feeling quotes

  • Onlybut this is rare When a beloved hand is laid in ours, When, jaded with the rush and glare Of the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear, When our world-deafened ear Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again. The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.

    - Matthew Arnold
      Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems,'The Buried Life', l.77^87.

  •   Sentences which simply express moral judgements do not say anything. Theyare pure expressions of feeling and as such donot come under the categoryof truth and falsehood.

    - SirAlfred Jules Ayer
      Language, Truth and Logic, ch.6.

  • L'amour n'est pas seulement un sentiment, il est un art aussi. Love is not only a feeling; it is also an art.

    - Honore   de Balzac
    La Recherche de l'absolu.

  • Sometimes you just get the feeling that here it is 11o'clock in the morning and you're not in school.

    - Marlon Brando
      On playing in Western films. In the NewYork Post,11 May.

  •    It is therefore our business carefully to cultivate in our minds, to rear to the most perfect vigour and maturity, every sort of generous and honest feeling that belongs to our nature. To bring the dispositions that are loved in private life into the service and conduct of the commonwealth; so to be patriots, asnot toforget we are gentlemen.

    - Edmund Burke
      Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents.

  • I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me, High mountains are a feeling, but the hum Of human cities torture.

    -Rochdale
    ^18  Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 3, stanza 72.

  • Remember your own childhood. That complete certainty you had, looking at the grown-ups, that you would never be like that. It was a lonely feeling, but euphoric, too.

    -Jane Campion
      Interview with Sarah Gristwood in The Times Magazine, 'Jane Campion:  A Childhood',1  Jan.

  •    I remember my youth and the feeling that it will never come back any morethe feeling that I could last for ever, outlast thesea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effortto death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expiresand expires, too soon, too soonbefore life itself.

    - Sir William Neil pseudonym Cassandra Connor
      'Youth'.

  • To create is first of all to destroy†there is and can be no such thing as authentic art until the bons trucs (whereby we are taught to see and imitate on canvas and in stone and by words this so-called world) are entirely and

    - e e pen name of  Edward Estlin Cummings cummings

  • After great pain, a formal feeling comes The Nerves sit ceremonious, likeTombs.

    - Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
    c.1862  Complete Poems, no.341 (first published1929).

  • If at times my eyes are lenses through which the brain explores constellations of feeling my ears yielding like swinging doors admit princes to the corridors into the mind, do not envy me. I have a beast on my back.

    - Gavin Douglas
      'Be"  te Noire'.

  •    Nor one feeling of vengeance presumed to defile The cause, or the men, or the Emerald Isle.

    -William Drennan
      Erin, stanza 3.

  • Le sentiment enseigne bien mieux si l'ouvrage touche que toutes les dissertations compose  es par les critiques. Feeling teaches much more than all the writing of critics if the work touches us.

    -Jean-Baptiste Du Bos
      Re  flexions critiques sur la poe  sie et la peinture.

  •    If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

    - George pseudonym of  MaryAnn Evans Eliot
    ^2  Middlemarch, bk.2, ch.20.

  • And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      Four Quartets,'East Coker', pt.5.

  • I have a feeling I'm falling on rare occasions but most of the time I have my feet on the ground I can't help it if the ground itself is falling.

    - Lawrence Ferlinghetti
      'Mock Confessional'.

  • Il ne faut pas toujours croire que le sentiment soit tout. Dans les arts, il n'est rien sans la forme. You must not think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.

    - Gustave Flaubert
      Letter to Mme Louise Colet,12  Aug.

  • That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women seetherelationship between objects† It is an extra dimension of feeling which we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real womenand absurd.

    -John Robert Fowles
      The Magus, ch.52.

  • Every true work of art must express a distinct feeling.

    - Caspar David Friedrich
    Quoted in William Vaughn Romantic  Art (1978).

  • Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes.

    - Robert M Hutchins
    Quoted in Colin  Jarman The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

  • Nowhere probably is there more true feeling, and nowhere worse taste, than in a churchyard.

    - Benjamin Jowett
    Quoted in Evelyn  Abbott and Lewis Campbell (eds) Letters of Benjamin Jowett (1899), ch.6.

  • Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.

    - Charles Lamb
      In the London Magazine, May^  Jul. Collected in Essays of Elia,'Detached Thoughts of Books and Reading'.

  • Ceremony is an invention to take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow-creature than some other person is. It endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater.

    - Charles Lamb
      Essays of Elia,'A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People'.

  • Now mancannot live without somevisionof himself.But still less can he live with a vision that is not true to his inner experience and inner feeling.

    - D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence
      'The Risen Lord'.

  • But thisnovel wasnot a trumpet for Women's Liberation. It described many female emotions of aggression, hostility, resentment. It put them into print. Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise.

    - Doris May ne  e Tayler Lessing
    The Golden Notebook, preface to new edition.

  • It may be divided into three parts; in one you cannot hear, in another you cannot see, and in the third you can neither see nor hear. I remember once sitting alone in the third divisionand never before or since have I had such a profound feeling of the power of solitude.

    - Christopher pseudonym of  JohnWilson North
      Of the Theatre Royal, Glasgow.'Noctes  Ambrosianae', no.64, in Blackwood's Magazine, Nov.

  • . Dieu d'Abraham, Dieu d'Isaac, Dieu de Jacob, non des philosophes et savants. Certitude. Certitude. Sentiment. Joie. Paix. .God of Abraham,God of Isaac,God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars.Certainty.Certainty. Feeling.Joy. Peace.

    - Blaise Pascal
    FEUFIREc.1662  Note found after his death on a parchment stitched to his coat.

  • A feeling of emulsion swept over me.

    - S(ydney) J(oseph) Perelman
      Crazy Like a Fox,'The Love Decoy'.

  • Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male istoaccept a womannot merelyas feeling, not merelyas thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.

    - Sylvia Plath
      Written while a student at Cambridge University, in Isis, 6 May.

  • I remember the front door. I remember the auditorium. I remember the feeling that you can't make it. But you can.

    - Colin Luther Powell
      On revisiting the South Bronx high school from which he graduated in1954. In the NewYorkTimes,16 Apr.

  • The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still.Like whentheysay 'Asit wasin the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end'.

    -Jean pseudonym of  Ellen Gwendolen Rees Williams Rhys
      Voyage in the Dark, ch.4, pt.1.

  • Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

    -Johnny stage name of  John Lydon Rotten
      Having walked offstage at the WinterlandBallroom during The Sex Pistols tour of the US,14 Jan.

  • All violent feelings†produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the'Pathetic Fallacy'.

    -John Ruskin
      Modern Painters, vol.3, pt.4, ch.12.

  • La cruaute  , bien loin d'e"  tre un vice, est le premier sentiment qu'imprime en nous la nature; l'enfant brise son hochet, mord le te  ton de sa nourrice, e  trangle son oiseau, bien avant que d'avoir l'a"  ge de raison. Far from being a vice, cruelty is the primary feeling that nature imprints in us. The infant breaks its rattle, bites its nurse's nipple, and strangles a bird, well before reaching the age of reason.

    - Donatien Alphonse Fran c° ois, Marquis de Sade
      La Philosophie dans le boudoir.

  • Vous savez qu'on doit se sentir heureux.Tous les vrais e  crivains ont e  prouve   ce sentiment. Quand on ne l'e  prouve pas, je suis oblige   de vous en avertir, c'est mauvais signe. You know that one should feel happy. All thetrue writers have experienced this feeling.When one does not experience it, I am obliged to tell you that it is a bad sign.

    - Nathalie Sarraute
      Entre la vie et la mort.

  • This barbarous feeling of nationality†has become the curse of Europe.

    - Le  opold Se  dar Senghor
      Diary, 20 May.

  • We were obsessed by the feeling that this was the supreme cause of our time. The cause of poets and of writers.The cause of freedom. And that unlessthe cause of anti-Fascism was won, unless Fascism was defeated, we would be unable to exist as writers.

    - Sir Stephen Harold Spender
      Speaking on the ITV seriesThe Spanish CivilWar, no.3, 'Battleground for idealists'.

  • Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

    -Wallace Stevens
      Opus Posthumous, Aphorisms,'Adagia'.

  • One to whose smooth-rubbed soul can cling Nor form, nor feeling, great or small; A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, An intellectual All-in-all!

    -William Wordsworth
      'A Poet's Epitaph', stanza 8 (published1800).

  • Compassed round by pleasure, sighed For independent happiness; craving peace, The central feeling of all happiness, Not as a refuge from distress or pain, A breathing-time, vacation, or a truce, But for its absolute self.

    -William Wordsworth
      'The Excursion', bk.3, l.380^5.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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