This paper detects Wierzbicka’s distinction between the concepts of ‘emotion’ and ‘feeling’, which is mainly based on the appearance of a thinking (cognitive) component inside the conceptual content of ‘emotion’ and on its alleged absence from the content of ‘feeling’. In order to test the hypothesis that all feelings, just as emotions, are cognitively permeated, the authors focus on the domain of pain, suggesting that pain with its two aspects, the physiological and the emotional, stands in between bodily based feelings and cognitive emotions. They investigate thus literal and metaphorical expressions of both physical and emotional pain in data from written and spoken Greek discourse, using a quantitative and qualitative methodology. They conclude that the two words do not differ in conceptual content, insofar as they both involve three elements (thinking, feeling and bodily processes), just as they do not differ in reference: they both pick out the same entities in the real world. Their difference can only be represented in terms of sense and lies within the system of English language.