Not Feeling Life Quotes & Sayings

Life is not a thing of knowing only
nay, mere knowledge has properly no place at all save as it becomes the handmaiden of feeling and emotions. — Learned Hand

My chest tightens: seeing him so upset breaks my own heart. 'Don't you ever wish you could make that bit go away?" I say, feeling angry at the past. 'That you could erase those painful memories, forget they every happened, just remember the happy times you had together?'
'You must never say that,' he reprimands sternly.
'But why not?' I look at him in surprise.
'Because it's the bad memories that makes you appreciate the good ones. Don't ever wish them away. it's like your nan always used to say, "You need both the sun and the rain to make a rainbow". — Alexandra Potter

Out of life's storm I carried only a few ideas - and not one feeling. — Mikhail Lermontov

Normal people are not always boring. On the contrary. Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and enticing, are not intrinsically preferable to a steadiness of experience and feeling about another person (nor are they incompatible). These are beliefs, of course, that one has intuitively about friendships and family; they become less obvious when caught up in a romantic life that mirrors, magnifies, and perpetuates one's own mercurial emotional life and temperament. It has been with my pleasure, and not-inconsiderable pain, that I have learned about the possibilities of love - its steadiness and its growth - from my husband, the man with whom I had lived for almost a decade. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I can't help feeling as if there's something missing in my life. But I don't know what it is. And the harder I look, the more I can't find it because there's just too much pressure and not enough time. — Alexandra Potter

SHE WAS MEETING a man she had recently and abruptly fallen in love with. She was in a state of ghastly anxiety. He was married, for one thing, to a Korean woman whom he described as the embodiment of all that was feminine and elegant. Not only that, but a psychic had told her that a relationship with him could cripple her emotionally for the rest of her life. On top of this, she was tormented by the feeling that she looked inadequate. — Mary Gaitskill

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife. — Audre Lorde

I'm frequently asked, "Do you believe there's extraterrestrial intelligence?" I give the standard arguments- there are a lot of places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the word billions, and so on. Then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it.
Often, I'm asked next, "What do you really think?"
I say, "I just told you what I really think."
"Yes, but what's your gut feeling?"
But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in. — Carl Sagan

There is one final point, the point that separates a true multivolume work from a short story, a novel, or a series. The ending of the final volume should leave the reader with the feeling that he has gone through the defining circumstances of Main Character's life. The leading character in a series can wander off into another book and a new adventure better even than this one. Main Character cannot, at the end of your multivolume work. (Or at least, it should seem so.) His life may continue, and in most cases it will. He may or may not live happily ever after. But the problems he will face in the future will not be as important to him or to us, nor the summers as golden. — Gene Wolfe

I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like Mohammed's coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do. — T.E. Lawrence

I know not from what distant time thou art ever coming nearer to meet me. Thy sun and stars can never keep thee hidden from me for aye.
In many a morning and eve thy footsteps have been heard and thy messenger has come within my heart and called me in secret.
I know not only why today my life is all astir, and a feeling of tremulous joy is passing through my heart.
It is as if the time were come to wind up my work, and I feel in the air a faint smell of thy sweet presence — Rabindranath Tagore

I don't really know a whole lot about complicated, worldly things. But I think parents and siblings, they need to be able to care for each other unconditionally. How many people could you risk your life to protect? Not that many, I bet. Everyone's top priority is taking care of themselves. But if there's anyone who can overcome that, it's flesh and blood. If you understand that feeling, then you can look at other people, and realize, this person's family cares about them, too. That's a really heavy feeling. When you think about that, it becomes a lot harder to do horrible things to them. So I think that love for your family ... is really at the root of what it means to care for other people. — Mohiro Kitoh

15 "probable illnesses" that are afflicting the curial body, including those of feeling "indispensable;" of excessive work habits and not enough time to rest and recharge before the Lord; of a spiritual hardening of hearts; of over-planning and not leaving room for the Holy Spirit to function; of a lack of collaboration; of living autonomously while forgetting salvation history; of vanity; of living a double life; of the "terrorism of gossip"; of egotistic opportunism; of indifference; of pessimism; of materialism; of cliquishness; and of the allures of power. — Anonymous

Curiously, just as much if not more mindless behavior can creep into our most momentous closures and life transitions, including our own aging and our own dying. Here, too, mindfulness can have healing effects. We may be so defended against feeling the full impact of our emotional pain - whether it be grief, sadness, shame, disappointment, anger, or for that matter, even joy or satisfaction - that we unconsciously escape into a cloud of numbness in which we do not permit ourselves to feel anything at all or know what we are feeling. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

It is not because I do not love my adopted land - it is the natural feeling of one far from home, who remembers those happy, carefree days when life flowed at full tide, without responsibility, flashing past one like the drama in a fascinating story of adventure and romance. — Erich Von Stroheim

We are all born happy. Life gets us dirty along the way, but we can clean it up. Happiness is not exuberant or noisy, like pleasure or joy; it's silent, tranquil, and gentle; it's a feeling of satisfaction inside that begins with self-love. You need to love yourself as I do, as all those who know you do, especially Alma's grandson. — Isabel Allende

The actual language of life is not the charts and graphs and stuff we map out to feel smart. The hidden language we are speaking is really about negotiating the feeling God used to give us. — Donald Miller

It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places of her life, like a familiar cafe that exists someone outside geography and beyond time zones.
There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F:, and some muchlarger and uncounted number of lurkers. And right now there are three people in Chat. But there's no way of knowing exactly who until you are in there, and the chat room she finds not so comforting. It's strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. the hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counmter-purposes, deter her. — William Gibson

My feeling about fiction, regardless of the genre, is that it is meant to be a representation of life. I want my books to give a whole spectrum of experiences to my readers. Not just fear or terror or revulsion, but excitement, laughter, pain, sorrow, desire, etc. — Richard Laymon

The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow. It eliminates the vice of procrastination, the sin of postponement, failed communications, failed communions. This thought has made me more and more attentive to all encounters. meetings, introductions, which might contain the seed of depth that might be carelessly overlooked. This feeling has become a rarity, and rarer every day now that we have reached a hastier and more superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people, more people, more countries. This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us. The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision. — Anais Nin

The most ernest prayer that I know is to ask for the life energy of the universe to come down into my body and let my mind become full and overflowing with peace and gratitude. Meditation is earnest prayer, and when prayer progress, it becomes true meditation.
No matter what prayer you offer, or from where, the key to prayer is sincerity. It isn't a certain posture that's important, but whatever you do, the important thing is not to lose the feeling of sincere devotion and earnestness. — Ilchi Lee

She called me Nerdy because I wore glasses and read books and ate yogurt on my lunch break. I'm not really a nerd: I only aspire to be one. Because of the high-school-dropout thing, I'm a self-didact. (Not a dirty word, look it up.) I read constantly. I think. But I lack formal education. So I'm left with the feeling that I'm smarter than everyone around me but that if I ever got around really smart people - people who went to universities and drank wine and spoke Latin - that they'd be bored as hell by me. It's a lonely way to go through life. So I wear the name as a badge of honor. That someday I may not totally bore some really smart people. The question is: How do you find smart people? — Gillian Flynn

Virtual Reality is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures. — Mark Zuckerberg

One of God's central qualities is compassion, a word that in Hebrew is related to the word for "womb." Not only is compassion a female image suggesting source of life and nourishment but it also has a feeling dimension: God as compassionate Spirit feels for us as a mother feels for the children of her womb. Spirit feels the suffering of the world and participates in it ... — Marcus Borg

I cannot love as I have loved, And yet I know not why; It is the one great woe of life To feel all feeling die. — Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

And then, for an hour, he became aware of the strange life he was leading, of him doing lots of things which were only a game, of, though being happy and feeling joy at times, real life still passing him by and not touching him — Hermann Hesse

It isn't necessary to know exactly how your ideal life will look; you only have to know what feels better and what feels worse ... Begin making choices based on what makes you feel freer and happier, rather than on how you think an ideal life should look. It's the process of feeling our way toward happiness, not the realization of the Platonic ideal, that creates our best lives. — Martha Beck

I am miserable now - not feeling unhappiness, just lack of life coming to me and coming out of me - resignation to getting nothing and seeking nothing, staying behind shell. The glare of unknown love, human, unhad by me, - the tenderness I never had. I don't want to be just a nothing, a sick blank, withdrawal into myself forever. I just want something, beside the emptiness I've carried around in me all my life. — Allen Ginsberg

In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason ... If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion before we act, life would be at a stand, and Art would be impracticable. — William Hazlitt

A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last, the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life. Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person - this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? — Joseph Conrad

I was 9 years old when I had my first glimpse of wholeness. It was early Christmas morning and I was standing in my pajamas in the living room and looked out of the large windows. Outside the white snow flakes silently singled down toward a snowclad landscape. Suddenly I was filled with a feeling of being one with the slowly dancing snowflakes, one with the silent landscape.
I did not understand then that this was my first taste of meditation, but it created a deep thirst and a longing in my heart to return to this natural and effortless experience of being one with the Whole. — Swami Dhyan Giten

Here, day was not the decorous successor to night known to us at home, lazily resuming sway over a drowsy world when the darkness thins and dies, bequeathing its lost kingdom to the unwilling light. This struggling, sun-born life in forest, swamp and teeming air was too urgent and too ephemeral to wait for the going of night before resuming its unchanging day-labor of growth, fruition and exhaustion once more. Day extended its reign into the darkness, stealing precious time from the night, and when the sky paled perceptibly at last the feeling of full day was already abroad on this impatient earth. — E. Arnot Robertson

I think that the perceived downs in my own career come from just managing my time and not feeling that I have enough time for my family or my friends. You could put that in the personal life category but it's all one category because I've got to balance my family. — Steven Spielberg

I like you in my bed," Patch said. "I rarely pull down the covers. I rarely sleep. I could get used to this picture."
"Are you offering me a permanent place?"
"Already put a spare key in your pocket."
I patted my pocket. Sure enough, something small and hard was snug inside. "How charitable of you."
"I'm not feeling very charitable now," he said, holding my eyes, his voice deepening with a gravelly edge. "I missed you, Angel. Not one day went by that I didn't feel you missing from my life. You haunted me to the point that I began to believe Hank had gone back on his oath and killed you. I saw your ghost in everything. I couldn't escape you and I didn't want to. You tortured me, but it was better than losing you. — Becca Fitzpatrick

The meaning of life is creative love. Not love as an inner feeling, as a private sentimental emotion, but love as a dynamic power moving out in the world and doing something original. — Old Tom Morris

It is natural for us to think that our present discontent arises as a result of something we currently do not have. We imagine there might be a way of abolishing the feeling if only we had the money, fame, job, or health that currently evades us. But people from all walks of life seem to experience the same kind of dissatisfaction that we do, even when they have the very things we believe would make our lives whole. And on the occasions when we gain the thing we believe will make us happy, we find that the satisfaction we experience is at best partial and at worst utterly unfulfilling. — Peter Rollins

Feel like Christ and you will be a Christ; feel like Buddha and you will be a Buddha. It is feeling that is the life, the strength, the vitality, without which no amount of intellectual activity can reach God. It is through the heart that the Lord is seen, and not through the intellect. — Swami Vivekananda

Life's not about feeling better, it's about getting the job done. — Ned Vizzini

I leave the governor's office next week, and with it public life[which] has been on the whole a pleasant one. But for ten years and over my salaries have not equalled my expenses, and there has been a feeling of responsibility, a lack of independence, and a necessary neglect of my family and personal interests and comfort, which make the prospect of a change comfortable to think of. — Rutherford B. Hayes

Were it not for the consciousness of Christ in my life, hour by hour, I could not go on. But He is teaching me the glorious lessons of His sufficiency, and each day I am carried onward with no feeling of strain or fear of collapse. — Hudson Taylor

(Dad) could not abide us feeling sorry for ourselves. Life was far too good for us to whine about small things. It was selfish, and on top of that, it was boring. — Jean Kennedy Smith

She sat for a moment, feeling the rhythmic rattle of the train's motion. "Does it ever bother you to be in his shadow, Wayne?"
"Who? Wax? I mean, he's been putting on weight, but he's not that fat yet, is he?" He grinned, though that faded when she didn't smile back. And, in an uncharacteristic moment of solemnity, he slid his boots off the table and rested one elbow on it instead, leaning toward her.
"Nah," he said after some thought. "Nah, it doesn't. But I don't care much if people look at me or not. Sometimes my life is easier if they ain't looking at me, ya know? I like listening. — Brandon Sanderson

Let Love Move You ...
If you can't stop thinking of her, it's because her essence has left an imprint on your heart ... on your soul ...
Don't be afraid of this feeling; be nourished by it ...
Let it stir your entire being ...
Let it help release your greatest self ...
Let it inspire you to be loving ... to be respectful ... to be romantic ... to be intelligent ... to be passionate ... to be a good listener ... to be appreciative ...
Let this wonderful feeling move you to become a passionate love maker ... a ravenous seducer ...
Do not be afraid of this deep love! Let it reveal the best of you ...
Let this feeling encourage you to behave in an honest and sincere manner ...
So that you may be more than a person she would settle for ... so that you may be a person she would yearn for. — Steve Maraboli

When I was five years old I was molested and just, you know. I remember feeling, literally right before it happened, I just could not believe that this person was going to do this to me. That thing followed me all my life. The shame of thinking my molestation was my fault - it led me to believe I wasn't worth anything. — Mary J. Blige

Life like candies.
You have your favorite candy, you have tasted it hundred times, you have got used to that, you know the taste, it is a perfect match for you. But there are plenty of the other ones, not tested yet, some of the them look so delicious that you wish to try them out, that feeling is so strong and instantaneous, but stop and think about it for a second, as soon as you will try it out, your favorite candy will never taste the same. — Unknown

Peter: Oy!
Harriet: Hullo!
Peter: I just wanted to ask whether you'd given any further thought to that suggestion about marrying me.
Harriet (sarcastically) : I suppose you were thinking how delightful it would be to go through life together like this?
Peter: Well, not quite like this. Hand in hand was more my idea.
Harriet: What is that in your hand?
Peter: A dead starfish.
Harriet: Poor fish!
Peter: No ill-feeling, I trust?
Harriet: Oh, dear no. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Motivation and inspiration energize people, not by pushing them in the right direction as control mechanisms do but by satisfying basic human needs for achievement, a sense of belonging, recognition, self-esteem, a feeling of control over one's life, and the ability to live up to one's ideals. Such feelings touch us deeply and elicit a powerful response. — John P. Kotter

I didn't think I was in a morbid mood, but it appears I am. My mind goes round and round trying to figure things out, but I always come back to the same two things: Loneliness and Death. Life ends before we figure anything out, most importantly how not to be lonely. Solitude is fine. But feeling like you have no one to love - abject lonliness - is not alright. — Jonathan Ames

When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today. By the mere existence of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase. The stomach might well be satisfied by such participation, but not man insofar as he is a thinking and feeling being. — Albert Einstein

Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning. — Vaclav Havel

I'm too intense. I feel too much. And when I experience certain sensations, I act. Even if the situation is one I should probably walk away from. But you know what?" She was feeling a little better. "I'm never going to walk away, not from any of it. I can't. I am what I am. I'm intense, just as my fiance said. I feel everything around me, and I'm glad about that. I can't imagine life without the depth, without the magic that accompanies the pain. — Tara Taylor Quinn

What am I sorry for? Taking off her shirt? Kissing her until I thought I was going to lose my mind? Touching her? Feeling her? Of all the things I may be sorry for in my life, I'm honestly not sorry for any of that. — Katie McGarry

I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life. — E. M. Forster

When all are undressed, one is somehow not ashamed, but when one's the only one undressed and everybody is looking, it's degrading,' he kept repeating to himself, again and again. 'It's like a dream, I've sometimes dreamed of being in such degrading positions.' It was a misery to him to take off his socks. They were very dirty, and so were his underclothes, and now everyone could see it. And what was worse, he disliked his feet. All his life he had thought both his big toes hideous. He particularly loathed the coarse, flat, crooked nail on the right one, and now they would all see it. Feeling intolerably ashamed made him, at once and intentionally, rougher. He pulled off his shirt, himself. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There was still one response, the greatest, that she had missed. She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth ... To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his ... No, not Francisco d'Anconia, not Hank Rearden, not any man she had ever met or admired ... A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience. — Ayn Rand

The mistakes of my youth have allowed me to see what true love is through the experience of its absence. They have allowed me to see that love is not a feeling but an action. It is the laying down of one's life for the beloved. It is not the laying down of someone else's life or body for our own gratification. Ultimately, as a Christian, I have come to see that love is not merely an action but a commandment. We are commanded to love the Lord our God and to love our neighbor - and our enemy. Clearly true love has nothing to do with selfishness in any — Joseph Pearce

Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it - a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling! — Virginia Woolf

Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write 'War and Peace' in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling. — Stanley Kubrick

I knew what the sanctified life was not. Not a life filled with more rituals, more scrupulously observed. Not more praying. Not becoming a better person, being more charitable, more concerned with everyone else's pains. Sanctifying had something to do with a sense of constant wonder - feeling gratitude and finding significance everywhere, in every action, relationship and object. — Vanessa L Ochs

Bathed in light, submerged in sound and rapt in feeling, the sentient body, at once both perceiver and producer, traces the paths of the world's becoming in the very course of contributing to its ongoing renewal. Here, surely, lies the essence of what it means to dwell. It is, literally to be embarked upon a movement along a way of life. The perceiver-producer is thus a wayfarer, and the mode of production is itself a trail blazed or a path followed. Along such paths, lives are lived, skills developed, observations made and understandings grown. But if this is so, then we can no longer suppose that dwelling is emplaced in quite the way Heidegger imagined, in an opening akin to a clearing in the forest. To be, I would now say, is not to be in place but to be along paths. The path, and not the place, is the primary condition of being, or rather of becoming. — Tim Ingold

I'm feeling really hopeful about it, like maybe I actually have a chance to get better. To be happy. It's funny, I just realized that my whole life, the whole time I've been trying to be perfect, I never once considered happiness as part of the equation. I guess it seemed so impossible I couldn't even let myself fantasize about it. But now, I don't know, things feel different somehow. Like impossible things might not be so impossible. — Amy Reed

You can't escape this feeling of disintegration. The world is fragile. But you also can't let it ruin your life. I'm actually a pretty composed person. I guess people imagine I spend my life thinking about crazy, sinister things but I don't, really. It's not like I'm trying to exorcise any demons. — Michael Shannon

The Christian community, therefore, is that community that freely becomes oppressed, because they know that Jesus himself has defined humanity's liberation in the context of what happens to the little ones. Christians join the cause of the oppressed in the fight for justice not because of some philosophical principle of "the Good" or because of a religious feeling of sympathy for people in prison. Sympathy does not change the structures of injustice. The authentic identity of Christians with the poor is found in the claim which the Jesus-encounter lays upon their own life-style, a claim that connects the word "Christian" with the liberation of the poor. Christians fight not for humanity in general but for themselves and out of their love for concrete human beings. — James H. Cone

I worry an awful lot about people and how they're faring. When I worry about people, whether their job is squashing their spirit, pushing them into a darker pathway of not feeling good about their life, that forces me to look for what's good. What's going well. That stokes a lot of positive feelings. Although I do worry, I look for the hope. — Debra Granik

Here are some passing thoughts. Imagine looking up at the moon and seeing it burning.
Imagine seeing the grocery store's checkout girl grow horns.
Imagine growing younger instead of older.
Imagine feeling more powerful and more capable of falling in love with life every new day instead of being scared and sick and not knowing whether to stay under a sheet or venture forth into the cold. — Douglas Coupland

For many feverish years he was burdened with the sensation, an ancient one to be sure, that the incredible sprawl of human history was no more than a pathetically partial record of an infinitely vast and shadowed chronicle of universal metamorphoses. How much greater, then, was the feeling that his own pathetic history formed a practically invisible fragment of what itself was merely an obscure splinter of the infinite. Somehow he needed to excarcerate himself from the claustral dungeon cell of his life. In the end, however, he broke beneath the weight of his aspiration. And as the years passed, the only mystery which seemed worthy of his interest, and his amazement, was that unknown day which would inaugurate his personal eternity, that incredible day on which the sun simply would not rise, and forever would begin. — Thomas Ligotti

I can identify with other people and situations, but I tend not to. I would rather recall things from my own life, and I don't have to force myself ... Just being in certain environments triggers a response in my brain, a certain feeling I want to articulate. For some reason, I am attracted to self-destruction. I know that personal sacrifice has a great deal to do with how we live or don't live our lives. — Bob Dylan

I did not see any way that I could possibly give birth to someone else and also give birth to myself. Far from feeling guilty, it was the first time that I had taken responsibility for my own life. — Gloria Steinem

If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them. Their inexperience saved the passenger's life. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Bodily delight is a sense experience, just like pure seeing or the pure feeling with which a lovely fruit fills the tongue; it is a great boundless experience which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the splendour of all knowing. Our acceptance of it is not bad; what is bad is that almost all men misuse and squander this experience, and apply it as a stimulus to the weary places of their life, a dissipation instead of a rallying for the heights. Mankind have turned eating, too, into something else: want on the one hand, and superfluity on the other, have dulled the clarity of this need, and all those deep, simple necessities by which life renews itself have become similarly dull. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Although she went home that night feeling happier than she had ever been in her short life, she did not confuse the golf course party with a good party, and she did not tell herself she had a pleasant time. it had been, she felt, a dumb event preceded by excellent invitations. what frankie did that was unusual was to imagine herself in control. the drinks, the clothes, the instructions, the food (there had been none), the location, everything. she asked herself: if i were in charge, how could i have done it better? — E. Lockhart

Scarlett was not fond of fate. She liked to believe if she were good, good things would happen. Fate left her feeling powerless, and hopeless, and with an overall feeling of lessness. To her, fate seemed like a larger, omnipotent version of her father, stealing her choices and controlling her life without any regard for her feelings. Fate meant that nothing she did mattered. — Stephanie Garber

It was in this byre, littered with dry and hollow cowclaps subsiding with a sigh at the poke of my finger, that for the first time in my life, and I would not hesitate to say the last if I had not to husband my cyanide, I had to contend with a feeling which gradually assumed, to my dismay, the dread name of love. — Samuel Beckett

Only other backpackers will understand what it's like to leave home to follow your dreams. Those pals back home will nod along, listening to your travel tales, but for them it's just words and pretty pictures. For you, everything has changed and you look around feeling like an alien in the most foreign place you have visited: home. That's why it's called a travel bug - you literally get bitten with this desire to keep moving and keep exploring, as the life you had back home isn't enough any more and may not ever be enough again. — Katy Colins

I remember an insight that taught me much about life. One day I felt that I had everything that I really wanted in life. I had a creative and meaningful work as a therapist and course leader, I had a relationship with a beautiful woman, who I loved and who loved me, I had friend that I trusted and I had money to do what I wanted.
But in spite of all this, I still had a feeling that there was something missing in my life. I was not satisfied. The thirst and longing in my heart was still searching for something more. It made me realize that the deepest pain in my heart was that I was still separated from the Whole and that no outer things or relationships could ease this pain. — Swami Dhyan Giten

True holiness, we surely ought to remember, does not consist merely of inward sensations and impressions. It is much more than tears, and sighs, and bodily excitement, and a quickened pulse, and a passionate feeling of attachment to our own favourite preachers and our own religious party, and a readiness to quarrel with everyone who does not agree with us. It is something of "the image of Christ," which can be seen and observed by others in our private life, and habits, and character, and doings. — J.C. Ryle

And such in fact is the behaviour of the specialist. In politics, in art, in social usages, in the other sciences, he will adopt the attitude of primitive, ignorant man; but he will adopt them forcefully and with self-sufficiency, and will not admit of- this is the paradox- specialists in those matters. By specialising him, civilisation has made him hermetic and self-satisfied within his limitations; but this very inner feeling of dominance and worth will induce him to wish to predominate outside his speciality. The result is that even in this case, representing a maximum of qualification in man- specialisation- and therefore the thing most opposed to the mass-man, the result is that he will behave in almost all spheres of life as does the unqualified, the mass-man. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

This is your life, not someone else's. It is your own feeling of what is important, not what people will say. Sooner or later, you are bound to discover that you cannot please all of the people around you all of the time. Some of t hem will attribute to you motives you never dreamed of. Some of them will misinterpret your words and actions, making them completely alien to you. So you had better learn fairly early that you must not expect to have everyone understand what you say and what you do. — Eleanor Roosevelt

It was one of those rare times of shared happiness, of perfect contentment. We had a feeling of expectation, that what was already wonderful would only get better and better as time went on. These moments are one of the rarest, most fragile things in the world. You have to seize the day; you have to recall all the rotten, dirty things you endured to earn this peace. You have to remember to enjoy each minute, each hour, because although you may feel like it's going to last forever, the world plans otherwise. You want to be grateful for every precious second, but you simply can't do it. It's not in human nature to live life to the fullest. Haven't your ever noticed that equal amounts of pain and joy are not, in fact, equal in duration? Pain drags on until you wonder if life will ever be bearable again; pleasure, though, once it's reached its peak, fades faster than a trodden gardenia, and your memory searches in vain for the sweet scent. — George Alec Effinger

In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia 122 — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

We all want things in life we can't have. Happens all the time. Jobs we don't get. Houses we don't live in. Health issues we sure as hell don't want. People we love who don't love us back. Not feeling the way someone wants you to feel doesn't make you a bad person. — Sarah Morgan

Love is not materialistic. It's intangible yet somehow an undeniable feeling. You know it when you have it. I have lots of love in my life and I am blessed. — Melanie Iglesias

We commonly confuse love with the strong emotions most often associated with it, such as joy, attachment, lust, infatuation, pleasure, pain, fear, and hope, to name a few. But, love is not a feeling; love itself is an action. There are countless emotions and beliefs that can cause us to love. Love is the willing giving of self to another living being. Love is giving the life, time, energy, and resources that we would normally give or use for our self to someone else. Love is an action that enhances the well-being of another living being. — C W Newman

Rabbits (says Mr. Lockley) are like human beings in many ways. One of these is certainly their staunch ability to withstand disaster and to let the stream of their life carry them along, past reaches of terror and loss. They have a certain quality which it would not be accurate to describe as callousness or indifference. It is, rather, a blessedly circumscribed imagination and an intuitive feeling that Life is Now. A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass. — Richard Adams

All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality, without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human. — George Eliot

I have had issues with depression all my life, and it's probably true to say there was a tendency towards it even when I was very young, during my schooldays. There was often - and this is quite common with comics - a sense of not feeling as if I belonged anywhere. — Jack Dee

So for me the essence of life is very simple. It is just this, awareness that allows us to trust in our own truths (without feeling any need to convince others), living gracefully amidst the chaos, maintaining a sense of balance (not being pulled around by the supposed opposites or false paradoxes), and being able to choose how we direct our lives. — Julia Woodman

It does not matter what name you attach to it, but your consciousness must ascend to the point through which you view the universe with your God-centered nature. The feeling accompanying this experience is that of complete oneness with the Universal Whole ... This God-centered nature is constantly awaiting to govern your life gloriously. You have the free will to either allow it to govern your life, or not to allow it to affect you. The choice is always yours! — Peace Pilgrim

It was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan. And not such a bad feeling, he decided. Being alone in two senses of the word was maybe like a double negation of isolation. In other words, it made perfect sense for him, a foreigner, to feel isolated here. The thought calmed him. He was in exactly the right place. — Haruki Murakami

I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say "This is it"? My depression is a harassed feeling. I'm looking: but that's not it - that's not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it? — Virginia Woolf

These galleries are hung, mostly, with images from 'Frog and Toad,' and he moves from each to each, not really seeing them but rather remembering the experience of viewing them for the first time, in JB's studio, when he and Willem were new to each other, when he felt as if he was growing new body parts - a second heart, a second brain - to accommodate this excess of feeling, the wonder of his life. — Hanya Yanagihara

I have come to accept the feeling of not knowing where I am going. And I have trained myself to love it. Because it is only when we are suspended in mid-air with no landing in sight, that we force our wings to unravel and alas begin our flight. And as we fly, we still may not know where we are going to. But the miracle is in the unfolding of the wings. You may not know where you're going, but you know that so long as you spread your wings, the winds will carry you. — C. JoyBell C.

If humans did not manufacture some of their own to appear like better people, people would not aspire to be someone else. They would stop dreaming. And if people didn't dream, they would be awake to discover the wonderful misery of being. There are no singular great people. There is only a small percentage of people manufactured to look significant, for the purpose of creating the feeling of mass insignificance. — Craig Stone

There is a certain consideration, and a general duty of humanity, that binds us not only to the animals, which have life and feeling, but even to the trees and plants. We owe justice to people, and kindness and benevolence to all other creatures who may be susceptible of it. There is some intercourse between them and us, and some mutual obligation. — Michel De Montaigne

The small talk that sprang readily to their lips came to hers only with a tremendous effort. After an opportunity had come and gone, she often scolded herself for not saying this or doing that, for laughing too loud or smiling too little. Whenever she tried to re-create the moment of contact, she was easily rebuffed by the slightest gesture, withdrawing all too quickly if she thought she was in the way. The old stone-and-brick schoolhouse, with its four gabled roofs and round little windows, was the only thing that seemed steadfast to her, while the beings that populated its rooms and thundered down its corridors were unreal and unpredictable. It gripped her like a monstrous truth that she was condemned to lead life without belonging or feeling close to anyone. — Erick Setiawan

Miss you so much it hurts.

Seconds later, she texts back, The feeling is mushrooms,followed by a second text reading, Yes, autocorrect, I meant to say mushrooms, not mutual. Good catch.

Life without you does feel a little bit like fungus, I reply. But definitely less tasty. — Emily Henry

There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G.B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping the mind and the sensibilities. It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless. — Charles Bukowski

Charles loved her voice. It was so soft and blurred, like pastels. It made his neck tingle just to listen to her. It gave him the same delicious feeling he had as he hovered on the brink of sleep and this feeling - until now - had been the single most pleasant feeling in his life. It was the voice that coloured everything he now thought about her. It was shy and tentative and musical. Sometimes he did not manage to hear the words she said, but he did not let on about his deafness. — Peter Carey

Don't get yourself in certain circumstances or instances, because it's not a good feeling to be sitting in that chair where you've got 12 people that are in control of your life. You have an opportunity to be in control of your life for yourself by the decisions that you make. — Sean Combs

Maybe it was just the after glow talking. Maybe it was the glow giving me my River blues..but it felt real. And my feeling, pure or not, were the only thing I had to go on. River had manipulated people. And Murdered people. He was wicked. Not as wicked as Brodie, but.. Still wicked. It was better that he was gone. Better he was out of my life. I knew that, logically. What I felt though, deep, deep down in the darkest of my heart, was that I didn't give a damn if River was Evil. I still liked him. Maybe i even kind of love him. And Maybe that made me Wicked too. — April Genevieve Tucholke