Quotes about feelings
page 81

“Have not many of us, in the weary way of life, felt, in some hours, how far easier it were to die than to live?
The martyr, when faced even by a death of bodily anguish and horror, finds in the very terror of his doom a strong stimulant and tonic. There is a vivid excitement, a thrill and fervor, which may carry through any crisis of suffering that is the birth-hour of eternal glory and rest.
But to live, — to wear on, day after day, of mean, bitter, low, harassing servitude, every nerve dampened and depressed, every power of feeling gradually smothered, — this long and wasting heart-martyrdom, this slow, daily bleeding away of the inward life, drop by drop, hour after hour, — this is the true searching test of what there may be in man or woman.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe book Uncle Tom's Cabin

Source: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Ch. 38 The Victory

Life, Death, Way, Search

“I’m me. I am a human being. Many things have been said about me. Many of these things have come from people’s own emotions, good or bad. I’m proud to be a human being. I am very happy that I have this life. I am also happy that I can feel joy and pain like everyone else. I’m happy being me. Some people would love to put labels on me, but I am just me.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Undated
Source: Conversation with Prem Rawat The Prem Rawat Foundation

Love, Life, Pain, Happiness

“I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.”

Teresa Nielsen Hayden (1956) American editor and writer

Post to Electrolite (29 January 2003); Republished at nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/002301 http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/002301.html, accessed May 9, 2014.

Way

“…the rapid march of scientific discovery…made me feel that it was quite within the realm of possibility that one day there might be an invention which would neutralise our [naval] superiority, and reduce us to equality with, if not inferiority to, our neighbours. … In such an event our position would be one of complete helplessness in the face of an invader with a powerful army. … We had two fundamental weaknesses in such a contingency. The first was that our army was too insignificant to stand up against the gigantic forces on the Continent. The second was that we were so overwhelmingly dependent upon overseas supplies for our food, that if these were cut off we should, within a few months, be brought to the very verge of starvation. It was this consideration amongst others that always led me to urge that we ought to devote more thought to the development of the resources of British soil.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

War Memoirs: Volume I (London: Odhams, 1938), p. 20.
War Memoirs

Food, Dependency

“If there’s a singularity, would the resulting AI, or AIs, feel conscious and self-aware? Would they have an internal reality? If not, they’re for all practical purposes zombies. Of all traits that our human form of life has, I feel that consciousness is by far the most remarkable. As far as I’m concerned, it’s how our Universe gets meaning, so if our Universe gets taken over by life that lacks this trait, then it’s meaningless and just a huge waste of space.”

Max Tegmark book Our Mathematical Universe

Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2014)

Life, Reality, Universe

“Sometimes I do believe in predestination. I feel helpless to do anything but what I am compelled to do.”

Why the lucky stiff American computer programmer

Collected PDFs (2013)

“How do you find what's going to make everybody have this strange reaction in their bodies, this response that's sort of chemical and physical all at once—this noise and emotion that changes how you sit? A laugh is a weird sound, and when you get a couple thousand people making it at once, it's really strange. But when I can feel proud of myself for causing it, it's great.”

Billy Crystal (1948) American actor

Interview with Oprah Winfrey

People, Change

“The soft seduction of consumer global capitalism reduce the nations of the West to a rootless mass of Americanised consumers, without identity, without pride and without a future. Children identify with the grotesque and vulgar instead of noble heroes and beautiful princesses in castles. Teenagers ape the antics of degenerate pop-stars whose example leads hundreds of thousands into the living death of drug addiction, not to mention the tragedy of the image conscious girls (mainly) who feel compelled to starve themselves to get "the look" and of course the spiralling number of abortions. Adults perform meaningless jobs, in conditions of mind-destroying boredom, to earn enough money to buy the latest needlessly created want to be pushed on television as the thing without which their neighbours will regard them as worthless failures. Old folk die unnoticed and lie rotting for weeks, even months, in barred and bolted flats in inhuman tower blocks, unofficial prisons which become tombs for those who no longer have any economic value. Do not be fooled by the glossy packaging of the consumer society. Where state socialism was a creed of terror and stagnation, capitalism is one of apathy and death.”

Nick Griffin (1959) British politician

Nick Griffin, The Deadly Twins.

Death, Money, Children, Lie

“Once men begin to feel cramped in their geographical, social and mental habitat, they are in danger of being tempted by the simple solution of denying one section of the species the right to be considered as human. This allows the rest a little elbow-room for a few more decades.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss book Tristes Tropiques

Source: Tristes Tropiques (1955), Chapter 16 : Markets p. 149

Men

“I don’t know the why of anything, even when I pretend most diligently I do. The truth is the last time I had any idea why or what I was supposed to do I was lying in a shell hole, looking up at the sky. My mind was filled with a Bach keyboard sonata, which was one of the last I’d learned, I forget which one now. I absolutely knew I was about to die and I was completely happy and at peace, in a way I never was before or since, not even with you, in our best moments. It was so easy, you see, a kind of absolute joy and peace, because I knew it was all done and I was all square with life. Nothing left to do but let things take their course. And when I didn’t die, I didn’t know what to do. So I thought, I’ll take my revolver, go out and blow a hole through my head. Only I knew it wouldn’t work. I knew, I just knew you couldn’t do it that way. You couldn’t make it happen, not if you wanted to find peace. So, I thought, then, a sniper can do it for me. But no matter how I tried to let them no sniper ever found me. And all the other times I went out and lay in shell holes in No Man’s Land it wasn’t the same, and I knew I wouldn’t die this time, and of course I never did. I had this mad feeling I’d become some sort of Wandering Jew. And everything for so long afterwards was about dragging this living corpse of myself around, giving it things to do, because here it was, alive. And nothing made any sense and I didn’t even hope it would. I followed paths that were there to be followed, I did what others said to do.”

Basil Rathbone (1892–1967) British actor

Letter https://thegreatbaz.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/fuller-text-of-letter-quoted-in-a-life-divided/

Life, Happiness, Truth, Peace

“[Looper's] sort of a down-to-earth Blade Runner: it feels real. It's that style of sci-fi that could actually exist in 30 years.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (1981) American actor, director, producer, and writer

Los Angeles Times http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2012/04/13/looper-trailer-joseph-gordon-levitt-completes-time-travel-circle/, 2012

“Laws alone is not enough to ensure that freedom is safeguarded. What is required is a sprit of freedom among the people concerned. There must be an atmosphere of respect, a feeling of belonging together, an atmosphere of harmony with fellow beings.”

Harry Schwarz (1924–2010) South African activist

Herald Times, (4 November 1979)
Parliament (1974-1991)
Source: http://www.samedia.uovs.ac.za/cgi-bin/getpdf?id=1552889

People, Law, Freedom

“One of the great movements in my lifetime among educated people is the need to commit themselves to action. Most people are not satisfied with giving money; we also feel we need to work. That is why there is an enormous surge in the number of unpaid staff, volunteers. The needs are not going to go away. Business is not going to take up the slack, and government cannot.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

"New Priorities" Dancing Toward The Future, Context Institute http://www.context.org/, (1992) 1990s and later

Money, People, Education, Business

“It is authority that provokes revolution…. This occurs when a feeling of impunity takes root among the elite: We are allowed anything, we can do anything. This is a delusion, but it rests on a certain rational foundation. For a while it does indeed look as if they can do whatever they want. Scandal after scandal and illegality after illegality go unpunished. The people remain silent…They are afraid and do not yet feel their own strength. At the same time, they keep a detailed account of the wrongs, which at one particular moment are to be added up. The choice of that moment is the greatest riddle of history.”

Ryszard Kapuściński book Shah of Shahs

Shah of Shahs, Vintage International edition, p. 106

People, History, Time

“The key issue is jobs. You can't get away from it: jobs. Having a buck or two in your pocket and feeling like somebody.”

Studs Terkel (1912–2008) American author, historian and broadcaster

http://books.google.com/books?id=FucDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PT25&lpg=PT25&dq=The+key+issue+is+jobs.+You+can't+get+away+from+it:+jobs.+Having+a+buck+or+two+in+your+pocket+and+feeling+like+somebody&source=bl&ots=TYKi7WaW5v&sig=-4ggLp9hfdxXUvrZIF8U1OpGMSU&hl=en&ei=0CPkS4LSJ4P68Aakk7SpBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAcQ6AEwAA Mother Jones Magazine - Sep 1995
The Guardian interview (2002)

“Here I swear, and as I break my oath may Infinity Eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge… Oh, how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon, to hurl him to his native Hell never to rise again — I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in Poetry.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg (3 January 1811)

Forgiveness, Hell, Revenge

“Seek the light
find the light
feel the light
be the light.”

Mike Scott (1958) songwriter, musician

"Seek the Light" (co-written with May East and Craig Gibsone)
Universal Hall (2003)

Light

“No one's keeping track — no one's making of an archive of these "unimportant" things, you know… but now we have an archive … and in a way, the second there's many, it becomes proof of something, something that's so unspecific — that it's — that it's lively — to me that's really alive — that kind of half nauseous, half beautiful feeling.”

Miranda July (1974) American performance artist, musician and writer

Pretty Cool People interview (2007)

Beauty, Way

“After the war, Japan was occupied by the allied forces, and based on peace and democracy as values to be upheld, established the Constitution of Japan, undertook various reforms and built the foundation of Japan that we know today. I have profound gratitude for the efforts made by the Japanese people at the time who helped reconstruct and improve the country devastated by the war. I also feel that we must not forget the help extended to us in those days by Americans with an understanding of Japan and Japanese culture. Today, more than sixty years since the end of the war, we have seen that, in the face of major disasters such as the Great East Japan Earthquake [March 11, 2011], there are so many people in Japan who value the bonds between people, can deal with various situations calmly, and work hard towards reconstruction. I have found this most reassuring.”

Akihito (1933) Emperor of Japan

War, People, Peace, Democracy

“You might find the idea of listening to your gut feelings odd or even ridiculous. Some people I coach, normally left-brain individuals who use logic and facts all day like engineers or accountants, are not used to following their intuition and feelings. Instead of asking themselves ‘What do I feel?’, they are more comfortable asking ‘What do the facts tell me?”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, 100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living (2016) https://books.google.ae/books?idnu0lCwAAQBAJ&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIMjAE

People, Idea

“As the glossaries lengthen, as the footnotes become more elementary and didactic, the poem, the epic, the drama, move out of balance on the actual page. As even the more rudimentary of mythological, religious or historical references, which form the grammar of Western literature, have to be elucidated, the lines of Spenser, of Pope, of Shelley or of Sweeney Among the Nightingales, blur away from immediacy. Where it is necessary to annotate every proper name and classical allusion in the dialogue between Jessica and Lorenzo in the garden at Belmont, or in Iachimo's stealthy rhetoric when he emerges in Imogen's bedchamber, these marvellous spontaneities of enacted feeling become "literary" and twice-removed.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"Tomorrow".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Literature

“We need a new England where all religions and colours feel proud of our flag and recognise how important our identity and culture is.”

Tommy Robinson (1982) English right-wing activist

Interview with Jamie Bartlett, «'The guards don't run the prison, Islam does': my interview with a 'reformed' Tommy Robinson», The Telegraph (17 June 2014) http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/jamiebartlett/100013835/the-guards-dont-run-the-prison-islam-does-my-interview-with-a-reformed-tommy-robinson/ 2014

Religion

“Growing old is natural,” growls the old woman. “When you’ve lived long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken, lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what’s left to go on for? If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you’re taking up that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage limit after a time. It’s a monstrously egotistical statement, to say you intend to live forever.”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 7 (“Curator”), p. 279

Friendship, People, Lovers, Nature

“It is evident that this, among many other of the purposes of my father's scheme of education, could not have been accomplished if he had not carefully kept me from having any great amount of intercourse with other boys. He was earnestly bent upon my escaping not only the ordinary corrupting influence which boys exercise over boys, but the contagion of vulgar modes of thought and feeling; and for this he was willing that I should pay the price of inferiority in the accomplishments which schoolboys in all countries chiefly cultivate. The deficiencies in my education were principally in the things which boys learn from being turned out to shift for themselves, and from being brought together in large numbers.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)

https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/35/mode/1up p. 35

Education, Exercises, Boy, Learning

“I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything.”

E. L. Konigsburg (1930–2013) American writer and illustrator

Mrs. Frankweiler in From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967)

Thinking, Learning, Time

“Now, I should like to say something else to you about the connection with music, primarily that of Bach, i. e. the Fugue or, put more simply, the canon... It has a great deal in common with my own motifs, which I make turn on various axes too. Nowadays I have such a powerful sense of relationship, of affinity, that when I am listening to Bach I frequently get inspired and feel an overwhelming instinct for his insistent rhythm, a cadence seeking something of the infinite. In the Fugue everything is based on a single motif, often consisting of just a few notes. In my work, too, everything revolves around a single closed contour..”

M. C. Escher (1898–1972) Dutch graphic artist

version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van M.C. Escher, in het Nederlands): 'Nu wou ik je nog wat zeggen over het verband met muziek, en wel in hoofdzaak met die van Bach, d.w.z. de Fuga, of eenvoudiger canon.. .Het heeft heel veel van mijn motieven, die ik ook om verschillende assen laat draaien. Ik heb dat gevoel van relatie, verwantschap, tegenwoordig zoo sterk, dat ik tijdens het luisteren naar Bach, dikwijls geïnspireerd word en een sterke drang naar zijn dwingende ritme voel, een cadans die iets van de eindeloosheid zoekt. In de Fuga is alles gebaseerd op een enkel motief, dikwijls maar van enkele noten. Bij mij draait ook alles om een enkele gesloten contour.. Quote from Escher’s letter, 1940 to his friend Hein 's-Gravezande; as cited (and translated!) on the website of museum 'Escher in the Palace', The Hague: dutch original text https://www.escherinhetpaleis.nl/escher-vandaag and english translation https://www.escherinhetpaleis.nl/escher-today/?lang=en 1940's

Music, Sense

“Writers don’t so much write about their own lives as create them, Barthes said; it’s an oddly modern idea. Bengalis, similarly, had to make their own history. They did it in houses, tenements, and in neighbourhoods connected by stifling alleys that are no wider than a small room … And this is why I feel, even now, that the most revealing places in Calcutta are not the museums or the great monuments … but the houses and lanes in which people live.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

People, History, Idea, Housing

“The world around us can be construed as a huge "house" that we share with other humans, as well as with animals and plants. It is in this world that we exist, fulfilling our tasks, enjoying things, developing social relations, creating a family. In short, we live in this world. We thus have a deep human need to know and to trust it, to be emotionally involved in it. Many of us, however, experience an increasing feeling of alienation. Even though, with the expansion of society, virtually the entire surface of the planet has become a part of our house, often we do not feel "at home" in that house. With the rapid and spontaneous changes of the past decades, so many new wings and rooms have been constructed or rearranged that we have lost familiarity with our house. We often have the impression that what remains of the world is a collection of isolated fragments, without any structure and coherence. Our personal "everyday" world seems unable to harmonise itself with the global world of society, history and cosmos.
It is our conviction that the time has come to make a conscious effort towards the construction of global world views, in order to overcome this situation of fragmentation. There are many reasons why we believe in the benefit of such an enterprise, and in the following pages we shall attempt to make some of them clear.”

Diederik Aerts (1953) Belgian theoretical physicist

Source: World views. From Fragmentation to Integration (1994), p. 1; About "The fragmentation of our world"

World, Family, Home, History

“Spend all your time waiting
For that second chance,
For a break that would make it OK.
There's always some reason
To feel not good enough;
And it's hard at the end of the day.I need some distraction,
Oh, beautiful release.
Memory seeps through my veins.
Let me be empty,
Oh weightless and maybe
I'll find some peace tonight.”

Sarah McLachlan (1968) Canadian musician, singer, and songwriter

Angel
Song lyrics, Surfacing (1997)

Peace, Beauty, Memory, Chance

“Within Siddhartha there slowly grew and ripened the knowledge of what wisdom really was and the goal of his long seeking. It was nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling, and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.”

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) German writer

Siddhartha (1922)

Life, Wisdom, Secret, Art

“Find one person in the audience and sing to them with all of your heart. And then cast a spell over them. Hoss, if you can't do it with feeling — don't.”

Patsy Cline (1932–1963) American country music singer

On singing and performing
Attributed by Dottie West in [Nassour, Ellis, Patsy Cline, 1980, unidentified edition, unidentified pages]
Quoted in The Real Patsy Cline (1986 documentary film)
Attributed

Singing, Heart, Personality

“Now that we've lost Alan Shepard, I can't help feeling that something is wrong with this picture; astronauts aren't supposed to grow old and leave this Earth forever. In our memories, they remain as Shepard was on that sunny Friday morning in May 1961, when he lay inside a tiny Mercury capsule ready to be hurled into space atop a Redstone booster.”

Alan Shepard (1923–1998) American astronaut

Andrew Chaikin (August 2, 1998) "Real American heroes: Shepard pushed our frontiers", Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, p. 3.
About

Memory, Help

“I believe there is no permanent greatness to a nation except it be based upon morality. I do not care for military greatness or military renown. I care for the condition of the people among whom I live. There is no man in England who is less likely to speak irreverently of the Crown and Monarchy of England than I am; but crowns, coronets, mitres, military display, the pomp of war, wide colonies, and a huge Empire, are, in my view, all trifles light as air, and not worth considering, unless with them you can have a fair share of comfort, contentment, and happiness among the great body of the people. Palaces, baronial castles, great halls, stately mansions, do not make a nation. The nation in every country dwells in the cottage; and unless the light of your constitution can shine there, unless the beauty of your legislation and the excellence of your statesmanship are impressed there on the feelings and condition of the people, rely upon it you have yet to learn the duties of Government.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in Birmingham (29 October 1858), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 274-275.
1850s

War, Happiness, People, Beauty

“Bookstore boss: [to Mo] The self-service kiosks have enabled us to cut down on staff, but some customers still feel the need to speak to an actual human. That's where you come in.
Customer: Excuse me, do you carry Jewish New Year cards?
Boss: I'm sorry, our New Years cards don't come in till November. But we'll be getting Jewish Christmas cards then, too!”

Alison Bechdel book Dykes to Watch Out For

#425, "Rites of Fall" (2003), collected in Invasion of the DTWOF (2005).
Dykes to Watch Out For

Christmas

“The Working Man as yet sought only to know his craft; and educated himself sufficiently by ploughing and hammering, under the conditions given, and in fit relation to the persons given: a course of education, then as now and ever, really opulent in manful culture and instruction to him; teaching him many solid virtues, and most indubitably useful knowledges; developing in him valuable faculties not a few both to do and to endure,—among which the faculty of elaborate grammatical utterance, seeing he had so little of extraordinary to utter, or to learn from spoken or written utterances, was not bargained for; the grammar of Nature, which he learned from his mother, being still amply sufficient for him. This was, as it still is, the grand education of the Working Man. As for the Priest, though his trade was clearly of a reading and speaking nature, he knew also in those veracious times that grammar, if needful, was by no means the one thing needful, or the chief thing. By far the chief thing needful, and indeed the one thing then as now, was, That there should be in him the feeling and the practice of reverence to God and to men; that in his life's core there should dwell, spoken or silent, a ray of pious wisdom fit for illuminating dark human destinies;—not so much that he should possess the art of speech, as that he should have something to speak!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

Life, Wisdom, Men, God

“John F. Kennedy … murdered in Dallas by some hapless geek named Oswald who worked for either Castro, the mob, Jimmy Hoffa, the CIA, his dominatrix landlady or the odious, degenerate FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. The list is long and crazy — maybe Marilyn Monroe's first husband fired those shots from the grassy knoll. Who knows? A whole generation of American journalists is still embarrassed by their failure to answer that question. JFK's ghost will haunt the corridors of power in America for as long as the grass is green and the rivers run to the sea. Take my word for it, Bubba. I have heard his footsteps for 30 years and I still feel guilty about not being able to explain the biggest news story of my lifetime to my son.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Better than Sex (22 August 1994)
1990s

Failure, Question, Grass, Sea

“And that brings me to the other big lesson that I want to share with you today. It’s a lesson about how to get through those struggles, and that is, instead of letting your hardships and failures discourage or exhaust you, let them inspire you. Let them make you even hungrier to succeed. Now, I know that many of you have already dealt with some serious losses in your lives. Maybe someone in your family lost a job or struggled with drugs or alcohol or an illness. Maybe you’ve lost someone you love […]. […] So, yes, maybe you’ve been tested a lot more and a lot earlier in life than many other young people. Maybe you have more scars than they do. Maybe you have days when you feel more tired than someone your age should ever really feel. But, graduates, tonight, I want you to understand that every scar that you have is a reminder not just that you got hurt, but that you survived. And as painful as they are, those holes we all have in our hearts are what truly connect us to each other. They are the spaces we can make for other people’s sorrow and pain, as well as their joy and their love so that eventually, instead of feeling empty, our hearts feel even bigger and fuller. So it’s okay to feel the sadness and the grief that comes with those losses. But instead of letting those feelings defeat you, let them motivate you. Let them serve as fuel for your journey.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2010s, Commencement speech for Martin Luther King Jr. College Prep graduates (2015)

Love, Life, Pain, People

“"But suppose your dæmon settles in a shape you don't like?"
"Well, then, you're discontented, en't you? There's plenty of fold as'd like to have a lion as a dæmon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they're going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling, that is."”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

Lyra and the seaman Jerry, in Ch. 10 : The Consul and the Bear
His Dark Materials, The Golden Compass (1995)

Learning

“With thy coming Melody was come.
This was thy lot, to feel, create, bestow,
And that immeasurable life to know
From which the fleshly self falls shrivelled, dead,
A seed primeval that has forests bred.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

Life, Dead

“The feelings and images aroused by the visible world are very difficult to express or are perhaps inexpressible with words because they are determined by forms, colors, space and light.”

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) Italian painter

in an interview with L. Vitali, 1957; as quoted in Morandi 1894 – 1964, published by Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, ed: M. C. Bandera & R. Miracco - 2008; p. 295
1945 - 1964

World, Color, Light

“One troublesome aspect is the place of rational expectations macroeconomics in the often political debate over Keynesian economics. At least implicitly, many people feel that what's bad for the rational expectations viewpoint is good for the Keynesian one, and vice versa. But it is hard to see how the problems in using the rational expectations approach to explain monetary nonneutrality can alleviate the theoretical and empirical shortcomings of the Keynesian model.”

Robert Barro (1944) American classical macroeconomist

Robert J. Barro, "Rational Expectations and Macroeconomics in 1984" (1984).

People, Problem

“The idea of a law of progress, or of an all but irresistible tendency to general improvement, is then merely a superstition, one of the tents of the modernist pseudo-religion of humanism. Even if such a law or tendency existed and were demonstrable, the liberal faith in progress would for Santayana be pernicious. For it leads to a corrupt habit of mind in which things are valued, not for their present excellence or perfection, but instrumentally, as leading to something better; and it insinuates into thought and feeling a sort of historical theodicy, in which past evil is justified as a means to present or future good. The idea of progress embodies a kind of time-worship (to adopt an expression used by Wyndham Lewis) in which the particularities of our world are seen and valued, not in themselves, but for what they might perhaps become, thereby leaving us destitute of the sense of the present and, at the same time, of the perspective of eternity.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

'Santayana's Alternative' (p.67-8)
Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

World, Faith, Religion, Law

“Expression, to my way of thinking, does not consist of the passion mirrored upon a human face or betrayed by a violent gesture. The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. The place occupied by figures or objects, the empty spaces around them, the proportions – everything plays a part. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements at the painter’s disposal for the expression of his feelings”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

Source: 1900s, Notes d'un Peintre (Notes of a Painter) (1908), p. 410

Art, Way, Thinking, Passion

“Why not make an end of it all?" he asked himself. "Why this obstinate resistance to the fate that is crushing me? It is all very well my forming what are apparently the most reasonable forms of conduct, my life is a succession of griefs and bitter feelings. This month is no better than the last; this year is no better than last year. Why this obstinate determination to go on living? Can I be wanting in firmness? What is death?" he asked himself, opening his case of pistols and examining them. "A very small matter, when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it.”

Stendhal book Armance

Pourquoi ne pas en finir? se dit-il enfin; pourquoi cette obstination à lutter contre le destin qui m'accable? J'ai beau faire les plans de conduite les plus raisonnables en apparence, ma vie n'est qu'une suite de malheurs et de sensations amères. Ce mois-ci ne vaut pas mieux que le mois passé; cette année-ci ne vaut pas mieux que l'autre année; d'où vient cette obstination à vivre? Manquerais-je de fermeté? Qu'est-ce que la mort? se dit-il en ouvrant la caisse de ses pistolets et les considérant. Bien peu de chose en vérité; il faut être fou pour s'en passer.
Source: Armance (1827), Ch. 2

Life, Death, Fate, Fools

“After a moment she let go of him and rubbed her eyes. “Sorry,” she said to both of them.
“Don’t be, child,” said Trixie. “Sometimes crying is the best medicine you can give yourself.”
“I never cry,” Maggie said, hearing the tears in her voice, and the anger. “Crying’s for people who are helpless.”
“Who told you that?” asked Trixie.
“Learned it from looking around.”
“Well, it’s not true. You can’t always judge by appearances. Crying’s a power tool to cleanse the soul, if you use it right. I think you used it right. Do you feel helpless?””

Nina Kiriki Hoffman (1955) American writer

“No,” said Maggie.
Source: The Thread That Binds the Bones (1993), Chapter 11 (p. 105)

People, Soul, Thinking, Tear

“From the time of the North Briton of the unprincipled Wilkes, a notion has been entertained that the moral spine in Scotland is more flexible than in England. The truth however is, that an elementary difference exists in the public feelings of the two nations quite as great as in the idioms of their respective dialects. The English are a justice-loving people, according to charter and statute; the Scotch are a wrong-resenting race, according to right and feeling: and the character of liberty among them takes its aspect from that peculiarity.”

John Galt (novelist) (1779–1839) British writer

Ringan Gilhaize (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1823) vol. 3, p. 313.

Love, People, Truth, Justice

“The spirit of the nation that should take the lead in this great reform would insensibly become agricultural: commerce, with all its vice, selfishness, and corruption, would gradually decline; more natural habits would produce gentler manners, and the excessive complication of political relations would be so far simplified that every individual might feel and understand why he loved his country, and took a personal interest in its welfare.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley book A Vindication of Natural Diet

A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813)

Love, Understanding, Nature, Personality

“I've also grown as an actor as I've got older in life. I've learnt how to go to work, immerse myself 100 per cent in the character and, at the end of the day, take it all off and go back, get a nice bubble bath, have a nice massage and realise that is not my life. And that feels good.”

Halle Berry (1966) American actress

Steve Pratt (March 27, 2004) "Blazing a trail with Halle's comet", The Northern Echo, p. 10.

Life

“The issue, it seems to me, is that many people think of giving the same way they think of eating broccoli: they feel obligated to, they know they should, but they'd rather not. So charities, smartly, treat them like 5-year-olds: they try to trick them into it. If there were millions of dollars riding on getting some kid to eat his broccoli, the wisest move would probably be to get one of those chocolate-covering machines and douse the stuff until it's unrecognizable.”

Holden Karnofsky (1981) American nonprofit executive

In "Chocolate-covered broccoli" https://blog.givewell.org/2007/01/03/chocolate-covered-broccoli/, January 2007

People, Way, Thinking

“It's who I am. Put somebody else's comfort ahead of my own? Go hop in a toilet to spare somebody else's feelings? That's the kinda thing you do, fella. You got everything bass ackwards. And look where it's landed you.'
'Other people ought to have more consideration.'
'You oughtta have less. Me personally, I am opposed to all strictures. If you feel it, let it rip. If you want it, go for it. Dude's gotta put his own interests first.”

Jonathan Franzen book The Corrections

The Corrections (2001)

People, Personality

“Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all Republicans have come up with is this slow down, stop everything, let's start over. You think you've heard these same excuses before, you're right. When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said, slow down, it's too early. Let's wait. Things aren't bad enough. When women spoke up for the right to speak up, they wanted to vote, some insisted slow down, there will be a better day to do that. The day isn't quite right. When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone, regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today. More recently, when chairman Chris Dodd of Connecticut, one of the people who will go down as a chief champion of the bill before us today, said that Americans should be able to take care of their families without fear of losing their jobs, you heard the same old excuses, seven years of fighting and more than one presidential veto, it was slow down, stop everything, start over. History is repeating itself before our eyes. There are now those who don't think it is the right time to reform health care. If not now, when, madam president? But the reality for many that feel that way, it will never, never be a good time to reform health care.”

Harry Reid (1939) American politician

On the Senate floor, during a debate on health care reform, December 7, 2009 Reid Compares Health Reform Bill with Slavery, Suffrage - George's Bottom Line, abcnews.com, December 7, 2009, 2009-12-08 http://blogs.abcnews.com/george/2009/12/reid-compares-health-reform-bill-with-slavery-suffrage.html,

Women, People, Health, Fear

“You know that weird cat dance that cats do late at night where they go completely stir-crazy and they run around the apartment and you don't know what the hell they're doing? I often feel like that. I dye my hair constantly because I can't sit still with one hair color. That's a perfect example of trying to satisfy some hunger. I want change; I want constant stimuli. I love to fly because I love the high. All of these are like itch kind of things. Sometimes I need to completely get away. I'll get in the car and I'll drive for as long as I can drive. Sometimes it's a sexual urge. I don't need to explain that; it's pretty self-explanatory. It's a craving, a desire. Sometimes it's food. I'm just a giant, big ol' consumer. I want, I need, I crave, I can't say no. I have no control and I'm a complete control freak. It's just crazy”

Colleen Fitzpatrick (1972) American singer and actress

laughs
Asked where her "itches" come from
Attributed

Love, Hunger, Food, Cars

“This is a common criticism: the idea that the atheist is guilty of a literalist reading of scripture, and that it’s a very naive way of approaching religion, and there’s a far more sophisticated and nuanced view of religion on offer and the atheist is disregarding that. A few problems with this: anyone making that argument is failing to acknowledge just how many people really do approach these texts literally or functionally - whether they’re selective literalists, or literal all the way down the line. There are certain passages in scripture that just cannot be read figuratively. And people really do live by the lights of what is literally laid out in these books. So, the Koran says “hate the infidel” and Muslims hate the infidel because the Koran spells it out ad nauseam. Now, it’s true that you can cherry-pick scripture, and you can look for all the good parts. You can ignore where it says in Leviticus that if a woman is not a virgin on her wedding night you’re supposed to stone her to death on her father’s doorstep. Most religious people ignore those passages, which really can only be read literally, and say that “they were only appropriate for the time” and “they don’t apply now”. And likewise, Muslims try to have the same reading of passages that advocate holy war. They say “well, these were appropriate to those battles that Mohammed was fighting, but now we don’t have to fight those battles”. This is all a good thing, but we should recognize what’s happening here: people are feeling pressure from a host of all-too-human concerns that have nothing, in principle, to do with God: secularism, and human rights, and democracy, and scientific progress. These have made certain passages in scripture untenable. This is coming from outside religion, and religion is now making a great show of its sophistication in grappling with these pressures. This is an example of religion losing the argument with modernity.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris in interview by Big Think (04/07/2007) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zV3vIXZ-1Y&t=6s 2000s

Death, God, Hate, War

“On the other hand, Hindu saints used to assuage the outraged feelings of Hindus and encourage them reconvert to Hinduism. For instance Harihar and Bukka, sons of the Raja of Kampil, converted to Islam by Muhammad bin Tughlaq, fled his court. At the instance of sage Vidyaranya they reverted to Hinduism and founded the Vijayanagar kingdom to resist the expansion of Muslim power in the South. Like Vidyaranya, there were scores of Bhakta saints who were helping people to resist injustice and retain their original religion. In Maharashtra, Namdeva in the fourteenth century declared that people were blind in insisting upon worshipping in temples and mosques, while His worship needed neither temple nor mosque.69 Such courageous denunciations were infectious and these spread in Gujarat, Bengal, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. Ramananda, Kabir, Nanak, Chaitanya, Raidas, Dhanna, Sain, Garibdas and Dadu Dayal and a host of others spoke out in the same idiom openly and repeatedly. They came from all classes of society - Raidas was a chamar, Sain was a barber while Pipa was a Raja, Raja of Gauranggarh - but they were all respected and listened to. Of these the three most important saints who turned Bhakti into a movement were Kabir, Nanak and Chaitanya.”

K. S. Lal book The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India

Source: The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (1992), Chapter 6

People, Religion, Courage, Help

“Sometimes I am a collector of data, and only a collector, and am likely to be gross and miserly, piling up notes, pleased with merely numerically adding to my stores. Other times I have joys, when unexpectedly coming upon an outrageous story that may not be altogether a lie, or upon a macabre little thing that may make some reviewer of my more or less good works mad. But always there is present a feeling of unexplained relations of events that I note, and it is this far-away, haunting, or often taunting, awareness, or suspicion, that keeps me piling on.”

Charles Fort (1874–1932) American writer

Ch. 4 http://www.resologist.net/talent04.htm Wild Talents (1932)

Lie, Time, Joy, Madness

“Why do I feel so exercised about what we think of the people of the Middle Ages?…I guess it's because so many of their voices are ringing vibrantly in my ears – Chaucer's, Boccaccio's, Henry Knighton's, Thomas Walsingham's, Froissart's, Jean Creton's… writers and contemporary historians of the period who seem to me just as individual, just as alive as we are today. We need to get to know these folk better in order to know who we are ourselves.”

Terry Jones (1942–2020) Welsh comedian, screenwriter, actor, film director and author

The Observer http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1143405,00.html, February 8, 2004.

People, Age, Exercises, Thinking

“I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord.
And I've been waiting for this moment for all my life, Oh Lord.
Can you feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord, oh Lord.”

Phil Collins (1951) English musician, songwriter and actor

"In the Air Tonight"
Face Value (1981)

Life, Waiting

“What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots and it's this feeling he tries to kill, right there on the bus; he grips the chrome bar and leans far over two women with white pleated blouses and laps of packages and closes his eyes and tries to kill it.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

Women, People, Cars, Baby

“My lifestyle is very healthy. I eat very healthy and we cook at home. We don't eat out a lot, we don't go out for fast food a lot -- and it's the same with the children. I'm a pain in the butt with my children. I want them to eat right. They hate me for it a lot of times, but I don't want to make my life easy and skip those roles that I feel like I have to have as a mother.”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

Interview with Stylelist.com, 10 February 2010 http://www.stylelist.com/2010/02/10/heidi-klum-heart-truth-red-dress/.

Life, Pain, Hate, Children

“Young men go to war. Sometimes because they are have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

Life, Men, War, Sadness

“Silence. Archie let it gather. He could always feel a heightening of interest in the room. It always happened this way when an assignment was about to be given. He knew what they were thinking- what's Archie come up with this time? Sometimes Archie resented them. The members of The Vigils did nothing but enforce the rules. Carter was muscle and Obie an errand boy. Archie alone was always under pressure, devising the assignments, working them out. As if he was some kind of machine. Press a button: out comes an assignment. What did they know about the agonies of it all? The nights he tossed and turned? The times he felt used up, empty? And yet he couldn't deny he exulted in moments like this, the guys leaning forward in anticipation, the mystery that surrounded them all, the kid Goober white-faced and frightened, the place so quiet you could almost hear your own heartbeat. And all eyes on him: Archie.”

Robert Cormier book The Chocolate War

Source: The Chocolate War (1974), p. 33

Way, Guy, Boy, Thinking

“The moonlight shown upon her as she lay back in my bed.
It was the kind of scene I only had imagined in my head.
I just could not believe it, to think that she was real.
And as I tried to tell her she said "Shhh.. I know just how you feel.
And if you want to come here with me, then that's all right with me.
'Cause I've been oh so lonely, lovin' someone is a better way to be.
anywhere's a better way to be."”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Better Place to Be
Song lyrics, Sniper and Other Love Songs (1972)

Way, Imagination, Thinking

“We sent men with rifles into Afghanistan and Iraq, and we kept our best weapons in their silos. Even now, we're standing there dying, daring to do nothing decisive because we've declared ourselves to be better than our terrorist enemies, more moral, more civilized. Our image is at stake, we insist.
But we didn't come this far because we are made of sugar candy. Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and into this continent by giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans. Yes, that was biological warfare. And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on, to grab this land from whomever, and we grew prosperous. And yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves.
And so it goes with most great nation-states, which feeling guilty about their savage pasts, eventually civilize themselves out of business, and wind up invaded and ultimately dominated by the lean, hungry, up-and-coming who are not made of sugar candy.”

Paul Harvey (1918–2009) American broadcaster

Commenting on historical military and social policies, during his ABC News broadcast (23 June 2005); quoted in "Agression Dominates the Airwaves" by Saul Landau, at Transnational Institute (19 July 2005) http://www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml?act_id=1859&username=guest@tni.org&password=9999&publish=Y.

Men, Way, Business, Decision

“It had always been one of my convictions that Jews and Arabs could live together. Even as a child it never occurred to me that Jews might someday be living in Israel without Arabs, or separated from Arabs. On the contrary, for me it had always seemed perfectly normal for the two people to live and work side by side. That is the nature of life here and it always will be…. though Israel is a Jewish nation, it is, of course, not only a Jewish nation… I begin with the basic conviction that Jews and Arabs can live together. I have repeated that at every opportunity, not for journalists and not for popular consumption, but because I have never believed differently or thought differently, from my childhood on. I am not afraid of Arabs. I feel I can live with them. I believe I understand their problems. I know that we are both inhabitants of this land, and although the state is Jewish, that does not mean that Arabs should not be full citizens in every sense of the word.”

Ariel Sharon (1928–2014) prime minister of Israel and Israeli general

Ariel Sharon, ‎David Chanoff (2002) Warrior: An Autobiography p. 343, 542-3
2000s

Life, People, Understanding, Nature

“You are an adult, and you can dress up whenever you want to. You don't need permission anymore! If you wake up next Tuesday, and you feel like being Batman, go for it! And then you go to work, and your boss will look up and go "who are you," and you can say…"I am Batman. That's who I am, who are you?"”

Lewis Black (1948) American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor

The Carnegie Hall Performance (2006)

“Saying ‘yes’ to major life decisions when inside you are crying out to say ‘no’ is more serious. Doing the opposite of what you feel is right can destroy your chances of achieving your dreams and goals. I have coached too many people who regret going with the flow on major life decisions and now need help living with the consequences.”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Life, People, Dreams, Decision

“It was this,: the future hanging heavy in the air, and Henry starting a quiet, drunk conversation about whether or not Blue would like to travel to Venezuela with him. Blue replying softly that she would, she very much would, and Gansey hearing the longing in her voice like he was being undone, like his own feelings were unbearably mirrored. I cant come? Gansey asked. Yes, you can meet us there in a fancy plane, Henry said. Don't be fooled by his fancy hair, Blue interjected, Gansey would hike. And warmth filled the empty caverns in Gansey's heart. He felt known.”

Maggie Stiefvater (1981) American writer

pg 155
The Raven Cycle Series, The Raven King (2016)

Fools, Travel, Future, Heart

“Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book III, Ch. 4
My Antonia (1918)

Men, Home, Time

“[Radhakrishnan describes the state of dejection he experienced as a student at Madras Christian College:] 'I was strongly persuaded of the inferiority of the Hindu religion to which I attributed the political downfall of India…. I remember the cold sense of reality, the depressing feeling that crept over me, as a causal relation between the anaemic Hindu religon and our political failure forced itself on my mind.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Radhakrishnan, 'The Spirit of Man', quoted in Rajiv Malhotra, Indra's Net, p. 316., 1st ed.

Religion, Failure, Reality, Sense

“I think that when you are famous every weakness is exaggerated. … Goethe said, "Talent is developed in privacy," you know? And it's really true. … Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you're a human being, you feel, you suffer. You're gay, you're sick, you're nervous or whatever.”

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

"Marilyn Monroe Pours Her Heart Out" interview by Richard Meryman, in LIFE (3 August 1962)

Thinking, Suffering

“I feel sex is a beautiful thing between two people. Between five, it's fantastic.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Standup Comic (1999)

People, Beauty, Sex

“I always look at everything with the eyes of a child. I feel enthusiastic for things today fort he same reasons as I was enthusiastic about them as a child... I remember one summer morning when I was twelve years old [1888], I was with my father. We were following a road which crossed the plain from Rueil to Croissy. The whole plain was a solid field of corn and the ears stood higher than my head. I still retain today the impression of the vast expanse, spangled with flowers and filled with the drone of insects. Often, later on, I have tried to recapture, to fix firmly in my mind once again, the impression of that world around me, of the sun which burns my face and hands... Every time a see a field of corn I an reminded of that morning.”

Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958) French painter

Source: Quotes dated, Dangerous Corner', 1929, p. 18-19

World, Flowers, Time, Sun

“So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tried to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As [Lewis] Hyde… puts it, "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage." This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly funny to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing by trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.”

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

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
Essays

Way, Time, Country

“A man who is not poor nor ill, nor about to be stoned to death, must not distress himself if he does not feel all through his life what faith Stephen had only in his last moments.”

William Mountford (1816–1885) English Unitarian preacher and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 221.

Life, Death, Faith

“Either no feeling remains to the soul after death, or death itself matters not at all.”
Aut nihil est sensus animis a morte relictum aut mors ipsa nihil.

Marcus Annaeus Lucanus book Pharsalia

Book III, line 39 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia

Death, Soul

“I got the idea to paint people, in the way I see them. From one face I take to my own idea some very characteristic features of it and then I make of the whole a picture in colors and lines, in the way how I meet that person. The whole thing becomes not at all a portrait in the usual sense... I have tried to make types, but will built in more and more personal qualities and all that kind of things... Everything will be figured out fully abstract of course, it is just a personal feeling and no system at all.”

Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876–1923) Dutch painter

translation from German, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
(original version, written by Jacoba in German:) Meine Idee ist es die Menschen zu malen, wie ich sie sehe. Ich nehme aus einem Gesicht einige meiner Ansicht nach am meisten sprechende Züge und ich mache dann vom ganzen ein Bild in den Farben und Linien, wie die Person mir entgegentritt. Das Ganze ist gar kein Porträt im gewöhnlichen Sinne.. .Ich habe mich bemüht, jetz noch Typen zu machen und werde mehr und mehr persönliche Eigenschaften und alle mögliche hereinbringen.. .Alles muss man sich natürlich ganz abstrakt denken, es ist ein persönliches Gefühl und gar kein System.
in a letter to Herwarth Walden, 6 Feb. 1918; as cited by Arend H. Huussen Jr. in Jacoba van Heemskerck, kunstenares van het Expressionisme, Haags Gemeentemuseum The Hague, 1982, p. 20
1910's

People, Color, Way, Idea

“This is zero hour and there's no way back
Can you feel that power in its arms you're wrapped
All through the night-time
Till the sun comes in?
Now Heaven's Open
Fly right in!”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Heaven's Open (1991)

Way, Time, Sun, Flying

“What is this world condition? Body is the world condition. And with body and form goes feeling, perception, consciousness, and all the activities throughout the world. The arising of form and the ceasing of form--everything that has been heard, sensed, and known, sought after and reached by the mind--all this is the embodied world, to be penetrated and realized.
…
The fool thinks he has won a battle when he bullies with harsh speech, but knowing how to be forbearing alone makes one victorious.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

Gautama Buddha, Samyutta Nikaya [citation needed]
Unclassified

World, Fools, Thinking, Sense

“I have gone to the set and you’re kind of around in this—it’s kind of combat writing when you do rewriting and stuff, and I feel like it’s a kind of ambulance chasing. Recently, I did this kind of a (laughing) where you go, “Oh, my God, it’s bleeding from the second act. Quick! Quick! Give me a suture! No, give me the paddles! This is the third act that’s having a heart attack!! The star is coming! The star is coming!"”

Carrie Fisher (1956–2016) American actress, screenwriter and novelist

And it's this incredibly intense process!
From the filmmaking documentary Dreams on Spec

God, Star, Heart

“I don’t want expensive gifts; I don’t want to be bought. I have everything I want. I just want someone to be there for me, to make me feel safe and secure.”

Diana, Princess of Wales (1961–1997) First wife of Charles, Prince of Wales

"Princess Diana: 10 most inspiring quotes from the 'people's princess'", Hello Magazine, Daily News (1 July 2015)

“This great maxim of Philosophy he had gathered by the teaching of nature alone: That man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

Reminiscences (1881), referring to his father, James Carlyle.
Sometimes quoted as "Man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream; Every idle moment is treason". The second of those two clauses in fact comes from Thomas Arnold The Christian Life (1841), Lecture VI.
1880s

Dreams, Nature

“In Daniel 7, Daniel had a vision where “the four winds of the heavens strove upon the great sea. And four beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another” (vv. 2-3). In the vision, Daniel saw a lion with eagle’s wings, a bear with three ribs in its mouth, a leopard with four wings, and a terrible beast with iron teeth and ten horns (v. 7). Bible scholars have speculated on the meaning of this passage for centuries. Some think the four beasts in this chapter represent a rehash of the first four empires from Babylon to the Roman Empire; while others think it is all yet in the future. I’m no scholar but here is my opinion: I (and many Bible scholars) think the four beasts are four world powers that will “strive” for world power (domination?) at the end of time before the one with ten horns finally becomes dominant. I think the four beasts are interpreted as follows: The lion sometimes standing like a man with eagle’s wings (v. 4) represents England (whose symbol as always been the lion) and America (whose symbol is the eagle) united, as one of four major end-time powers. The eagle’s wings “were plucked” and “it was lifted up from the earth, and made to stand upon the feet as a man, and a man’s heart was given to it” (v. 4). My best guess is that America will soon cease to be a world power (wings plucked) but there will still be enough of a godly influence that the English/American alliance will have some “heart” or compassion and maybe even be able to finally “take a stand” for God in the wicked world. I think the bear (v. 5) is Russia (whose symbol is the bear) and the three ribs in its mouth represent three countries it has dominated or “eaten,” such as Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, or perhaps Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia. The leopard with four wings (v. 6) could be some sort of oriental alliance between China, Japan, Korea, and a Southeast Asia alliance (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, etc.). Verse 6 says, “dominion was given to it.” Many certainly feel that China is soon to be the major economic (and military) power in the world. If they could get a military or economic alliance with some of the other oriental nations mentioned, they would indeed be a force to be reckoned with! No animal is named for the fourth beast. It is only described as being dreadful, terrible, strong exceedingly, having great iron teeth, different from all other beasts and having ten horns. As I said earlier there are three options from what I can see for this beast. It is either (A) the European Common Market or a future similar alliance; or (B) 10 world regions and (C) some sort of alliance of Muslim nations around the Middle East or the world. I tend to go with option (C)”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 94-95

God, World, Thinking, Strong

“Open your newspaper any day of the week and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government … The newspaper reader feels a sickening sense of impotence. Yet if these feelings of disgust could be united into common action, something effective could be done.”

Peter Benenson (1921–2005) English human rights activist

Benenson (1961), in: The Observer, 28 May 1961.
Opening of article, which gave birth to Amnesty International.

World, Religion, Sense

“I believe… that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to John Adams (1816)
1810s

Pleasure

“Islam prescribes the bases of social justice. It insures that the poor have claims on the possessions of the rich, and it lays down a just policy for government and finance. It does not need to numb people's feelings and does not call on people to abandon their rights on earth and to expect them only in the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) Egyptian author, educator, Islamic theorist, poet, and politician

Sayyid Qutb and Islamic Activism: A Translation and Critical Analysis of Social Justice in Islam (1996), p. 16

People, Justice

“If we can remember the feeling of love we once had, we can die without ever going away.”

Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie

Tuesdays with Morrie (1997)

Love

““And how do you feel?” the Prince asked in a smooth voice.
“Better than you look,” Thane grunted.”

Lin Carter (1930–1988) American fantasy writer, editor, critic

Source: Tower at the Edge of Time (1968), Chapter 9, “Slaves of Chan” (p. 85)

“Nothing in our daily life will last if neglected; houses, stuffs, friendships, pleasures. Roofs fall in, love comes to an end. A tile needs re-fastening, a joint must be repaired, a misunderstanding cleared up. Otherwise bitterness is created; feelings deep down in the soul become centers of infection, and one day, during a quarrel, the abscess breaks, and each is horrified by the picture of himself or herself discovered in the other's mind.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Marriage

Love, Life, Friendship, Pleasure

“[Some of the] rules and articles of faith [of the western myth]:
Questions that cannot be answered should not be asked.
Knowledge and power are the twin pillars of human identity.
Knowledge consists of organized facts.
Sensation, intuition, and feeling are primitive, immature forms of thought.
Wealth is created by fabricating natural, raw materials into finished products; the production of goods is the basis of value.
Economics has replaced religion as the ultimate concern.
The chief motivation (eros) of human beings is to accumulate and consume.
Advertising and propaganda are the chief erotic sciences of the modern age.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), pp. 23-24

Age, Faith, Religion, Motivation

“A lot of the material is about the inevitable disappointment people feel as they move through life, and things don’t feel the way they expect. No experience will ever match up to the idealized version in your mind.”

Ben Gibbard (1976) American singer, songwriter and guitarist

Source: The Meaning Of Life, II

Life, People, Disappointment, Way

“Nothing can better express the feelings of the scientist towards the great unity of the laws of nature than in Immanuel Kant's words: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing awe: the stars above me and the moral law within me."… Would he, who did not yet know of the evolution of the world of organisms, be shocked that we consider the moral law within us not as something given, a priori, but as something which has arisen by natural evolution, just like the laws of the heavens?”

Konrad Lorenz book On Aggression

Source: On Aggression (1963), Ch. XII : On the Virtue of Scientific Humility

World, Law, Star, Nature

“To appreciate Christmas to the full, one must know how it feels to be deprived of its blessings”

Carlos P. Romulo (1899–1985) Filipino politician and diplomat

as quoted in the " Carlos P Romulo Speech 1949 President UN Assembly, Filipino http://mannaandquail.com/2012/07/09/carlos-p-romulo-speech-1949-president-un-assembly-filipino/" on mannaandquail.com

Christmas

“Tom Strong and the rest of the ABC bunch leave me cold for a lot of reasons. First—and I realize this is purely subjective, but what isn’t?—I find a smugness, a condescension that reads to me as nostalgia being done by someone who is not in the least bit nostalgic. Almost as if Moore sits down to write and flips his brain 180°, so he’s not really writing what he feels or what he likes, just the exact opposite of what he would usually write.

Also, there is the whole pastiche/homage/whatever thing. I find this really annoying. Not just when Moore does it. I can look back on elements of my own work and be annoyed at myself for going down that path. I only did it on rare occasions, tho. Moore has turned it into a career. So much so, that in the post-Watchmen era I have trouble calling to mind much that he has done that was not based on someone else’s previous work. I am not the most original guy on the block, but at least when I do Superman, I do Superman.

I suppose a lot of this could simply be the bad taste his earlier work left for me. All that tearing down and “deconstructionism.””

John Byrne (1950) American author and artist of comic books

All that revealing of the flaws and feet of clay, not a bit of which has served the industry in any positive way, and, in fact, has left huge scars across it, like the ones left in the landscape by open pit mining.
Alan Moore

Way, Guy, Tear, Nostalgia

“Lemony Snicket: (narrating) Reading poetry, even if you are only reading to find a secret message within its words, can often give one a feeling of power, the way you can feel powerful if you are the only one who brought an umbrella on a rainy day, or the only one who knows how to untie knots when you're taken hostage.”

Daniel Handler book The Grim Grotto

The Grim Grotto (2004)

Secret, Way, Reading

“It's a sort of infantile thing, painting. Paint in a sense is a certain infantile thing. I mean in the handling. I start out using a brush but then I can't take the time because the idea doesn't correspond, it gets stuck when the brush goes out of paint in a certain length of time. So I have to go back and by then I might have lost the rest of it. So I take my hand and I do it. Or I have those wonderful things that came in later: paint sticks... So I had to find things that I could use, like my hands or the paint sticks... And I did those charts, big palettes... two or three paintings with palettes and all of the colours – pink, flesh, brown, red for blood. And I think with most painters you can think and it can change very fast, the impetus of what something is. It's instinctive in a certain kind of painting, not as if you were painting an object or special things, but it's like coming through the nervous system. It's like a nervous system. It's not described, it's happening. The feeling is going on with the task.”

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) American painter

Source: 2000 - 2011, Cy Twombly, 2000', by David Sylvester (June 2000), p. 179

Idea, Thinking, Sense, Change

“Roll, roll me away,
Won't you roll me away tonight?
I too am lost, I feel double-crossed.
And I'm sick of what's wrong and what's right.
We never even said a word,
We just walked out and got on that bike.
And we rolled.
And we rolled clean out of sight.”

Bob Seger (1945) American singer-songwriter

Roll Me Away
Song lyrics, The Distance (1982)

“Someone should tell him that part of the art of politics is smiling when you feel like you’re swallowing a turd.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

To Alastair Campbell on David Trimble according to Campbell's diaries, The Blair Years (2007) http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XAUVWij78oQC&pg=PA320&lpg=PA320&dq=%22Someone+should+tell+him+that+part+of+the+art+of+politics+is+smiling+when+you+feel+like+you%E2%80%99re+swallowing+a+turd%22&source=bl&ots=NeSrq9ZCGr&sig=hXsgQneQqkODxOnpvNE1yWfmPto&hl=en&sa=X&ei=DSWBUriUFI6jhgfd9YDYCQ&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22Someone%20should%20tell%20him%20that%20part%20of%20the%20art%20of%20politics%20is%20smiling%20when%20you%20feel%20like%20you%E2%80%99re%20swallowing%20a%20turd%22&f=false Attributed

Smile, Art, Parting