Henry David Thoreau Quotes

If I'm going to talk about an issue, I better know what it's about viscerally.

I've said this before - and I mean it strongly - an abstract concept or a moral issue has to be connected to feeling. If we don't believe it somehow viscerally, we don't really take it in.

My readers - and I get 400 emails for a day, my readers normally they say, well, you understand me, and I answer, you do understand me also. We are in the same level.

He who sees without loving is only straining his eyes in the darkness.

Man is much more than a 'rational being' and lives more by sympathies and impressions than by conclusions. It darkens his eyes and dries up the wells of his humanity to be forever in search of doctrine. We need wholesome, experiencing na­tures, I dare affirm, much more than we need sound reasoning.

religion, like beauty, cannot be experienced in cold blood.

I know you even under the skin.

It is not half so important to know as to feel.

The woman's vision is deep reaching, the man's far reaching. With the man the world is his heart, with the woman the heart is her world.

When you know a person particularly well, you cannot escape their ruffled feelings.

I'm a very emotional person, and I love feeling things, so I tend to approach things kind of openly.

I could almost feel him near me, the way you can feel a fire's presence in a cold room.

See with one eye, feel with the other.

A really intelligent man feels what other men only know.

Feel the world, instead of trying to understand the world.

George Bernard Shaw said that thinking was the greatest of all human endeavors, but I would say that feeling was. Allowing yourself to feel things, to feel love or wrath, hatred, rage.

The heart lies and the head plays tricks on us, but the eyes see true. Look with your eyes. Hear with your ears. Taste with your mouth. Smell with your nose. Feel with your skin. Then comes the thinking, afterward, and in a way knowing the truth.

... every time you look at the world and the people in it closely, lovingly, imaginatively, it changes you. The world, under the microscope of your attention, opens up like a beautiful, strange flower and gives itself back to you in ways you could never imagine.

But what I thought, and what I still think, and always will, is that she saw me. Nobody else has ever seen me — me, Jenny Gluckstein — like that. Not my parents, not Julian, not even Meena. Love is one thing — recognition is something else.

Rose: You have a gift Jack, you do. You see people. Jack: I see you. Rose: And? Jack: You wouldn't have jumped.

You go on reacting to the image not to the person, and hence there is no relationship. When there is no image, then there is relationship.

People want to believe you are sincerely interested in them as a person, not just what they can do for you.

How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home?

Wonderful thing about novels is that sometimes we read a novel and we know the person in the novel more than we know people in our own lives.

Some things were made to be felt