Difference Between Thought and Feeling
Thought and feeling are confusing words because of their similarity in usage and meaning. Speaking strictly they have difference in their senses. ‘Thought’ refers to a ‘mental process occurring in the mind and is continuous in nature while ‘feeling’ refers to an emotion that occurs in the heart of a person about something that is seen or read.
The word ‘thought’ is used as a mental impression that comes and goes often as in the sentence ‘a lot of thoughts have occurred in my mind’. In the sentence above, ‘thoughts’ refer to a series of mental impressions coming and going in the mind of a person.
On the other hand the word ‘feeling’ refers to ’emotion’ that arises in heart after seeing a painting, a scene, or reading a story and other similar things. For example,
1. After I read the book my heart was gripped by a sense of pathos.
2. A feeling of surprise occurred in my mind when I saw her.
In the first sentence ‘feeling’ is a sense of pathos that occurred in the heart of a person after he or she read a novel. In the second sentence the word ‘feeling’ refers to the emotion of surprise that occurred in the mind of the person when he saw the other person.
Note both ‘feeling’ and ‘thought’ are mostly followed by prepositions ‘of’ and ‘about’.
It is interesting to note that the word ‘feeling’ is often followed by ‘of’ and ‘about’ which are prepositions. On the other hand the word ‘thought’ is often followed by ‘of’ and ‘about’ which are also prepositions.