Great Throughts Treasury

"All good poetry is spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." - William Wordsworth

"The most human thing we have to do in life is is to learn to speak our honest convictions and feelings and live with the consequences. This is the first requirement of love, and it makes us vulnerable to other people who may ridicule us. But our vulnerability is the only thing we can give to other people." -

"Being As you become aware of your feelings, thoughts, and actions--and can observe them--you reach a most powerful place: the place of choice." - David Dibble

"Hard as it is for us to escape the effects of our own feelings, nobody seems to have difficulty in rejecting the feelings of others as merely subjective and vulnerable to interference from the demons of self-deception and self-delusion." - Felipe Fernández-Armesto

"The true revolutionary is guided by feelings of great love." -

"The seduction of war is insidious because so much of what we are told about it is true; It does create a sense of comradeship, which obliterates our alienation and makes us, for perhaps the only time of our life, feel we belong. War allows us to rise above our small stations in life. We find nobility in a cause and feelings of selflessness and even bliss. And at a time of soaring deficits and financial scandals and the very deterioration of our domestic fabric, war is a fine diversion. War, for those who enter into combat, has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it the "lust of the eye" and warns believers against it. War gives us a distorted sense of self; it gives us meaning." - Chris Hedges

"The secular or freethinking humanist looks into the self for guidance; response to need comes from deep human feelings of compassion, concern for others, and a desire to help. The freethinker is not motivated by a divine command to act, but rather by personal humanistic response to pain, loneliness, hunger, and homelessness. Benevolent actions are not accompanied by a need to convert or indoctrinate, but rather flow from deep human wellsprings of empathy and a desire to improve the condition of the world." - Gerald Alexander Larue

"When I speak to people about creating a life, they often speak of what they want to "do" – as opposed to what they want to "feel." My recommendation to someone facing your decision is to write down a list of feelings that you're trying to create in your life and use that as the measuring stick to determine whether you're achieving your goals. I post my list right above my desk every day." - Luke O’Neill

"We often use the word "meaning" in relation to personal feelings and emotional significance. It then reveals and sometimes declares our highest values. It manifests ideals that we cherish and pursue." - Irving Singer

"Feelings are variously specialized operations, effecting a transition into subjectivity. An actual entity is a process, and is not describable in terms of the morphology of a ‘stuff’." - Alfred North Whitehead

"Often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. We lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year's time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worthwhile actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings." - André Malraux

"Each of us really understands in others only those feelings he is capable of producing in himself." - André Gide, fully André Paul Guillaume Gide

"Since things that are found in the soul are of three kinds - passions, faculties, states of character, virtue must be one of these. By passions I mean appetite, anger, fear, confidence, envy, joy, friendly feeling, hatred, longing, emulation, pity, and in general the feelings that are accompanied by pleasure or pain; by faculties the things in virtue of which we are said to be capable of feeling these, for example, of becoming angry or being pained or feeling pity; by states of character the things in virtue of which we stand well or badly with reference to the passions, for example, with reference to anger we stand badly if we feel it violently or too weakly, and well if we feel it moderately; and similarly with reference to the other passions. Now neither the virtues nor the vices are passions, because we are not called good or bad on the ground of our virtues and our vices, and because we are neither praised nor blamed for our passions (for the man who feels fear or anger is not praised, nor is the man who simply feels anger blamed, but the man who feels it in a certain way), but for our virtues and our vices we are praised or blamed." - Aristotle NULL

"When men hear imitations, even apart from the rhythms and tunes themselves, their feelings move in sympathy. Since then music is a pleasure, and virtue consists in rejoicing and loving and hating aright, there is clearly nothing which we are so much concerned to acquire and to cultivate as the power of forming right judgments and of taking delight in good dispositions and noble actions. Rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and of the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know form our own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a change. The habit of feeling pleasure or pain at mere representation is not far removed from the same feeling about realities." - Aristotle NULL

"Men best show their character in trifles, where they are not on guard. It is in insignificant matters, and in the simplest habits, that we often see the boundless egotism which pays no regard to the feelings of others, and denies nothing to itself." - Arthur Schopenhauer

"Joy and sorrow are not ideas of the mind but affections of the will, and so they do not lie in the domain of memory. We cannot recall our joys and sorrows; by which I mean we cannot renew them. We can recall only the ideas that accompanied them; and, in particular, the things we were led to say; and these form a gauge of our feelings at the time. Hence our memory of joys and sorrows is always imperfect, and they become a matter of indifference to us as soon as they are over." - Arthur Schopenhauer

"To laugh is to risk appearing the fool. To weep is to risk appearing sentimental. To reach out for another is to risk involvement. To expose our feelings is to risk exposing our true self. To place your ideas and dreams before the crowd is to risk loss. To love is to risk not being loved in return. To hope is to risk despair. To try at all is to risk failure. But risk we must, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. The man, the woman who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing." - Author Unknown NULL

"Patriotism depends as much on mutual suffering as on mutual success; and it is by that experience of all fortunes and all feelings that a great national character is created." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

"Feelings are chemical and can kill or cure." - Bernie S. Siegel

"Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

"One-half of life is admitted by us to be passed in sleep, in which, however, it may appear otherwise, we have no perception of truth, and all our feelings are delusions; who knows but the other half of life, in which we think we are awake, is a sleep also, but in some respects different from the other, and from which we wake when we, as we call it sleep. As a man dreams often that he is dreaming, crowding one dreamy delusion on another." - Blaise Pascal

"All great discoveries are made by those whose feelings run ahead of their thinking." - Charles Henry Parkhurst

"The rule of life is to be found within yourself. Ask yourself constantly, "What is the right thing to do?" Beware of ever doing that which you are likely, sooner or later, to repent of having done. It is better to live in peace than in bitterness and strife. It is better to believe in your neighbors than to fear and distrust them. The superior man does not wrangle. He is firm but not quarrelsome. He is sociable but not clannish. The superior man sets a good example to his neighbors. He is considerate of their feelings and property. Consideration for others is the basis of a good life, and a good society. Feel kindly toward everyone. Be friendly and pleasant among yourselves. Be generous and fair." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL

"Without feelings of respect, what is there to distinguish men from beasts?" - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL

"It is the way we react to circumstances that determines our feelings." - Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey

"Expression has a different tone from communication; it involves not only sharing one's own emotional reality but encouraging others to do the same... Emotional self-expression - sharing their authentic feelings honestly and directly and encouraging others to do the same... cultivate empathy but avoid sympathy." - Dan Millman, born Daniel Jay Millman

"If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear and hope will forward it; and they who persist in opposing this mighty current will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men. They will not be so much resolute and firm as perverse and obstinate." - Edmund Burke

"Man is a machine. All his actions, words, thoughts, feelings, opinions and habits are the results of external influences, external impressions. Out of himself a man cannot produce a single thought, a single action. Everything he says, does , thinks, feels - all this happens. To establish this fact for oneself, to be convinced of its truth, means getting ride of a thousand illusions about man, about his being creative and consciously organizing his own life, and so on. But it is one thing to understand with the mind and another thing to feel with one’s ‘whole mass’, to be really convinced that it is so and never forget it." - George Gurdjieff, fully George Ivanovich Gurdjieff

"Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life." - George Santayana

"The public is bored by foreign affairs until a crisis arises; and then it is guided by; feelings rather than by thoughts." - Harold Nicolson, fully Sir Harold George Nicolson

"It is impossible to indulge in habitual severity of opinion upon our fellow-men without injuring the tenderness and delicacy of our own feelings." - Henry Ward Beecher

"There is no liberty to men whose passions are stronger than their religious feelings; there is no liberty to men in whom ignorance predominates over knowledge; there is no liberty to men who know not how to govern themselves." - Henry Ward Beecher

"Thinking cannot be clear till it has had expression. We must write, or speak, or act our thoughts, or they will remain in a half torpid form. Our feelings must have expression, or they will be as clouds, which, till they descend in rain, will never bring up fruit or flower. So it is with all the inward feelings; expression gives them development. Thought is the blossom; language the opening bud; action the fruit behind it." - Henry Ward Beecher

"Men are not rational beings, as commonly supposed. A man is a bundle of instincts, feelings, sentiments, which severally seek their gratification and those which are in power get hold of the reason and use it to their own ends, and exclude all other sentiments and feelings of power." - Herbert Spencer

"Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings and not by the intellect." - Herbert Spencer

"Virtue... in so far as it is based on internal freedom, contains a positive command for man, namely, that he should bring all his powers and inclinations under his rule (that of reason); and this is a positive precept of command over himself which is additional to the prohibition, namely, that he should not allow himself to be governed by his feelings and inclinations (the duty of apathy); since, unless reason takes the reins of government into its own hands, the feelings and inclinations play the master over the man." - Immanuel Kant

"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

"Customs are made for customary circumstances and customary characters... The mind itself is bowed to the yoke; even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they live in crowds: they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have not nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own." - John Stuart Mill

"It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it, and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become noble and beautiful object of contemplation; and as the works partake the character of those who do them, by the same process human life also becomes rich, diversified, and animating, furnishing more abundant aliment to high thoughts and elevating feelings, and strengthening the tie which binds every individual to the race, by making the race infinitely better worth belonging to." - John Stuart Mill

"The convictions of the mass of mankind run hand in hand with their interests or with their class feelings." - John Stuart Mill

"The moral feelings are not innate, but acquired." - John Stuart Mill

"What is required to participate more fully in our own health and well-being is simply to listen more carefully and to trust what we hear, to trust the messages from our own life, from our own body and mind and feelings." - Jon Kabat-Zinn

"Music is the only sensual gratification which mankind may; indulge in to excess without injury to their moral or religious feelings." - Joseph Addison

"Politeness is to goodness what words are to thought. It tells not only on the manners, but on the mind and the heart; it renders the feelings, the opinions, the words, moderate and gentle." - Joseph Joubert

"Scurrility has no object in view but incivility; if it is uttered from feelings of petulance, it is mere abuse; if it is spoken in a joking manner, it may be considered raillery." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

"The past is not dead; it is not even past. People live on inner time; the moment in which a decisive thought or feeling takes place can be at any time. Timeless feelings are common to all of us." - Martha Graham

"Work has to include our deepest values and passions and feelings and commitments, or it's not work, it's just a job. A job is something to pay our bills with. Work is something that touches our heart and expresses our being. That joy is the key to spirit." - Matthew Fox

"Memories, thoughts and feelings are all shaped by how we use it. And it is an energy under our control, to do with as we please; hence, attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály

"When attention is not focused on a goal, the mind typically begins to be filled by disjointed and depressing thoughts. The normal condition of the mind is chaos. Only when involved in a goal-directed activity does it acquire order and positive moods... Boredom directs us to seek new challenges, while anxiety urges us to develop new skills; the net result is that, in order to avoid such negative feelings, a person is forded to grow in complexity." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály

"A well-composed song strikes and softens the mind, and produces a greater effect than a moral work, which convinces our reason, but does not warm our feelings, nor affect the slightest alteration in our habits." - Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I