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. Anthon St Maarten
And the more I drink the more I feel it. That’s why I drink too. I try to find sympathy and feeling in drink ... I drink so that I may suffer twice as much! Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
I’ve got a gut feeling in my stomach. Alan Sugar, BBC
I felt for Gareth Southgate. Tony Gubba
Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason. Samuel Adams, 1722-1803
Touch it … Isn’t it obvious? I’m trying to seduce you. Bound 1996 starring Gina Gershon & Jennifer Tilly & Joe Pantoliano & Mary Mara & Susie Bright & Margaret Smith & Barry Kivel & Christopher Meloni & John Ryan & Petre Spellos et al, directors Wachowskis
A strong sense of injury often gives point to the expression of our feelings. Pliny the Younger, Epistles III:9
The drug companies announced they had created a new type of drug called an SSRI which they claimed targeted circuits inside the brain that were causing these misfunctions … like Prozac … The result was liberation from anxiety on a wide scale. But in the process the checklists became a powerful and seemingly objective guide for people as to what should be their normal feelings and what was abnormal. Adam Curtis, The Trap II: The Lonely Robot, BBC 2007
Large parts of normal human experience, grief, disappointment, loneliness, were all being reclassified as medical disorders. In the process a new system of management was emerging: the drugs took away those complex and difficult feelings and made the individuals happier. But they also made them simpler beings, more easy to predict and manage. ibid.
Empty, unhinged, distorted: unknown forces greater than ourselves are shaping us to be something we don’t feel we really are, something unnatural. Matthew Collings, This is Civilisation III: Save Our Souls
This feeling of catastrophe isn’t really unique to modern life. ibid.
We feel we are losing our individuality, our creativity, we feel meaningless. Tonight we’re going to meet a Victorian who thought he could fight that process, that civilisation could rise again … He is an art guru: John Ruskin. His life’s work is about the power of art to save our souls. Ruskin was a great battling critical mind. He taught Victorians to see clearly, and through that to understand what they could be, they were better than themselves. ibid.
We’re looking at the redeeming power of art. Art is not just a distraction from the gruelling trip of life, it is life. It is our imaginative proposal of what art could be. ibid.
Ruskin is the prophet of why art matters. ibid.
In the 1840s John Ruskin put art, man and nature together … The man who fires up Ruskin to become the guru of the age was the great landscape painter J M W Turner. Turner paints nature … the emotion of that experience. He paint’s nature’s power. ibid.
In the late stages of his art, Turner has gone on to a new level, elemental, powerful, yet sublime. ibid.
It’s Ruskin who rescues Turner’s reputation. ibid.
In the late stages of his art, Turner has gone on to a new level, elemental, powerful, yet sublime. ibid.
It’s Ruskin who rescues Turner’s reputation. Ibid.
Ruskin is the guy who comes up with the idea of a bad Renaissance instead of a good one … Renaissance bad, Gothic good. ibid.