How very sad it is to have a confiding nature, one's hopes and feelings are quite at the mercy of all who come along; and how very desirable to be a stolid individual, whose hopes and aspirations are safe in one's waistcoat pocket, and that a pocket indeed, and one not to be picked!
Patriotism is "a very definite feeling of preference for one's own people or State above all other peoples and States, and a consequent wish to get for that people or State the greatest advantages and power that can be got - things which are obtainable only at the expense of the advantages and power of other peoples or States."
Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatesoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer.
I had these little babies [my twins] and it gave me something so spectacular, such a feeling - I was so turned on and so excited by them that I wrote a poem. I had it on scraps of paper and the maid threw it out.
It is to our lack of proper content ("notre manque de contenu propre:;», Fr.), of our inner emptiness that we need occupations and distractions, otherwise ("faute de quoi", Fr.) we experience boredom, which is nothing elses than the feeling of unease that take hold of us when our spirit is not absorbed by the mirages of life.
The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.
every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.