Quotes about body
page 3

Louise L. Hay photo
Sylvia Plath photo
Jean Baudrillard photo
Terry Pratchett photo
W.E.B. Du Bois photo

“One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strenth alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

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 photo

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.”

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
1910s
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.

Haruki Murakami photo

“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

Oscar Wilde photo
Marie Corelli photo
Colson Whitehead photo
Mark Twain photo

“[Whose_property]Whose property is my body? Probably mine. I so regard it. If I experiment with it, who must be answerable? I, not the State. If I choose injudiciously, does the State die? Oh no.”

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
Source: Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings

Galileo Galilei photo

“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"

Rebecca Solnit photo

“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

William Shakespeare photo

“When the
mind's free,
The Body's delicate.”

Source: King Lear

James Patterson photo
Elizabeth Gilbert photo
Orhan Pamuk photo
Sharon Creech photo
Sadhguru photo
Eve Ensler photo

“stop fixing your bodies and start fixing the world!”

Eve Ensler (1953) American playwright, performer, feminist, activist and artist
Angelina Jolie photo
William Wilberforce photo
W.B. Yeats photo
Virginia Woolf photo
Emil M. Cioran photo

“Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Source: Tears and Saints (1937)

Albert Einstein photo
Izumi Shikibu photo
Christopher Isherwood photo
Carlos Ruiz Zafón photo
Fernando Pessoa photo
Aimé Césaire photo
Tracey Emin photo
Virginia Woolf photo
Jim Butcher photo
Laurie Halse Anderson photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
Martha Graham photo

“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 photo

“To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.”

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

Laurell K. Hamilton photo
Isaac Newton photo
Mark Twain photo

“Now he found out a new thing--namely, that 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.”

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.

Hugh Laurie photo
Thich Nhat Hanh photo
Virginia Woolf photo
Mahmoud Darwich photo

“Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?”

Mahmoud Darwich (1941–2008) Palestinian writer

Source: Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems

Virginia Woolf photo
Lewis Carroll photo
William Shakespeare photo
Oscar Wilde photo
John Donne photo

“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 photo
Scott Westerfeld photo

“… humanity is a disease, a cancer on the body of the world.”

Variant: humanity is a cancer on the body of the world
Source: Pretties

H.P. Lovecraft photo

“The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!”

Fiction
Source: "Dagon" - Written Jul 1917; First published in The Vagrant, No. 11 (November 1919)

Douglas Adams photo
Ovid photo
Orhan Pamuk photo

“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 photo
John Locke photo
Deb Caletti photo
Leonard Cohen photo

“Your body will never be familiar.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

Source: The Favorite Game

Mark Twain photo
Pythagoras photo

“It is only necessary to make war with five things; with the maladies of the body, the ignorances of the mind, with the passions of the body, with the seditions of the city and the discords of families.”

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

Guy De Maupassant photo

“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 photo

“The man or the woman in whom resides greater virtue is the higher; neither the loftiness nor the lowliness of a person lies in the body according to the sex, but in the perfection of conduct and virtues.”

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

Corrie ten Boom photo

“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

Leonardo Da Vinci photo
Isaac Newton photo

“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:
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."
Variants:
I can calculate the motions of erratic bodies, but not the madness of a multitude.
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
I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.
I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies but not the madness of men.
I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.
Disputed

Alexis Carrel photo
Arundhati Roy photo
Alexandre Dumas photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar photo
W.B. Yeats photo

“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

Among School Children http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1437/, st. 8
The Tower (1928)
Context: Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Terry Pratchett photo
Oscar Wilde photo
Eckhart Tolle photo

“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

Robinson Jeffers photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Mark Twain photo

“When I was a boy a farmer's wife who lived five miles from our village had great fame as a faith-doctor—that was what she called herself. Sufferers came to her from all around, and she laid her hand upon them and said, "Have faith—it is all that is necessary," and they went away well of their ailments. She was not a religious woman, and pretended to no occult powers. She said that the patient's faith in her did the work. Several times I saw her make immediate cures of severe toothaches. My mother was the patient. In Austria there is a peasant who drives a great trade in this sort of industry, and has both the high and the low for patients. He gets into prison every now and then for practising without a diploma, but his business is as brisk as ever when he gets out, for his work is unquestionably successful and keeps his reputation high. In Bavaria there is a man who performed so many great cures that he had to retire from his profession of stage-carpentering in order to meet the demand of his constantly increasing body of customers. He goes on from year to year doing his miracles, and has become very rich. He pretends to no religious helps, no supernatural aids, but thinks there is something in his make-up which inspires the confidence of his patients, and that it is this confidence which does the work, and not some mysterious power issuing from himself.”

Source: Christian Science (1907), Ch. 4

Clarice Lispector photo
Leonardo Da Vinci photo
Auguste Comte photo
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan photo

“If experience is the soul of religion, expression is the body through which it fulfills its destiny. We have the spiritual facts and their interpretations by which they are communicated to others. It is the distinction between immediacy and thought. Intuitions abide, while interpretations change.”

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 photo

“We shall have [a complete theory] only when the laws of Physics shall be extended enough, generalized enough, to make known beforehand all the effects of heat acting in a determined manner on any body.”

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) French physicist, the "father of thermodynamics" (1796–1832)

p, 125
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)