Quotes about feelings
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“It's a feeling which tells me that any woman can be beautiful in the eyes of a man who loves her.”

Joanne Harris book Five Quarters of the Orange

Source: Five Quarters of the Orange

“This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

World, Hope, Music, Way

“Today I feel that I shall win through. I have come to the gateway of the simple; I am now content to see things as they are. I have gained freedom myself; I shall allow freedom to others. In my work will be my salvation.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Source: The Home and the World

Freedom

“Feelings are never stupid, they just make us feel stupid sometimes.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Danse Macabre

Source: Danse Macabre

Stupidity

“Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.”

Sharon Creech book Absolutely Normal Chaos

Source: Absolutely Normal Chaos

Sadness, Boy, Waiting

“No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“It occurred to me that I was unhappy. And it didn’t feel so very terrible. No urgency, nothing. I could slip out of my life on a slow wave like this—it didn’t matter. I don’t have to be happy. All I have to do is hold on to something and wait.”

Helen Oyeyemi (1984) British author

Source: Mr. Fox

Life, Happiness, Waiting

“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star.
It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.
Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.”

Haruki Murakami book South of the Border, West of the Sun

Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun

Star, Light, Distant

“A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Hurt

“If you feel lost, disappointed, hesitant, or weak, return to yourself, to who you are, here and now and when you get there, you will discover yourself, like a lotus flower in full bloom, even in a muddy pond, beautiful and strong.”

Masaru Emoto (1943–2014) Japanese writer

Source: Secret Life of Water

Beauty, Disappointment, Flowers, Strong

“From the very beginning— from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

World, Selfishness

“We're always disappointed when we find out someone else has human limits, the same as we do. It's stupid for us to feel that way, and we really ought to know better, but that doesn't seem to slow us down.”

Jim Butcher book Small Favor

Source: Small Favor

Stupidity, Disappointment, Way

“I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Journals of Sylvia Plath

Love

“Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

Love, Lovers

“I feel more helpless with you than without you.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

“Sometimes a wild horse needs to feel that his rider is just a little bit wilder.”

Francesca Lia Block (1962) American children's writer

Source: Ruby

Horse

“The fuckers. There, I feel better. God-damned human race. There, I feel better.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship

God

“The deeper the feeling, the greater the pain”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Pain

“It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.”

Virginia Woolf book The Voyage Out

Source: The Voyage Out

Music, Appearance

“You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you’ve done nothing good for yourself. That’s the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.”

Dave Eggers book The Circle

Source: The Circle

Hate

“Explain to me what loving feels like, Beth. I want to understand.”

Jennifer Ashley (1974) American author

Source: The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie

Love, Understanding

“Vimes stalked gloomily through the crowded streets, feeling like the only pickled onion in a fruit salad.”

Terry Pratchett book Guards! Guards!

Source: Guards! Guards!

“I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.”

Allen Ginsberg book Howl and Other Poems

Source: Howl and Other Poems

Books, Dreams

“Kennedy was not impressed by military objections. The Bay of Pigs had taught the President to distrust the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The first advice I’m going to give my successor,” he once said to his journalist friend Ben Bradlee, “is to watch the generals and to avoid feeling that because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”4 During the missile crisis Kennedy courteously and consistently rejected the Joint Chiefs’ bellicose recommendations. “These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor,” he said. “If we…do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.”5”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

Source: Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

Men

“Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person…. Reading is bliss.”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Learning, Reading, Personality

“Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?”

Ernest Hemingway book The Sun Also Rises

Source: The Sun Also Rises

Life, Time

“Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.”

Benjamin Spock (1903–1998) American pediatrician and author of Baby and Child Care

Source: Decent and Indecent: Our Personal and Political Behavior (1970), p. 103

Idea

“Think about it: what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellow men. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone.”

Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998) Peruvian-American author

Variant: Self-importance is our greatest enemy. Think about it - what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellowmen. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone.
Source: Fire from Within

Men, Thinking

“Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore.”

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) Austrian writer

Source: The Post-Office Girl

Happiness, Sense, Freedom, Time

“The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.”

Jane Kenyon (1947–1995) American poet, translator

People, Truth, Beauty, Way

“I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.”

May Sarton (1912–1995) American poet, novelist, and memoirist

Source: Journal of a Solitude

Personality

“Some people say great God come from the sky take away everything and make everybody feel high, but if you know what life is worth, you will look for yours on earth.”

Bob Marley (1945–1981) Jamaican singer, songwriter, musician

Get Up, Stand Up (cowritten with Peter Tosh), from the album Burnin (1973)
Song lyrics

Life, God, People

“Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the center which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

Death, People, Communication

“Anyone who falls in love is searching for missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time. It's just a natural feeling. You're not the person who discovered that feeling, so don't go trying to patent it, okay?”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Kafka on the Shore (2002)

Love, Sadness, Search, Lovers

“I feel occasionally my skull will crack, fatigue is continuous - I only go from less exhausted to more exhausted & back again.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“‎"Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights.”

John Wooden (1910–2010) American basketball coach

“The more you pray, the less you'll panic. The more you worship, the less you worry. You'll feel more patient and less pressured.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Source: The Purpose of Christmas

“I feel apart from everything and a part of everything.”

Tim Bowler book Frozen Fire

Source: Frozen Fire

Parting

“Your desire is your prayer. Picture the fulfillment of your desire now and feel its reality and you will experience the joy of the answered.
Dr. Joseph Murphy”

Joseph Murphy (1898–1981) American writer

Reality, Joy

“I am so often accused of gloominess and melancholy. And I think I'm probably the most cheerful man around. I don't consider myself a pessimist at all. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel completely soaked to the skin.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

As quoted in "The Joking Troubadour of Gloom" in The Daily Telegraph (26 April 1993) http://www.webheights.net/speakingcohen/feb93.htm <br class="br">Context: I am so often accused of gloominess and melancholy. And I think I'm probably the most cheerful man around. I don't consider myself a pessimist at all. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel completely soaked to the skin. … I think those descriptions of me are quite inappropriate to the gravity of the predicament that faces us all. I've always been free from hope. It's never been one of my great solaces. I feel that more and more we're invited to make ourselves strong and cheerful..... I think that it was Ben Jonson who said, I have studied all the theologies and all the philosophies, but cheerfulness keeps breaking through.

Thinking, Waiting

“Mummy always told me, you should never let a man see your feelings or the contents of your handbag.”

Sophie Kinsella book Can You Keep a Secret?

Source: Can You Keep a Secret?

“I feel shame, not for the wrong things I have done, but for the right things that I have failed to do.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

“I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

Thinking

“And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

Soul, Thinking

“The polite thing would be to go back inside, give you privacy when you read it. But, I’m just not that mature.'
'It’s nothing. Fine.' Feeling foolish, Laurel opened the envelope.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Savor the Moment

Reading

“Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

People, Weather

“Mort was already aware that love made you feel hot and cold and cruel and weak, but he hadn't realized that it could make you stupid.”

Terry Pratchett book Mort

Source: Mort

Love, Stupidity

“She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.”

Raymond Chandler book Farewell, My Lovely

Source: Farewell, My Lovely

Smile

“Nothing is more essential, than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

1790s, Farewell Address (1796)
Source: The Papers Of George Washington
Context: Nothing is more essential, than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The Nation, which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests.

Passion

“Let your heart feel for the afflictions and distress of everyone.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

Affliction, Heart

“You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born. Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens. Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Fear, Birth, Waiting, Future

“It's often just enough to be with someone. I don't need to touch them. Not even talk. A feeling passes between you both. You're not alone.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

“How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Reality

“All I'm gonna do is just go on and do what I feel.”

Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) American musician, singer and songwriter

“If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

People, Way

“Since 2001, the U. S. government has abandoned its role as a champion of human rights and has perpetrated terrible and illegal abuses in prisons in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, sent prisoners secretly to other nations to be tortured, denied the applicability of the Geneva Convention restraints, and severely restricted time-honored civil liberties within our own country. Certain political leaders of other nations, who are inclined to perpetrate human rights abuses to quiet dissenting voices and were previously restrained by positive influence from Washington, now feel free to emulate or exceed the abuses approved by American leaders.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Source: Beyond the White House: Waging Peace, Fighting Disease, Building Hope

Time, Country

“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”

Robert Frank (1924–2019) American photographer and filmmaker

People, Way, Reading

“The root of the matter is a very simple and old fashioned thing… love or compassion. If you feel this, you have a motive for existence, a guide for action, a reason for courage, an imperative necessity for intellectual honesty.”

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

Love, Motivation, Fashion, Courage

“When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
"When I have fears that I may cease to be" (1817)
Source: The Complete Poems

Love, Books, World, Fear

“Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Wisdom, Thinking

“Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

Joy

“What amazes me is that most days feel useless. I don't seem to accomplish anything-just a few pages, most of which don't seem very good. Yet, when I put all those wasted days together, I somehow end up with a book of which I'm very proud.”

Louis Sachar (1954) American writer of children's books

Books

“Sometimes
when you are trying
not to think about something
it keeps popping back in your head
you can't help it
you think about it
and
think about it
and
think about it
until your brain
feels like
a squashed pea.”

Sharon Creech Love That Dog

Source: Love That Dog

Thinking, Help

“The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;
We find delight in the most loathsome things;
Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,
And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Hell, Dance

“Aesthetics have substantial political consequences. How one views oneself as beautiful or not beautiful or desirable or not desirable has deep consequences in terms of one’s feelings of self-worth and one’s capacity to be a political agent.”

Cornel West (1953) African-American philosopher and political/civil rights activist

Source: Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life

Beauty

“We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

“Why give up before we try
Feel the lows before the highs
Clip our wings before we fly away
I can't say I came prepared
I'm suspended in the air
Won't you come be in the sky with me”

Alicia Keys (1981) American singer-songwriter, pianist, and actress

Flying

“I can't really articulate what I feel”

Harold Pinter (1930–2008) playwright from England

“It's hard to enjoy practical jokes when your whole life feels like one.”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Source: The Last Olympian

Life

“Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Variant: great people are those who make others feel that they, too, can become great.

People, Deep, Success, Inspirational

“But when two people feel something, they ought to respect that enough to figure it out”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: The Witness

People

“Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Love, Understanding, Deep, Relationship

“In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel.”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Source: Eleven Minutes (2003), p. 97.
Context: In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel. It hurt when I lost each of the various men I fell in love with. Now, though, I am convinced that no one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.

Love

“I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

World

“She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

Sense, Sea

“If you hear a voice within you saying, "You are not a painter," then by all means paint, boy, and that voice will be silenced, but only by working. He who goes to trends and tells his troubles when he feels like that loses part of his manliness, part of the best that's in him; your friends can only be those who themselves struggle against it, who raise your activity by their own example of action.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter from Drenthe, The Netherlands, Oct. 1883, 'Van Gogh's Letters', http://webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/13/336.htm <br class="br">1880s, 1883

Boy, Silence, Parting, Painting