“Grotesque sentiments such as the lust of business success or economic power of any kind, and indeed every purely self-regarding passion, from that of the social climber to that of the salvation-seeking ascetic, are experienced by the explorer with something of that shame which the child, emerging into adolescence, may feel toward the still-clinging fascination of his outgrown toys, or with such disgust as the youth may feel when he wakes from some unworthy sexual infatuation”

— Olaf Stapledon , book Last Men in London

Source: Last Men in London (1932), Chapter II: Exploring the Past.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Olaf Stapledon 113

British novelist and philosopher 1886–1950

Albert K. Cohen (1918–2014) American criminologist

Source: Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang, 1955, p. 110

“Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies, and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Authority and the Individual (1949), p. 59
1940s

“A person who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which he may himself derive from sexual relations. A sadist is always at the same time a masochist.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

"Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality" (1905), reprinted in "Essential Papers on Masochism" p.87, edited by Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly, New York University press, New York and London, (1995)
1900s

“The shame love causes is like its pain; we only feel it once. We may feign it afterwards, but we do not feel it. However, the pleasure remains, and that is indeed something.”

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos book Les Liaisons dangereuses

La honte que cause l’amour est comme sa douleur: on ne l’éprouve qu’une fois. On peut encore la feindre après; mais on ne la sent plus. Cependant le plaisir reste, et c’est bien quelque chose.
Letter 105: La Marquise de Merteuil to Cécile Volanges. Trans. Richard Aldington (1924). http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Liaisons_dangereuses_-_Lettre_105
Les liaisons dangereuses (1782)

“The intellectual … may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque. Although there have been zealots whom we may still regard as intellectuals, zealotry is a defect of the breed and not of the essence.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 29

“For every one feels to what purpose he can use his own powers. Before the horns of a calf appear and sprout from his forehead, he butts with them when angry, and pushes passionately.”
Sentit enim vis quisque suas quoad possit abuti. cornua nata prius vitulo quam frontibus extent, illis iratus petit atque infestus inurget.

Lucretius (-94–-55 BC) Roman poet and philosopher

Book V, lines 1033–1035 (tr. Bailey)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)

“Truth and falsity, indeed understanding, is not necessarily something purely intellectual, remote from feelings and attitudes.”

Max Wertheimer (1880–1943) Co-founder of Gestalt psychology

Source: "On Truth," 1934, p. 28 (1961 edition)

“When a rule is enforced, the person who is supposed to have broken it may be seen as a special kind of person, one who cannot be trusted to live by the rules agreed upon by the group. He is regarded as an outsider. But the person who is thus labeled an outsider may have a different view of the matter. He may not accept the rule by which he is being judged and may not regard those who judge him as either competent or legitimately entitled to do so. Hence, a second meaning of the term emerges: the rule-breaker may feel his judges are outsiders.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963), pp. 1-2.

“The emergence of abstract art is a sign that there are still men of feeling in the world. Men who know how to respect and follow their inner feelings, no matter how irrational or absurd they may first appear. From their perspective, it is the social world that tends to appear irrational and absurd.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

1951; as cited in 'Robert Motherwell, American Painter and Printmaker' https://www.theartstory.org/artist-motherwell-robert-life-and-legacy.htm#writings_and_ideas_header, on 'Artstory'
from his responding at the 1951 MoMA symposium, in which several artists were asked to respond to the prompt 'What Abstract Art Means to Me'
1950s

“My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of men is disgusting. My attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

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