86 Feeling Quotes To Inspire

In our daily lives, emotions play an integral role in shaping our experiences and interactions. Whether you're feeling elated, contemplative, or seeking comfort, words have the power to resonate deeply and bring about a sense of connection. To capture the essence of these varied emotional landscapes, we've carefully curated a list of the top 86 feeling quotes. These quotes, drawn from a diverse array of thinkers, writers, and influencers, aim to inspire, uplift, and remind you of the beauty inherent in every emotion. Join us on this journey of reflection and discovery, and let these powerful words infuse a new depth of feeling into your everyday life.

1. “Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.” - Erich Fromm

2. “The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.” - C.S. Lewis

3. “Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that you can not bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond that pain.” - Kahlil Gibran

4. “Who wants to feel everything everyone else feels all the time?” - Eileen Wilks

5. “We think too much and feel too little.” - Charlie Chaplin

6. “Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery. It is far better to be free, to leave the forts and barricades of fear, to stand erect and face the future with a smile. It is far better to give yourself sometimes to negligence, to drift with wave and tide, with the blind force of the world, to think and dream, to forget the chains and limitations of the breathing life, to forget purpose and object, to lounge in the picture gallery of the brain, to feel once more the clasps and kisses of the past, to bring life's morning back, to see again the forms and faces of the dead, to paint fair pictures for the coming years, to forget all Gods, their promises and threats, to feel within your veins life's joyous stream and hear the martial music, the rhythmic beating of your fearless heart. And then to rouse yourself to do all useful things, to reach with thought and deed the ideal in your brain, to give your fancies wing, that they, like chemist bees, may find art's nectar in the weeds of common things, to look with trained and steady eyes for facts, to find the subtle threads that join the distant with the now, to increase knowledge, to take burdens from the weak, to develop the brain, to defend the right, to make a palace for the soul. This is real religion. This is real worship” - Robert Green Ingersoll

7. “You could feel things or you could find a way to shut down. But once you were feeling things, you couldn’t decide exactly what to feel. That was the trouble with letting them in at all. They made a mess of the place.” - Ann Brashares

8. “Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of he body. 'I feel good here': the well-being under-expressed in the language it appears in like a fleeting glimmer is a spatial practice.” - Michel de Certeau

9. “She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father. And to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.” - Nicole Krauss

10. “I like the feeling that anything, anything, could happen.” - Marsha Qualey

11. “Brigan was saying her name, and he was sending her a feeling. It was courage and strength, and something else too, as if he were standing with her, as if he'd taken her within himself, letting her rest her entire body for a moment on his backbone, her mind in his mind, her heart in the fire of his.The fire of Brigan's heart was astounding. Fire understood, and almost could not believe, that the feeling he was sending her was love.” - Kristin Cashore

12. “Will any of those men under you ever really understand all this? They're professional cynics, and it's too late for them. Why do you want to go back with them? So you can keep up with the Joneses? To buy a gyro just like the Smith has? To listen to music with your pocketbook instead of your glands?” - Ray Bradbury

13. “For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breatheourselves out and away; with each new heartfirewe give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us:you're in my blood, this room, Spring itselfis filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us,we vanish within him and around him.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

14. “There are many things in your heart you can never tell to another person. They are you, your private joys and sorrows, and you can never tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself, when you tell them.” - Greta Garbo

15. “Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment...'dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love -- which is to transform us.' Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling.” - bell hooks

16. “Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” - M. Scott Peck

17. “For feeling, not events, is to me the essence of history.” - Christopher Pike

18. “You're late.""Sorry. I was busy talking about my feelings and killing people.” - Jennifer Estep

19. “A feeling is not bottomless. once felt all the way through,a great peace greets you there” - Alanis Morissette

20. “No need to feel guilty if you can't be a good man all the time. But anytime your heart is feeling so eager to do even a small good deed, then it might be a good chance for you…to be a better man.” - Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident]

21. “[W]e must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch that fills others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony.” - George Eliot

22. “We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.” - George Eliot

23. “When she came to her senses again she cut off all contact with him. It had not been easy, but she had steeled herself. The last time she saw him she was standing on a platform in the tunnelbana at Gamla Stan and he was sitting in the train on his way downtown. She had stared at him for a whole minute and decided that she did not have a grain of feeling left, because it would have been the same as bleeding to death. Fuck you.” - Stieg Larsson

24. “Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.” - Honoré de Balzac

25. “Just like science, there must be other kinds of sensations which haven't yet been feltby the human heart at all.” - Toba Beta

26. “I don't know...just a feeling, like in..." Xander thought for a moment. "Star Wars. You know, when Han Solo says, 'I've got a bad feeling about this'?” - Robert Liparulo

27. “I'm not in search of sanctity, sacredness, purity; these things are found after this life, not in this life; but in this life I search to be completely human: to feel, to give, to take, to laugh, to get lost, to be found, to dance, to love and to lust, to be so human.” - C. JoyBell C.

28. “Sometimes, you feel like being watched from behind by someone.When you turned, it's just nothing, nobody, none,or only someone who's daydreaming and staring right through you.” - Toba Beta

29. “Conversation, to take another example, is one of the common pleasures of life, but not all conversation is pleasurable. The stutterer finds talking painful, and the listener is equally pained. Persons who are inhibited in expressing feeling are not good conversationalists. Nothing is more boring than to listen to a person talk in a monotone without feeling. We enjoy a conversation when there is a communication of feeling. We have pleasure in expressing our feelings, and we respond pleasurably to another person's expression of feeling. The voice, like the body, is a medium through which feeling flows, and when this flow occurs in an easy and rhythmic manner, it is a pleasure both to the speaker and listener.” - Alexander Lowen

30. “What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child.” - Fernando Pessoa

31. “If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.” - Fernando Pessoa

32. “Feeling bored is a childish attitude.You wouldn't feel so if you don't relyon somebody to change your feeling.” - Toba Beta

33. “As we approached each other, the noise and the students around us melted away and we were utterly alone, passing, smiling, holding each other's eyes, floors and walls gone, two people in a universe of space and stars.” - Jerry Spinelli

34. “Subjectivity measures nothing consistently.” - Toba Beta

35. “He sighed profoundly, and flung himself - there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word - on the earth at the foot of the oak tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding; or the deck of a tumbling ship - it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out. To the oak tree he tied it and as he lay there, gradually the flutter in and about him stilled itself; the little leaves hung, the deer stopped; the pale summer clouds stayed; his limbs grew heavy on the ground; and he lay so still that by degrees the deer stopped nearer and the rooks wheeled round him and the swallows dipped and circled and the dragonflies shot past, as if all the fertility and amorous activity of a summer's evening were woven web-like about his body.” - Virginia Woolf

36. “We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling.” - T.E. Lawrence

37. “I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.” - Philip Larkin

38. “The objective of learning is not necessarily to remember. It may even be salutary to forget. It is only when we forget the early pains and struggles of forming letters that we acquire the capacity for writing. The adult does not remember all the history s/he learned but s/he may hope to have acquired a standard of character and conduct, a sense of affairs and a feeling of change and development in culture. Naturally there is nothing against having a well-stocked mind provided it does not prevent the development of other capacities. But it is still more important to allow knowledge to sink into one in such a way that it becomes fruitful for life; this best done when we feel deeply all we learn. For the life of feeling is less conscious, more dream-like, than intellectual activity and leads to the subconscious life of will where the deep creative capacities of humanity have their being. It is from this sphere that knowledge can emerge again as something deeply significant for life. It is not what we remember exactly, but what we transform which is of real value to our lives. In this transformation the process of forgetting, of allowing subjects to sink into the unconscious before "re-membering" them is an important element.” - Henning Hansmann

39. “Enjoy it, kid. Enjoy feeling that you can make a difference.' Floyd flashed him a smile. 'It won't last for ever.” - Alastair Reynolds

40. “Insecurities have the ability to shape and mold our minds to live with everything that’s bad; like crying on the inside, while smiling on the outside…thus creating pain…but, alas, I have the answer; forget about what you thought and enjoy (embrace) what you feel” - Jeremy Aldana

41. “Me, feeling. What a concept.” - Jeff Lindsay

42. “Close your eyes and turn your face into the wind.Feel it sweep along your skin in an invisible ocean of exultation.Suddenly, you know you are alive.” - Vera Nazarian

43. “I felt like some part of my soul was ripped out and put under a microscope for criticizing.” - Alysha Speer

44. “She sang, as requested. There was much about love in the ballad: faithful love that refused to abandon its object; love that disaster could not shake; love that, in calamity, waxed fonder, in poverty clung closer. The words were set to a fine old air -- in themselves they were simple and sweet: perhaps, when read, they wanted force; when well sung, they wanted nothing. Shirley sang them well: she breathed into the feeling, softness, she poured round the passion, force: her voice was fine that evening; its expression dramatic: she impressed all, and charmed one.On leaving the instrument, she went to the fire, and sat down on a seat -- semi-stool, semi-cushion: the ladies were round her -- none of them spoke. The Misses Sympson and the Misses Nunnely looked upon her, as quiet poultry might look on an egret, an ibis, or any other strange fowl. What made her sing so? They never sang so. Was it proper to sing with such expression, with such originality -- so unlike a school girl? Decidedly not: it was strange, it was unusual. What was strange must be wrong; what was unusual must be improper. Shirley was judged.” - Charlotte Brontë

45. “Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.” - Sebastian Faulks

46. “Dan menangis ada gunanya juga, ternyata. Menangis membuat tubuhmu sedikit lebih hangat hingga malam tidak perlu terasa terlalu dingin.” - Fauzan Mukrim

47. “no matter how u run away, no matter how can u pretend, no matter how scared u are there is gona be the sense u have missed something, fallen heart feeling u mixed with in the moments u should live, u will get used to that feeling, believe me when i tell u, this is crazy, some day ur life will be sou r just warming up” - مسعد العرباني

48. “Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.” - Lauren Oliver

49. “Awkward.That's exactly how it was when we walked over to our sister and stood on each side of her, looking at her and feeling things and not knowing what to do.” - Markus Zusak

50. “It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is” - W.B. Yeats

51. “The words are meaningless except in terms of feeling. Does anyone act as the result of thought or does feeling stimulate action and sometimes thought implement it.” - John Steinbeck

52. “Caroline was always moody and miserable, but I liked it. I liked feeling as if she had chosen me as the only person in the world not to hate, and so we spent all this time together just ragging on everyone, you know?” - John Green

53. “I wanted to drown inside a woman in the feeling and drooling of the love I could give her. I wanted her pulse to crush me with its intensity. That's what I wanted. That's what I wanted myself to be.” - Markus Zusak

54. “And this was what we felt: vertigo, an icicle through our strong hearts, our long-lost childhoods. Sunshine in a field and crickets and the sweet tealeaf stink of a new ball mitt and a rock glinting with mica and a chaw of bubblegum wrapping its sweet tendrils down our throats and the warm breeze up our shorts and the low vibrato of lake loons and the sun and the sun and the warm sun and this is what we felt; the sun.” - Lauren Groff

55. “Dictionaries stop where the heart starts.” - David Foenkinos

56. “La nuit, tout sent bon", disait Mondo."C'est parce qu'on ne voit pas", disait Thi Chin."on sent mieux, et on entend mieux quand on ne voit pas".” - j.m.g. le clezio

57. “Esther n'était certainement pas bien éduquée au sens habituel du terme, jamais l'idée ne lui serait venue de vider un cendrier ou de débarrasser le relief de ses repas, et c'est sans la moindre gêne qu'elle laissait la lumière allumée derrière elle dans les pièces qu'elle venait de quitter (il m'est arrivé, suivant pas à pas son parcours dans ma résidence de San Jose, d'avoir à actionner dix-sept commutateurs); il n'était pas davantage question de lui demander de penser à faire un achat, de ramener d'un magasin où elle se rendait une course non destinée à son propre usage, ou plus généralement de rendre un service quelconque. Comme toutes les très jolies jeunes filles elle n'était au fond bonne qu'à baiser, et il aurait été stupide de l'employer à autre chose, de la voir autrement que comme un animal de luxe, en tout choyé et gåté, protégé de tout souci comme de toute tâche ennuyeuse ou pénible afin de mieux pouvoir se consacrer à son service exclusivement sexuel. Elle n'en était pas moins très loin d'être ce monstre d'arrogance, d'égoïsme absolu et froid, au, pour parler en termes plus baudelairiens, cette infernale petite salope que sont la plupart des très jolies jeunes filles; il y avait en elle la conscience de la maladie, de la faiblesse et de la mort. Quoique belle, très belle, infiniment érotique et désirable, Esther n'en était pas moins sensible aux infirmités animales, parce qu'elle les connaissait ; c'est ce soir-là que j'en pris conscience, et que je me mis véritablement à l'aimer. Le désir physique, si violent soit-il, n'avait jamais suffi chez moi à conduire à l'amour, il n'avait pu atteindre ce stade ultime que lorsqu'il s'accompagnait, par une juxtaposition étrange, d'une compassion pour l'être désiré ; tout être vivant, évidemment, mérite la compassion du simple fait qu'il est en vie et se trouve par là-même exposé à des souffrances sans nombre, mais face à un être jeune et en pleine santé c'est une considération qui paraît bien théorique. Par sa maladie de reins, par sa faiblesse physique insoupçonnable mais réelle, Esther pouvait susciter en moi une compassion non feinte, chaque fois que l'envie me prendrait d'éprouver ce sentiment à son égard. Étant elle-même compatissante, ayant même des aspirations occasionnelles à la bonté, elle pouvait également susciter en moi l'estime, ce qui parachevait l'édifice, car je n'étais pas un être de passion, pas essentiellement, et si je pouvais désirer quelqu'un de parfaitement méprisable, s'il m'était arrivé à plusieurs reprises de baiser des filles dans l'unique but d'assurer mon emprise sur elles et au fond de les dominer, si j'étais même allé jusqu'à utiliser ce peu louable sentiment dans des sketches, jusqu'à manifester une compréhension troublante pour ces violeurs qui sacrifient leur victime immédiatement après avoir disposé de son corps, j'avais par contre toujours eu besoin d'estimer pour aimer, jamais au fond je ne m'étais senti parfaitement à l'aise dans une relation sexuelle basée sur la pure attirance érotique et l'indifférence à l'autre, j'avais toujours eu besoin, pour me sentir sexuellement heureux, d'un minimum - à défaut d'amour - de sympathie, d'estime, de compréhension mutuelle; l'humanité non, je n'y avais pas renoncé. (La possibilité d'une île, Daniel 1,15)” - MICHEL HOUELLEBECK

58. “An Overall Feeling of Doom that One Cannot Ever Escape no Matter What One Does” - Lemony Snicket

59. “I don’t want to talk.” Dan’s neck muscles tensed resisting Vadim’s hand.He didn’t know the words and he didn’t want to search for them. “I just want to feel.” But no, that wasn’t it. “I want to feel human.” - Aleksandr Voinov

60. “It is not the dream of what you're feeling laziness, if not, the sleep of exhaustion.” - Edmundo de Amicis

61. “I will never fully understand why things happen the way they do on this planet. Too many people hold their tongue here. Too many people hide their true feelings. And at the end of the day, that does nothing but hurt someone. The men and women of Tamaran were always taught to live by their emotions, to trust that first reaction, as it is the most pure. Cyborg argues that you need time to make the proper decision. I argue that time blurs the true intent. To Earth standards, I may appear brash and rushed. I never hide what I think. Perhaps that is why Tamaran was a target for so many invasions. Our captors may have enjoyed seeing what pain they inflicted upon us, for our tears were never hidden either.” - Geoff Johns

62. “I find my data first in myself, not first in the poets. For if I did not find it in myself, I would not be able to find it in the poets.” - Peter Kreeft

63. “We need music the most when we’re feeling things really intensely. I think the most intense times in your life are when you’re either falling in love or losing it” - Taylor Swift

64. “This is beyond understanding." said the king. "You are the wisest man alive. You know what is preparing. Why do you not make a plan to save yourself?"And Merlin said quietly, "Because I am wise. In the combat between wisdom and feeling, wisdom never wins.” - John Steinbeck

65. “I’m starting to get used to this feeling of not caring about anything.” - J.A. Redmerski

66. “What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?” - Jonathan Safran Foer

67. “If we deny the need for thought, Moneo, as some do, we lose the powers of reflection; we cannot define what our senses report. If we deny the flesh, we unwheel the vehicle which bears us. But if we deny emotion, we lose all touch with our internal universe. It was emotions which I missed the most.” - Frank Herbert

68. “How are you managing? And don't say you're fine."It's true. Whatever the opposite of fine is, that's what I am.” - Suzanne Collins

69. “The Pāli term for "feeling" is vedanā, derived from the verb vedeti, which means both "to feel" and "to know". In its usage in the discourses, vedanā comprises both bodily and mental feelings. Vedanā does not include "emotion" in its range of meaning. Although emotions arise depending on the initial input provided by feeling, they are more complex mental phenomena than bare feeling itself and are therefore rather the domain of the next [third] satipaṭṭhāna, contemplation of states of mind.” - Anālayo

70. “Another aspect inviting contemplation is the fact that the affective tone of any feeling depends on the type of contact that has caused its arising. Once this conditioned nature of feelings is fully apprehended, detachment arises naturally and one's identification with feelings starts to dissolve.” - Anālayo

71. “I'm not sure if you even want me around or if you just feel sorry for me. I'm not sure of anything.” - Sarah Ockler

72. “Do what others do not do, Believe in what others do not believe, Feel what others cant feel, Become what others cannot be” - Yan Antropov

73. “Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and grief! He who has not seen the things of this world, and the heart of men in this double light, has seen nothing, and knows noting of the truth.” - Victor Hugo

74. “The soul that loves and suffers is in the sublime state.” - Victor Hugo

75. “A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.” - John Steinbeck

76. “What destiny is there, but to sense, observe, merge, re-emerge,Empty, yet filled, spreading everywhere, inside, outside, in, Pulsing, fluctuating, breathing as part of one being, Whispering, feeling, reflecting, flowing between hot and cold, Mineral and plant, dark and light, love and fear, new and old.” - jay woodman

77. “You will remember how, as a schoolboy, I had destroyed my religious life by a vicious subjectivism which made 'realizations' the aim of prayer; turning away from God to seek states of mind, and trying to produce those states of mind by 'maistry'.” - C.S. Lewis

78. “Qué fuerza de realiadad tienen los pensamientos de la gente que piensa poco y, sobre todo, que no divaga. A veces dicen “buenos días”, pero de qué manera tan inteligente.” - Juan Carlos Onetti

79. “Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in us. Everything that has been, if we saw it when it was, was taken from us when it went away.” - Fernando Pessoa

80. “The emotions attached to them were like sand castles in the tide, slowly washing out to sea.” - Nicholas Sparks

81. “Love is not an idea, not a feeling, not a sensation, not a sentiment, not a passion, not even an emotion. It is becoming and being not... Ultimate nothingness! Complete self-annihilation!” - Raheel Farooq

82. “Slowly like a movie fade out, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favorite feeling in the world.” - Haruki Murakami

83. “har baat kahte ho juban se mujhe tum... Kabhi apna haal bejuban bhi to bata dil..” - Naresh Sharma

84. “Kucheza muziki si lazima utingishe mwili kama mwendawazimu. Unaweza kucheza kwa hisia.” - Enock Maregesi

85. “i move on feeling and have learned to distrust those who don't.” - Nikki Giovanni

86. “A man like you is a god, not just a machine covered with skin, but a theater where fine feelings sprout and grow-and feelings are all that matters, as far as I'm concerned. Is a feeling anything but an entire world poured into a thought?” - Honoré de Balzac