sentiment, and its synonyms

Synonyms: feeling, emotion, passion, sentiment

These nouns refer to complex and usually strong subjective human response. 

• Although feeling and emotion are sometimes interchangeable, feeling is the more general and neutral:
  .... "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity" William Wordsworth. 
• Emotion often implies the presence of excitement or agitation:
  .... "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion" T.S. Eliot. 
• Passion is intense, compelling emotion:
  .... "They seemed like ungoverned children inflamed with the fiercest passions of men" Francis Parkman. 
• Sentiment often applies to a thought or opinion arising from or influenced by emotion:
  .... We expressed our sentiments about the government's policies.
  The word can also refer to delicate, sensitive, or higher or more refined feelings:
  .... "The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people" Walter Bagehot.

Synonyms: opinion, view, sentiment, feeling, belief, conviction, persuasion

These nouns signify something a person believes or accepts as being sound or true. 

• Opinion is applicable to a judgment based on grounds insufficient to rule out the possibility of dispute:
  .... "A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible" Woodrow Wilson.
• View stresses individuality of outlook:
  ... "My view is . . . that freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they have or the views they express" Hugo L. Black. 
• Sentiment and especially feeling stress the role of emotion as a determinant:
  ... "If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences . . . reason is of no use to us" George Washington.
  .... "There needs protection . . . against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling" John Stuart Mill. 
• A belief is a conclusion to which one subscribes strongly:
  ... "Our belief in any particular natural law cannot have a safer basis than our unsuccessful critical attempts to refute it" Karl Popper. 
• Conviction is belief that excludes doubt:
  .... "the editor's own conviction of what, whether interesting or only important, is in the public interest" Walter Lippmann. 
• Persuasion applies to a confidently held opinion:
  ... "He had a strong persuasion that Likeman was wrong" H.G. Wells.

.... Am-Heritage