# Feelings

Feelings are the conscious subjective experiences of emotions.
Feeling can also refer to tactile sensation.

## Quotes

* Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel—below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.
** Matthew Arnold, St. Paul and Protestantism (1870)
* The Stoics in describing the feelings as "indefinite cognitions," had in mind something which in most text-books on psychiatry is not included in the conception of feelings; they thought pre-eminently of intellectual processes. To the scholastics the feelings were either a desire for the good -or an aversion to the bad, in other words pleasure and displeasure, to which was added a certain ethical value, and a special emphasis upon the voluntaristic principle which is always contained in the "feelings." If Hegel calls feeling "intelligence on the threshold of it's immediateness," and Volkmar "the becoming conscious of the degree of tension of ideation," we can not deny that these are words which mean little more than nothing to the practical psychologist, the psychopathologist; nor are we any better off when we take into account the explanations which are always indispensable for the understanding of such "definitions." Kant expressed himself most clearly and correctly on this subject, but without effect upon his successors however, whose conceptions are not much clearer than those of the earlier philosophers.
** Eugen Bleuler 1857-1939 Affectivity, suggestibility, paranoia 1912 p. 2
* ‘External feelings’ refer to physical feelings, feelings of pleasure, pain, and neither pleasure nor pain in the various parts of the body. ‘Internal feelings’ refer to the feelings of pain, pleasure, and neither pleasure nor pain in the heart. ... These things are the bosses, lording it over the heart. ... The heart is their vessel, their seat. That’s where they sit. Or you could say it’s their toilet, because that’s where they defecate. Whichever one comes along, it gets right up there on the heart. Now pain jumps up there and defecates. Now pleasure gets up there and defecates. Now a feeling of neither pleasure nor pain gets up there and defecates. They keep defecating like this, and the heart is content to let them do this, because it doesn’t have the mindfulness or discernment to shake them off and not let them defecate. This is why we have to develop a great deal of mindfulness and discernment so that we can fight them off.
** Ajahn Maha Bua, Straight from the Heart
* Pleasant feeling is impermanent, conditioned, dependently-arisen, bound to decay, to vanish, to fade away, to cease—and so too are painful feeling and neutral feeling. So anyone who, on experiencing a pleasant feeling, thinks: "This is my self", must, at the cessation of that pleasant feeling, think: "My self has gone!"
** Gautama Buddha, Digha Nikaya, M. Walshe, trans. (1987), Sutta 15 (Mahanidana Sutta), verse 29, p. 227
* One of the important things in stocks is that the stock does not know that you own it. You know, you have all theses feelings about it ... you remember what you paid ... you remember who told you about it ... all these little things ... and it doesn't give a damn. It just sits there ... A stock at 50 — somebody has paid 100 for it — they feel terrible — somebody else paid 10 — they fell wonderful. All these feelings — and it has no impact whatsoever. As Charlie says, gambling is the classic example.
** Warren Buffett, (February 22, 2019)"Warren Buffett: 'You don't have to make it back the way you lost it.'". The Financial Review, YouTube. (quote at 4:10 of 5:09; from an answer to a question at the 1995 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting)
* But, spite of all the criticising elves, Those who would make us feel, must feel themselves.
** Charles Churchill, The Rosciad (1761), line 961.
* Thought is deeper than all speech, Feeling deeper than all thought; Souls to souls can never teach What unto themselves was taught.
** Christopher Pearse Cranch, "Enosis" (Feb. 1840), stanza 1, in Poems (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1844), p. 51.
* Feelings! I have no time for them, no chance of them. I pass my whole life, miss, in turning an immense pecuniary Mangle.
** Jarvis Lorry in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Book 1, Chapter 4: The Preparation: Page 5, written by Charles Dickens.
* I am very conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.
** Albert Einstein, Why Socialism? (1949), Monthly Review New York (May 1949)
* You only get one life so you might as well feel all the feelings.
** Greta Gerwig in "Greta Gerwig gets real" Dazed (August 27, 2015)
* [I]t is quite certain that only through the equal presence to successive feeling of a subject other than they, which holds them together, and thus held together regards them as its object, are there related things or relations at all. It is not that first there are relations then they are conceived. Every relation is constituted by an act of conception. This is not to be understood as meaning that there is 'nothing but the soul and its feelings,' or that realities are feelings, even feelings as determined by thought. It is through feeling as determined by thought that for us there comes to be reality, but the reality is not to be identified with the process by which we, as thinking animals, arrive at it. Even simple facts of feeling (e.g. the fact that a certain sweet smell accompanies the sight of a rose) are not feelings as felt: more clearly, the conditions of such facts are not feelings, even as determined by thought. A 'feeling determined by thought' would probably mean a feeling which but for thought I should not have, e.g. emotion at the spectacle of a tragedy. Objective facts are not of this sort, not feelings determined by thought, though but for the determination of feeling by thought they would not exist for our consciousness.
** T. H. Green, Works, Volumen 2, 1886, Longmans, Green & Co.
* Immediate feeling is certainly the first, is the vital force; in it is life, just as it is indeed said that from the heart flows life. But then this feeling must “be kept,” understood in the same way as when it said, “Keep your heart, for from it flows life.” It must be cleansed of selfishness, kept from selfishness; it must not be left to its own devices, but, on the contrary, that which is to kept must be entrusted to the power of something higher that keeps it – just as the loving mother prays to God to keep her child. In immediate feeling, one human being never understands the other. As soon as something happens to him personally, he understands everything differently. When he himself is suffering, he does not understand another’s suffering, and when he himself is happy he still does not understand it. Immediate feeling selfishly understands everything in relation to itself and therefore is in the disunion of double-mindedness with all others, because there can be unity only in the soundly understood equality of sincerity, and in selfish shortsightedness his conviction is continually being changed, or it is chance that it is not changed, since the reason for this is that by chance his life is not touched by any change. But such firmness of conviction is a delusion on the part of the pampered, because a conviction is not firm when everything forces it upon one, as it were, and makes it firm, but its firmness manifests itself in the ups and downs of everything. Rarely, indeed, does a person’s life avoid all changes, and in the changes the conviction of immediate feeling is a delusion, the momentary impression blown up into a view of life as a whole.
** Soren Kierkegaard Ubbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, 1847 p. 71-72.
* How much we give to thoughts and things our tone-painting, And judge of others' feelings by our own!
** Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Romance and Reality (1831), Vol.I, Chapter 5
* Sentiment, by the by, is one of those ill-used words which, from being often misemployed, require a definition when properly applied. Sentiment is the poetry of feeling. Feeling weeps over the grave of the beloved — sentiment weeps, and plants the early flower and the green tree, to weep too.
** Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Romance and Reality (1831), Vol.II, Chapter 12
* Real feeling is shy of expression;
** Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Ethel Churchill (1837), Vol.II, Chapter 28
* With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.
** Abraham Lincoln, first debate with Stephen Douglas Ottawa, Illinois (21 August 1858)
* Feeling is deep and still; and the word that floats on the surface Is as the tossing buoy, that betrays where the anchor is hidden.
** Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847), Part II, scene 2, line 212.
* For there are moments in life, when the heart is so full of emotion, That if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths like a pebble Drops some careless word, it overflows, and its secret, Spilt on the ground like water, can never be gathered together.
** Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), Part VI. Priscilla, line 12.
* As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.
** Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press. 1984. p. 37. ISBN 978-0-89594-142-8.
* Within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were meant to kneel to thought as we were meant to kneel to men. But women have survived.
** Audre Lorde, "Poetry Is Not a Luxury" (1985), Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press. 1984. p. 39. ISBN 978-0-89594-142-8.
* The need for sharing deep feeling is a human need.
** Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press. 1984. p. 58. ISBN 978-0-89594-142-8.
* Your eyes can deceive you. Don't trust them. Stretch out with your feelings!
** Obi-Wan Kenobi, interpreted by Alec Guinness in the film Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977), written by George Lucas.
* "Trust your feelings!"—But feelings are nothing final or original; behind the feelings there stand judgments and evaluations. ... The inspiration born of feeling is the grandchild of a judgment—and often a false judgment! And in any event not a child of your own! To trust one’s feelings means to give more obedience to one’s grandfather and grandmother and their grandparents than to the gods which are in us: our reason and our experience.
** Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, § 35, (1888).
* The wealth of rich feelings—the deep—the pure, With strength to meet sorrow, and faith to endure.
** Frances Sargent Osgood, "Romance", line 7, in A Wreath of Wild Flowers from New England (London: Edward Churton, 1838), p. 221.
* I am tipsy after my own feelings themselves have become wine. I forget myself, world and all.
** Suman Pokhrel, The Taj Majal and My Love
* Your thoughts, feelings and mental pictures can be called incipient exterior events, for in one way or another, each of these is materialized into physical reality.
** Jane Roberts, (1974) in The Nature of Personal Reality, p. 9-10, Session 613.
* Some feelings are to mortals given, With less of earth in them than heaven.
** Walter Scott, Lady of the Lake (1810), Canto II, Stanza 22.
* There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt.
** Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 1929, Chapter IV, p. 310.
* I just wanna feel real love Feel the home that I live in 'Cause I got too much life Running through my veins Going to waste
** Robbie Williams and Guy Chambers, Feel, Escapology (18 November 2002)

### Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

    Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 270.
* He thought as a sage, though he felt as a man.
** James Beattie, The Hermit, line 8.
* Era of good feeling.
** Title of article in Boston Centinal (July 12, 1817).
* The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation, as the moment of finding an idea.
** George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876), Book II, Chapter XVII.
* Wenn ihr's nicht fühlt ihr werdet's nicht erjagen.
** You'll never attain it unless you know the feeling.
** Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, I. 1. 182.
* The soul of music slumbers in the shell, Till wak'd and kindled by the master's spell, And feeling hearts touch them but lightly—pour A thousand melodies unheard before!
** Samuel Rogers, Human Life, line 359.
* Sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart.
** William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.

## See also

* Emotions

## External links

Emotions Adoration ~ Affection ~ Agony ~ Amusement ~ Anger ~ Anguish ~ Anxiety ~ Apathy ~ Awe ~ Boredom ~ Calmness ~ Cheerfulness ~ Compassion ~ Contempt ~ Contentment ~ Depression ~ Desire ~ Disappointment ~ Discontent ~ Disgust ~ Ecstasy ~ Embarrassment ~ Empathy ~ Enthusiasm ~ Envy ~ Euphoria ~ Fear ~ Gratitude ~ Grief ~ Guilt ~ Happiness ~ Hatred ~ Hope ~ Hostility ~ Humiliation ~ Impatience ~ Indignation ~ Insecurity ~ Jealousy ~ Joy ~ Loneliness ~ Loss ~ Love ~ Lust ~ Malice ~ Melancholy ~ Nostalgia ~ Panic ~ Passion ~ Pity ~ Pride ~ Rage ~ Regret ~ Remorse ~ Resentment ~ Sadness ~ Shame ~ Sorrow ~ Suffering ~ Surprise ~ Sympathy ~ Wonder ~ Worry