“Highly
sensitive people are too often perceived as weaklings or damaged goods.
To feel intensely is not a symptom of weakness, it is the trademark of
the truly alive and compassionate. It is not the empath who is broken,
it is society that has become dysfunctional and emotionally disabled.
There is no shame in expressing your authentic feelings. Those who are
at times described as being a 'hot mess' or having 'too many issues' are
the very fabric of what keeps the dream alive for a more caring, humane
world. Never be ashamed to let your tears shine a light in this world.”
“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”
“I
think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who
underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more
universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive. My self
does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many
people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange,
borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on
my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but
suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it
suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self.
In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with
his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism.”
“For our part, when we feel, we
evaporate; ah, we breathe
ourselves out and away; with each new
heartfire
we give off a fainter scent. True,
someone may tell us:
you're in my blood, this room, Spring
itself
is filled with you . . . To what end?
He can't hold us,
we vanish within him and around him.”
“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.”
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 so
u r just warming up”
We
realize we can't go around saying and doing what we're actually
thinking and feeling. If we all did that, life would be a lunatic
asylum. Indeed, that's how you know you're talking to a lunatic.
Lunatics are those poor souls who have lost their inner communication
and so they allow themselves to say and do exactly what they are
thinking and feeling and that's why they're mad.”
“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.”
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.”
“Then
my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third storey,
backwards and forwards, safe in the silence and solitude of the spot,
and allow my mind's eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before
it - and, certainly, they were many and glowing; to let my heart be
heaved by the exultant movement, which, while it swelled it in trouble,
expanded it with life; and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale
that was never ended - a tale my imagination created, and narrated
continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I
desired and had not in my actual existence.”
Yes!
Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the
earth: it does not wait for beauty—it flows with resistless force and
brings beauty with it... There are few prophets in the world; few
sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my
love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those
feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the
foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I
touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy.”
“Think
of how you feel when you are sick, or how you felt when you were
learning to ride your bike. The physical state of your body has a direct
effect on how you think about the world, on the state of your mind. I
don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that your body has a
direct effect on who you are. (30)
