Quotes about feelings
page 6
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl
Variant: Everyones got to be different. You can't copy anybody and end up with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. And without feeling, whatever you do amounts to nothing.
Source: Lady Sings the Blues
Variant: It's impossible to go through life unscathed. Nor should you want to. By the hurts we accumulate, we measure both our follies and our accomplishments.
Source: Inheritance (2011)
Source: Letters to a Young Poet
Source: Requiem for a Dream
Source: Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places
“A professional is one who does his best work when he feels the least like working.”
“As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.”
Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1870), letter #342a of The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958), edited by Thomas H. Johnson, associate editor Theodora Ward, page 474
Source: Selected Letters
Source: Adam Bede (1859)
Context: These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people — amongst whom your life is passed — that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire — for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience. And I would not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who could create a world so much better than this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work, that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields — on the real breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be cheered and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice.
So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one's best efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin — the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings — much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
23 February 1944 http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~param/quotes/annefrank.html
(1942 - 1944)
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl
“If you feel far from God, guess who moved?”
Source: Surprise Endings
Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
Context: But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgements, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-so in South Kensington; some one up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quiet continuously a sense of their existence and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?
An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know.
All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was! — that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.
“… she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”
Source: Mrs. Dalloway
Source: Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person
Source: Alice in Zombieland
“All the women I know feel a little like outlaws.”
Source: The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. I: Of Our Spiritual Strivings
Context: After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.
“She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.”
Variant: Do you love the cross because it makes much of you? Or do you love it because it enables you to enjoy and eternity of making much of God?
“A true man of honor feels humbled himself when he cannot help humbling others.”
"Definition of a Gentleman" http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/LEE/gentdef.html, a memorandum found in his papers after his death, as quoted in Lee the American (1912) by Gamaliel Bradford, p. 233
Context: The forbearing use of power does not only form a touchstone, but the manner in which an individual enjoys certain advantages over others is a test of a true gentleman.
The power which the strong have over the weak, the employer over the employed, the educated over the unlettered, the experienced over the confiding, even the clever over the silly — the forbearing or inoffensive use of all this power or authority, or a total abstinence from it when the case admits it, will show the gentleman in a plain light.
The gentleman does not needlessly and unnecessarily remind an offender of a wrong he may have committed against him. He cannot only forgive, he can forget; and he strives for that nobleness of self and mildness of character which imparts sufficient strength to let the past be but the past. A true man of honor feels humbled himself when he cannot help humbling others.
"The Moral Problem"
1920s, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)
Source: Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
Context: There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.
“Somewhere in his body--perhaps in the marrow of his bones--he would continue to feel her absence.”
Source: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest
“I was feeling insecure you might not love me anymore”
“I feel sad that he’s just a voice now.”
“Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.”
Pt. IV, Expression; § 67: "Conclusion.", p. 267
The Sense of Beauty (1896)
Source: Spilling Open: The Art of Becoming Yourself
Source: The Second Sex
Source: The Shadow of the Wind
Part 1, Chapter 13; sometimes paraphrased: "Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth."
Books, Coningsby (1844), Contarini Fleming (1832)
“I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.”
Source: The Price of Salt
A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (1988)
Source: At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror
Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
“Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.”
"Emotions", p. 36.
The Second Sin (1973)
“We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.”
Context: (Answering "What made you step up to making your own record?") I felt like I may not get opportunities to do this ever again, so it’s about time—it’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There’s almost no such thing as ready. There’s only now. And you may as well do it now. I mean, I say that confidently as if I’m about to go bungee jumping or something—I’m not. I’m not a crazed risk taker. But I do think that, generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.
"Susan Sontag Finds Romance" http://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/02/books/booksspecial/sontag-romance.html?ex=1168146000&en=d224e29f399a3317&ei=5070, interview with by Leslie Garis, The New York Times (2 August 1992)
“The secret of the creative life is to feel at ease with your own embarrassment.”
Source: The Will to Power
Bruce Lee: Enter the Dragon (1973); In a training session with one of the temple students.
Variant: Its like a finger pointing away to the moon. Dont concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.
Source: Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living
“After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.”
