Feelings

In dealing with the affairs of the heart, every form of unfeelingness is an offence. It is by drawing out and satisfying, not be freezing or searing, the affections, that true happiness and peace are to be won.
~ William Rounseville (W.R.) Alger, The Solitudes of Nature and of Man, or, The Loneliness of Human Life (1867). Preface

Nothing is more likely to make you poor than your own emotions; nothing is more likely to save your finances than learning how to use cool, dispassionate reason to hold these emotions in check.
~ William J. Bernstein, The Investor's Manifesto: Preparing for Prosperity, Armageddon, and Everything in Between (2009). Chapter 4. The Enemy in the Mirror

Tranced in a sweet delirium of feeling!
~ William Henry Burleigh, from Poems (1841). Miscellaneous Sonnets. XXXI: Orat Illa

[O]ur feelings towards persons and objects may undergo most important changes, without our being in the least degree aware, until we have our attention directed to our own mental state, of the alteration which has taken place in them.
~ William Benjamin Carpenter, Principles Of Human Physiology (1853 edition). Chapter XIV. Of The Functions Of The Nervous Sytem

The affections are delicate and must not be tampered with.
~ William Ellery Channing (D.D.), from Discourses, Reviews, and Miscellanies (1830). Discourse at the Dedication of Divinity Hall (Cambridge, 1826)

Prove that you have human feelings,
Ere you proudly question ours!
~ William Cowper, in Poems by William Cowper of the Inner Temple, Esq. (1805 edition). The Negro's Complaint (written in 1788).

Feeling is both excited and excites.
~ William Danby, Ideas and Realities, or Thoughts on Various Subjects (1827).

Actually, I'm not interested in Zen that much, as a philosophy, nor in joining any movements. I don't pretend to understand it. I just find it comforting. And very similar to jazz. Like jazz, you can't explain it to anyone without losing the experience. It's got to be experienced, because it's feeling, not words.
~ Bill Evans, Down Beat Magazine (1960).

This is the natural process for healing hurt. Hurt is just a feeling. When you allow the feeling to take its course, the feeling quickly comes and goes.
~ Bill Ferguson

It's a genetic mechanism to try and control these emotions, which have destructive factors in them. We try to create humor out of tragedy in an attempt to relieve fear and/or depression.
~ William F. Fry, Jr., MD, The San Francisco Chronicle (2 February 2003). Conspiracy theories springing up in Internet chat rooms: Experts say predictable reactions include the bizarre, tasteless and opportunistic

He is not raised above others by being superior to the common interests, prejudices, and passions of mankind, but by feeling them in a more intense degree than they do.
~ William Hazlitt, from Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters (1819). Character of Lord Chatham (written in 1807)

In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason.
~ William Hazlitt, Table-Talk; or, Original Essays, Volume II (1821-1822). Essay IV. On Genius and Common Sense

Everyone's got to be different. You can't copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. And without feeling, whatever you do amounts to nothing.
~ Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues (1956 autobiography).

Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. ... And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
~ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Lecture IX: Conversion

Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.
~ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Lecture XX: Conclusions

The emotions are not always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.
~ William James

There are only two emotions in Wall Street: fear and greed.
~ William M. LeFevre, in Time Magazine (1 May 1978). The Wildest Week for Stocks

Affection is created by habit, community of interests, convenience and the desire of companionship. It is a comfort rather than an exhilaration.
~ W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (1938).

In a state of right emotion impelling to right action, and in that only is the true life of humanity realised.
~ William McCombie, in Sermons and Lectures (1871). Sermon V

Our affections do not rust so quickly as our minds.
~ William Gilmore Simms, Egeria: Or, Voices of Thought and Counsel for the Woods and Wayside (1853).

I only roar when the feeling is right ...
~ Willie "The Lion" Smith

I don't believe people die from hard work. They die from stress and worry and fear -- the negative emotions. Those are the killers, not hard work. The fact is, in our society today, most people don't understand what hard work is all about.
~ A.L. ("Art") Williams, All You Can Do Is All You Can Do, But All You Can Do Is Enough! (1988). Chapter 4. Warning: No Free Lunch

It's just a feeling. You get that feeling and you just go out and play.
~ Frank Williams, in Chicago Daily Herald (23 December 2001). Williams the conqueror

You can't imagine the warm feeling I had, for the very fact that I had done what every ballplayer would want to do on his last time up, having wanted to do it so badly, and knowing how the fans really felt, how happy they were for me. Maybe I should have let them know I knew, but I couldn't. It just wouldn't have been me.
~ Theodore Samuel ("Ted") Williams (on hitting a home run in his final at bat on 28 September 1960), My Turn at Bat (1969).

Again and again I affirm there is no importance in anything save the emotion.
~ William Carlos Williams, in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Volume XIV. Number IV (June 1919). Notes from a Talk on Poetry

My mother used to tell me about vibrations. To think that invisible feelings, invisible vibrations existed scared me to death.
~ Brian Wilson

Emotions come wholly from within, and have only the strength we allow them.
~ John M. Wilson

It is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like, and something in our sweetheart that we dislike. It is this entanglement of moods which makes us old, and puckers our brows and deepens the furrows about our eyes.
~ William Butler Yeats, from The Celtic Twilight (1893). The Untiring Ones

It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is.
~ William Butler Yeats, Reveries Over Childhood and Youth (1916). XXX

Emotions are the colors of the soul; they are spectacular and incredible. When you don't feel, the world becomes dull and colorless.
~ William P. Young, The Shack (2007).