Quotes about body page 3
“The body is our general medium for having a world.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty book Phenomenology of Perception
Source: Phenomenology of Perception
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
W.E.B. Du Bois book The Souls of Black Folk
Source: The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. I: Of Our Spiritual Strivings
Context: After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.
John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author
The Yosemite http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_yosemite/ (1912), chapter 15: Hetch Hetchy Valley <br class="br">1910s <br class="br">Variant: Everybody needs beauty... places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul alike.
“Somewhere in his body--perhaps in the marrow of his bones--he would continue to feel her absence.”
Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist
Source: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories
“What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul.”
Oscar Wilde book A House of Pomegranates
Source: A House of Pomegranates
Marie Corelli (1855–1924) British writer
Source: The Sorrows of Satan or The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire
Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist
“Osteopathy” (1901), in Mark Twain's Speeches, p. 253 http://books.google.com/books?id=jmhaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA253&dq=%22Whose+property+is+my+body%22 <br class="br">Source: Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings
“It is a beautiful and delightful sight to behold the body of the Moon.”
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer
Source: The Starry Messenger, Venice 1610: "From Doubt to Astonishment"
“Walking… is how the body measures itself against the earth.”
Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States
Source: Wanderlust: A History of Walking
“Man needs bread and hyacinths: one to feed the body, and one to feed the soul.”
Sharon Creech book Chasing Redbird
Source: Chasing Redbird
“stop fixing your bodies and start fixing the world!”
Eve Ensler (1953) American playwright, performer, feminist, activist and artist
“It is through your body that you realize you are a spark of divinity.”
B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar
“In this world
love has no color
yet how deeply
my body
is stained by yours.”
Izumi Shikibu Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan
Source: Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan
“How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.”
Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) American poet
Tracey Emin (1963) English artist, one of the group known as Britartists or Young British Artists
Source: Strangeland
Sara Gruen book Water for Elephants
Source: Water for Elephants
“And is it not sects, bodies of definite, uncompromising principles, that lead us into revolutions?”
Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution
“Dance is the hidden language of the soul, of the body.”
Martha Graham (1894–1991) American dancer and choreographer
New York Times interview (1985)
Context: To me, the body says what words cannot. I believe that dance was the first art. A philosopher has said that dance and architecture were the first arts. I believe that dance was first because it's gesture, it's communication. That doesn't mean it's telling a story, but it means it's communicating a feeling, a sensation to people.
Dance is the hidden language of the soul, of the body. And it's partly the language that we don't want to show.
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet
A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated (1894)
Source: Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics
Mark Twain book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Variant: To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.
Source: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Ch. 22.
“Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?”
Mahmoud Darwich (1941–2008) Palestinian writer
Source: Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems
“What does it matter where my body happens to be?' he said. 'My mind goes on working all the same.”
Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer
“Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.”
John Donne (1572–1631) English poet
The Extasy, line 71
Source: The Complete English Poems
George Jones (1931–2013) American musician, singer and songwriter
Source: I Lived to Tell It All (1996, ebook 2014), Page 205.
“… humanity is a disease, a cancer on the body of the world.”
Scott Westerfeld book Pretties
Variant: humanity is a cancer on the body of the world
Source: Pretties
H.P. Lovecraft book Dagon
Fiction
Source: "Dagon" - Written Jul 1917; First published in The Vagrant, No. 11 (November 1919)
Masaru Emoto (1943–2014) Japanese writer
Source: The Hidden Messages in Water
Douglas Adams book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Source: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
“I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well.”
Orhan Pamuk (1952) Turkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literature recipient
Source: My Name is Red
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
Source: Victor Frankenstein in Ch. 5
“A sound mind in a sound body, is a short but full description of a happy state in this world.”
John Locke book Some Thoughts Concerning Education
Sec. 1
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
“Your body will never be familiar.”
Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter
Source: The Favorite Game
Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher
As quoted in The Biblical Museum: A Collection of Notes Explanatory, Homiletic, and Illustrative on the Holy Scriptures, Especially Designed for the Use of Ministers, Bible-students, and Sunday-school Teachers (1873) http://books.google.com/books?id=aJ8CAAAAQAAJ&pg=RA1-PA331&dq=%22only+necessary+to+make+war+with+five+things%22&ei=8jG1SZKiIIGklQTL0KHHDg by James Comper Gray, Vol. V
“A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.”
Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer
Source: Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques
Christine de Pizan book The Book of the City of Ladies
Cellui ou celle en qui plus a vertus est le plus hault, ne la haulteur ou abbaisement des gens ne gist mie es corps selon le sexe mais en la perfeccion des meurs et des vertus.
Part I, ch. 9, p. 24.
Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (c. 1405)
Source: The Book of the City of Ladies
“Surely there is no more wretched sight that the human body unloved and uncared for.”
Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983) Dutch resistance hero and writer
Source: The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom
“My body will not be a tomb for other creatures.”
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath
“I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people.”
Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics
Such a statement is indicated as his response to a question regarding the financial fiasco known as the South Sea Bubble; the earliest mention of this famous anecdote appears to be from manuscripts of the Second Memorandum Book (1756) of Joseph Spence, first published in Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, of Books and Men (1820) https://archive.org/details/anecdotesobserv00singgoog edited by in Samuel Weller Singer; a Lord Radnor is quoted as saying:<br>When Sir Isaac Newton was asked about the continuance of the rising of South Sea stock? — He answered, "that he could not calculate the madness of the people." <br class="br">Variants: <br class="br">I can calculate the motions of erratic bodies, but not the madness of a multitude. <br class="br">As quoted in "Mammon and the Money Market", in The Church of England Quarterly Review (1850), p. 142 http://books.google.com/books?id=s_cDAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA142&dq=%22but+not+the+madness%22&hl=en&ei=nUtbTfuoCYG6ugPFi4n4DA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=book-preview-link&resnum=1&ved=0CCkQuwUwAA#v=onepage&q=%22but%20not%20the%20madness%22&f=false <br class="br">I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people. <br class="br">I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies but not the madness of men. <br class="br">I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men. <br class="br">Disputed
Paullina Simons book The Bronze Horseman
Source: The Bronze Horseman
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
W.B. Yeats book The Tower
Among School Children http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1437/, st. 8 <br class="br">The Tower (1928) <br class="br">Context: Labour is blossoming or dancing where<br>The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.<br>Nor beauty born out of its own despair,<br>Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.<br>O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,<br>Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?<br>O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,<br>How can we know the dancer from the dance?
“The face is the soul of the body.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations
Source: Philosophical Investigations
“Emotions arise in the place where your mind and body meet”
Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer
Source: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
P. C. Cast (1960) American writer
Source: Goddess of the Sea
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), IV Perspective of Disappearance
Auguste Comte (1798–1857) French philosopher
Book II: Astronomy, Ch. I: General View
The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (1853)
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Variant: We have spiritual facts and their interpretations by which they are communicated to others, sruti or what is heard, and smṛti or what is remembered. Śaṅkara equates them with pratyakṣa or intuition and anumana or inference. It is the distinction between immediacy and thought. Intuitions abide, while interpretations change.
Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) French physicist, the "father of thermodynamics" (1796–1832)
p, 125
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)