Feeling is deep and still; and the word that floats on the surface — Feelings

"Thought is deeper than all speech, Feeling deeper than all thought; Souls to souls can never teach What unto themselves was taught."

"Wenn ihrs nicht fühlt ihr werdets nicht erjagen."

"Immediate feeling is certainly the first, is the vital force; in it is life, just as it is indeed said that from the heart flows life. But then this feeling must “be kept,” understood in the same way as when it said, “Keep your heart, for from it flows life.” It must be cleansed of selfishness, kept from selfishness; it must not be left to its own devices, but, on the contrary, that which is to kept must be entrusted to the power of something higher that keeps it – just as the loving mother prays to God to keep her child. In immediate feeling, one human being never understands the other. As soon as something happens to him personally, he understands everything differently. When he himself is suffering, he does not understand another’s suffering, and when he himself is happy he still does not understand it. Immediate feeling selfishly understands everything in relation to itself and therefore is in the disunion of double-mindedness with all others, because there can be unity only in the soundly understood equality of sincerity, and in selfish shortsightedness his conviction is continually being changed, or it is chance that it is not changed, since the reason for this is that by chance his life is not touched by any change. But such firmness of conviction is a delusion on the part of the pampered, because a conviction is not firm when everything forces it upon one, as it were, and makes it firm, but its firmness manifests itself in the ups and downs of everything. Rarely, indeed, does a person’s life avoid all changes, and in the changes the conviction of immediate feeling is a delusion, the momentary impression blown up into a view of life as a whole."

"‘External feelings’ refer to physical feelings, feelings of pleasure, pain, and neither pleasure nor pain in the various parts of the body. ‘Internal feelings’ refer to the feelings of pain, pleasure, and neither pleasure nor pain in the heart. ... These things are the bosses, lording it over the heart. ... The heart is their vessel, their seat. That’s where they sit. Or you could say it’s their toilet, because that’s where they defecate. Whichever one comes along, it gets right up there on the heart. Now pain jumps up there and defecates. Now pleasure gets up there and defecates. Now a feeling of neither pleasure nor pain gets up there and defecates. They keep defecating like this, and the heart is content to let them do this, because it doesn’t have the mindfulness or discernment to shake them off and not let them defecate. This is why we have to develop a great deal of mindfulness and discernment so that we can fight them off."

"The wealth of rich feelings—the deep—the pure, With strength to meet sorrow, and faith to endure."

"The Stoics in describing the feelings as "indefinite cognitions," had in mind something which in most text-books on psychiatry is not included in the conception of feelings; they thought pre-eminently of intellectual processes. To the scholastics the feelings were either a desire for the good -or an aversion to the bad, in other words pleasure and displeasure, to which was added a certain ethical value, and a special emphasis upon the voluntaristic principle which is always contained in the "feelings." If Hegel calls feeling "intelligence on the threshold of its immediateness," and Volkmar "the becoming conscious of the degree of tension of ideation," we can not deny that these are words which mean little more than nothing to the practical psychologist, the psychopathologist; nor are we any better off when we take into account the explanations which are always indispensable for the understanding of such "definitions." Kant expressed himself most clearly and correctly on this subject, but without effect upon his successors however, whose conceptions are not much clearer than those of the earlier philosophers."