ Frances Noyes Hart

When you read history it is quite astonishing to discover that there never was a day when men thought times were really good. Every generation in history has been haunted by the feeling of crisis. ~~ Harold Walker

Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our control. ~~ Arthur Schopenhauer

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is a vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child. ~~ Carl Jung

Each member of the couple must be aware of what is going on in the mind of the other. You don’t do that with most people in your life. You don't need to--many personal things you just keep to yourself. But in a relationship as close as marriage, you are living a shared life; and if you don't know what the other person is feeling, thinking, and planning, you'll soon be in trouble. ~~ David and Vera Mace

The individual in any given society represses the awareness of those feelings and fantasies which are incompatible with the thought patterns of his society. The force affecting this repression is the fear of being isolated and of becoming an outcast through having thoughts and feelings which nobody will share. ~~ Erich Fromm

I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate--it's apathy. ~~ Leo Buscaglia

One of the quickest ways to become exhausted is by suppressing your feelings. ~~ Sue Patton Thoele

Latent in every man is a venom of amazing bitterness, a black resentment; something that curses and loathes life, a feeling of being trapped, of having trusted and been fooled, of being the helpless prey of impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, drops him, promises and betrays, and--crowing injury--inflicts on him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself. ~~ Paul Valery

While not exactly disgruntled, he was far from feeling gruntled. ~~ P. G. Wodehouse

I'm sure that President Johnson would never have pursued the war in Vietnam if he'd ever had a Fulbright to Japan, or say Bangkok, or had any feeling for what these people are like and why they acted the way they did. He was completely ignorant. ~~ Senator J. William Fulbright

Is there anything as horrible as starting on a trip? Once you're off, that's all right, but the last moments are earthquake and convulsion, and the feeling that you are a snail being pulled off your rock. ~~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The roots of reason are embedded in feelings--feelings that have formed and accumulated and developed over a lifetime of personality-shaping. These feelings are not a source of weakness but a resource of strength. They are not there for occasional using but are inescapable. To know what we think, we must know how we feel. It is feeling that shapes belief and forms opinion. It is feeling that directs the strategy of argument. It is our feelings, then, with which we must come to honorable terms. ~~ James E. Miller, Jr.

No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim. ~~ Boris Pasternak

Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes. ~~ Maynard Robert Hutchins

You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve. ~~ Pablo Picasso

Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs. ~~ Sir Robert Peel

[On the woman who raised him after his mother died:] I remember a lot of talk and a lot of laughter. I must have talked a great deal because Martha used to say again and again, "You remember you said this, you said that…" She remembered everything I said, and all my life I've had the feeling that what I think and what I say are worth remembering. She gave me that. ~~ Eric Hoffer

The first thing men do when they have renounced pleasure, through decency, lassitude, or for the sake of health, is to condemn it in others. Such conduct denotes a kind of latent affection for the very things they left off; they would like no one to enjoy a pleasure they can no longer indulge in; and thus they show their feelings of jealousy. ~~ La Bruyere

Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass. ~~ Fran Lebowitz

Many people feel "guilty" about things they shouldn't feel guilty about, in order to shut out feelings of guilt about things they should feel guilty about. ~~ Sydney J. Harris

Parents ought, through their own behavior and the values by which they live, to provide direction for their children. But they need to rid themselves of the idea that there are surefire methods which, when well applied, will produce certain predictable results. Whatever we do with and for our children ought to flow from our understanding of our feelings for the particular situation and the relation we wish to exist between us and our child. ~~ Bruno Bettelheim

Exhilaration is that feeling you get just after a great idea hits you, and just before you realize what's wrong with it. ~~ Joe Moore

A mark of maturity seems to be the range and extent of one's feeling of self-involvement in abstract ideals. ~~ Gordon Wallport

The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible. ~~ Jean Kerr

The feeling that you've done a job well is rewarding; the feeling that you've done it perfectly is fatal. ~~ Unattributed

Pity is feeling sorry for someone; empathy is feeling sorry with someone. ~~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

We all felt the majesty of the body… As we saw the artificial heart beat… the feeling was not aren't we great, but aren't we small. ~~ William C. DeVries

I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing against the current: difficulty entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall. ~~ Virginia Woolf

I do feel that horses have faces--and feelings too. ~~ Alanna Knight

Happiness is a resultant of the relative strengths of positive and negative feelings rather than an absolute amount of one or the other. ~~ Norman Bradburn

A child with an intense capacity for feeling can suffer to a degree that is beyond any degree of adult suffering, because imagination, ignorance, and the conviction of utter helplessness are untempered either by reason or by experience. ~~ E.M. Delafield

I have no romantic feelings about age. Either you are interesting at any age or you are not. There is nothing particularly interesting about being old--or being young, for that matter. ~~ Katharine Hepburn

Someone once asked me what I regarded as the three most important requirements for happiness. My answer was: "A feeling that you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others. ~~ Eleanor Roosevelt

A universal feeling, whether well or ill founded, cannot be safely disregarded. ~~ Abraham Lincoln

[Nations are] susceptible to all moral feelings, including--however painful a step it may be--repentance… EVERY nation without exception, however persecuted, however cheated, however flawlessly righteous it feels itself to be today, has certainly at one time or another contributed its share of inhumanity. ~~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Sometimes I get the feeling that the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that's not true. Some of the smaller countries are neutral. ~~ Robert Orben

Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another. ~~ Milan Kundera

People think responsibility is hard to bear. It's not. I think that sometimes it is the absence of responsibility that is harder to bear. You have a great feeling of impotence. ~~ Henry Kissinger

My mother used to tell me about vibrations. I didn't really understand too much of what that meant when I was just a boy. To think that invisible feelings, invisible vibrations existed scared me to death. ~~ Brian Wilson

As siblings, we were inextricably bound, even though our connections were loose and frayed… And each time we met, we discovered to our surprise and dismay how quickly the intensity of childhood feelings reappeared… No matter how old we got or how often we tried to show another face, reality was filtered through yesterday's memories. ~~ Jane Mersky Leder

Feeling is the language of the soul. ~~ Neale Donald Walsch

Unexpressed feelings never die; they just get buried and come forth later in uglier form. ~~ Linda and Richard Eyre

My mother always found me out. Always. She's been dead for thirty-five years, but I have this feeling that even now she's watching. ~~ Natalie Babbitt

I would say, express your feelings at all times. Unless you're trying to hide something. ~~ Miss Piggy [Muppet]

I have walked with people whose eyes are full of light but who see nothing in sea or sky, nothing in city streets, nothing in oaks. It were far better to sail forever in the night of blindness with sense, and feeling, and mind, than to be content with the mere act of seeing. The only lightless dark is the night of darkness in ignorance and insensibility. ~~ Helen Keller

One's own surroundings means so much to one, when one is feeling miserable. ~~ Edith Sitwell

Never apologize for showing feelings. Remember that when you do, you apologize for the truth. ~~ Benjamin Disraeli

One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know and react to the miseries which afflict this world. ~~ Lorraine Hansberry

Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards -- the things we live by and teach our children -- are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings. ~~ Walt Disney

The pleasure we derive from doing favors is partly in the feeling it gives us that we are not altogether worthless. ~~ Eric Hoffer

Forgiveness is not a feeling but a promise or commitment to three things: 1) I will not use it against them in the future, 2) I will not talk to others about them, 3) I will not dwell on it myself. ~~ Jay E. Adams

We cannot bear to regard ourselves simply as playthings of blind chance; we cannot admit to feeling ourselves abandoned. ~~ Ugo Betti

It was a breeze in the 60s to grow up, compared to [the 90s]… The dream was still there, the no-matter-what-you-could-make-it feeling. Kids today feel, "No matter what, I'm probably not going to make it." ~~ Neil Young

The inability to act spontaneously, to express what one genuinely feels and thinks, and the resulting necessity to present a pseudo-self to others and oneself, are the root of the feeling of inferiority and weakness. ~~ Erich Fromm

I can say with sincerity that I like cats. A cat is an animal which has more human feeling than almost any other. ~~ Emily Bronte

What feeling is so nice as a child's hand in yours? So small, so soft and warm, like a kitten huddling in the shelter of your clasp. ~~ Marjorie Holmes

Joggers die. Health-food addicts die, and so do people who have spent their entire lives in lounge chairs eating corn curls. Don't muddy it all up feeling guilty. If you've been told you're going to die soon, the only word that should bother you is "soon." ~~ Kathleen MacInnes [American Journal of Nursing]

Poverty consists in feeling poor. ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

My tidiness, and my untidiness, are full of regret and remorse and complex feelings. ~~ Natalia Ginzburg

Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason, that's all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling. ~~ Felix Frankfurter

There is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power. ~~ William Henry Harrison

Both in thought and feeling, even though time is real, to realize the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom. ~~ Bertrand Russell

What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion. ~~ Herman Melville

In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults. They frolic with animals, caress them, share with them feelings neither has any words for. Have they ever stroked any adult with the love they bestow on a cat? Hugged any grown-up with the ecstasy they feel when clasping a puppy? ~~ Jessamyn West

Anger is a symptom, a way of cloaking and expressing feelings too awful to experience directly--hurt, bitterness, grief and, most of all, fear. ~~ Joan Rivers

I can't help feeling wary when I hear anything said about the masses. First you take their faces from 'em, calling them the masses, and then you accuse 'em of not having any faces. ~~ J. B. Priestley

It's unbelievable the primitive feelings that are aroused by rapid change. ~~ Sheila Ballantyne

You can get used to anything if you have to, even feeling perpetually guilty. ~~ Golda Meir

Remember the feeling as a child when you woke up and morning smiled, it's time you felt like that again. ~~ Taj Mahal [Take a Giant Step, song, 1969]

Whatever peace I know rests in the natural world, in feeling myself a part of it, even in a small way. ~~ May Sarton [Journal of a Solitude]

What makes people the world over stand in line for Van Gogh is not that they will see beautiful pictures [but] that in an indefinable way they will come away feeling better human beings. And that is exactly what Van Gogh hoped for. ~~ John Russell

You really have to experience the feeling of being with the president in the Oval Office. It's a disease I came to call Ovalitis. ~~ John Dean

Do you know why psychiatrists go into their specialty? It is because they do not feel they are normal, and they go into this work because it is a means of sublimation for this feeling--a means of assuring themselves that they are really normal. Society puts them in charge of the mentally abnormal, and so they feel reassured. ~~ Sigmund Freud

The public is bored by foreign affairs until a crisis arises; and… then it is guided by feelings rather than by thoughts. ~~ Harold Nicolson

The fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling. ~~ Thomas Hardy

Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings of emptiness, of disconnections, of the unreality of self. And here the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but need never feel vulnerable to another person. ~~ Sherry Turkle

For a boy to reach adulthood feeling that he knows his father, his father must allow his emotions to be visible--hardly an easy task when most males grow up being either subtly or openly taught that this is not acceptable behavior. A father must teach his son that masculinity and feelings go hand in hand. ~~ Kyle Pruett

It is a lovely thing to have a husband and wife developing together and having the feeling of falling in love again. That is what marriage really means; helping one another to reach the full status of being persons, responsible autonomous beings who do not run away from life. ~~ Paul Tournier

Like the one-tenth of our brain that we currently use, I think now that most if not all of us have access to about one-tenth of our possible feelings. ~~ Sonia Johnson [The Ship That Sailed Into the Living Room]

If you want to know the feeling [of labor pain], just take your bottom lip and pull it over your head. ~~ Carol Burnett

Ridding oneself of this feeling that the universe has a personal grudge against one is the first and most difficult task in growing to adulthood. ~~ Colin Wilson

Our society allows people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else's feelings, and yet be very respectable. ~~ Ntozake Shange

If you're hanging around with nothing to do and the zoo is closed, come over to the Senate. You'll get the same kind of feeling and you won't have to pay. ~~ Robert J. Dole

Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment--originating in the social instinct, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit. ~~ Charles Darwin

Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear. Thus a feeling of utter unworthiness can be a source of courage. ~~ Eric Hoffer

One of the great attractions of patriotism--it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous. ~~ Aldous Huxley

All the feeling which my father could not put into words was in his hand--any dog, child, or horse would recognize the kindness of it. ~~ Freya Stark

The mind is more vulnerable than the stomach, because it can be poisoned without feeling immediate pain. ~~ Helen MacInnes

Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect. ~~ Herbert Spencer

Photographs record the gamut of feelings written on the human face -- the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited; and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man. ~~ Edward Steichen (see Said Who?)

Basic anxiety can be roughly described as a feeling of being small, insignificant, helpless, deserted or endangered in a world that is out to abuse, cheat, humiliate, betray, envy… And special in this is the child's feeling that the parents' love, their Christian charity, honesty, generosity… may be only a pretense. ~~ Karen Horney [The Neurotic Personality of Our Time]

The ability to feel is indivisible. Repress awareness of any one feeling, and all feelings are dulled… The same nerve endings are required for weeping and dancing, fear and ecstasy. ~~ Sam Keen

Beware of men who cry. It's true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own. ~~ Nora Ephron

When you're famous, you kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way. It stirs up envy, fame does. People you run into feel that, well, who is she--who does she think she is, Marilyn Monroe? They feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you, you know, of any kind of nature--and it won't hurt your feelings--like it's happening to your clothing. One time here I am looking for a home to buy and I stopped at this place. A man came out and was very pleasant, very cheerful, and said, "Oh, just a moment, I want my wife to meet you." Well, she came out and said, "Will you please get off the premises?" ~~ Marilyn Monroe

If merely "feeling good" could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience. ~~ William James

Maturity begins when we're content to feel we're right about something without feeling the necessity to prove someone else wrong. ~~ Sydney J. Harris

Sometimes when you look in his eyes you get the feeling that someone else is driving. ~~ David Letterman

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies. ~~ Elizabeth Bowen

It rubs me the wrong way, a camera. It doesn't matter who it is. Someone in my own family could be pointing a camera around. It's a frightening feeling. Cameras make ghosts out of people. ~~ Bob Dylan

To mourn is to be extraordinarily vulnerable. It is to be at the mercy of inside feelings and outside events in a way most of us have not been since early childhood. ~~ Christian McEwen

People who are always thinking of the feelings of others can be very destructive because they are hiding so much from themselves. ~~ May Sarton [Crucial Conversations]

Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can't persist much longer. If it does, then we won't. ~~ Barbara Kingsolver

Sometimes I get the feeling that the two biggest problems in America today are making ends meet--and making meetings end. ~~ Robert Orben

I believe that I'm letting my kids see that a man can be tender, sensible, warm, attentive to feelings, and present, just plain there. That's important to me, because I didn't get any of that from my own father, and I am realizing now how much I missed it. ~~ Unattributed

The feeling of sleepiness when you are not in bed, and can't get there, is the meanest feeling in the world. ~~ Edgar Watson Howe

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more, the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men. ~~ Joseph Conrad

For an intimate relationship with one's mate, the only really important thing is feelings … You can be seething about something that's so petty you hardly dare bring it up, but the fact is that you must say, "I am furious." ~~ James Taylor

I created you while I was happy, while I was sad, with so many incidents, so many details. And, for me, the whole of you has been transformed into feeling. ~~ Constantine Peter Cavafy