Quotes about smell
page 5

“166. Of all smells, bread; of all tasts, salt.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

“It seems odd to think of you at Lake George tonight – I can smell the outdoors – and hear it – and see the stars – So often before I went to bed at night I would walk out toward the barn and look at the sky in the open space. There was no light little house – there were no people – there was only the night – I will never go back again – maybe to stand just for a moment where I put the little bit that was left of Alfred [ Alfred Stieglitz, her husband] after he was cremated – but I think not even for that. I put him where he would hear the lake.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

That is finished.
In a letter to William Howard Schubart, (nephew of her died husband), Abiquiu, New Mexico, August 4, 1950; as quoted in Voicing our visions, -Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, pp. 228-29
1950 - 1970

People, Star, Thinking, Light

“Down on Spring Street, in a bar across the street from the secondhand store. With my last nickel I went there for a cup of coffee. an old style place, sawdust on the floor, crudely drawn nudes smeared across the walls. It was a saloon where old men gathered, where the beer was cheap and smelled sour, where the past remained unaltered.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Men, Spring, Coffee, Beer

“To smell to a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the body; no less are thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul.”

Thomas Fuller (1608–1661) English churchman and historian

The Virtuous Lady.
The Holy State and the Profane State (1642)

Soul

“I find the totality of metamorphosis most terrifying when I'm Woyzeck… Suffering through that had as devastating an impact on me as if I hadn't only always suffered as Woyzeck but continue to do so over and over. Malaria of the soul, recurring again and again. My total being is one large breeding ground for the shocks of the world past, present and future. All living and dying, all vibrations pass through me. The entire universe pours into me, rages in me, rampages through and over me. Annihilates me. It comes and goes whenever it likes. It rules me, commands me, envelops me, threatens me, and waits for me everywhere and all the time. It sucks me up, sucks me dry, grows through me. It's in my spinal marrow. In my brain mass. In my blood, in my bones. My muscles. Guts. Genitals. Sperm. Flesh. Eyes. Hearing. Taste. Smell. Balance. Laughter. Tears. In my days and nights. In my thoughts. In my feelings. In my courage and my fear. In my despair and my hope. In my weakness and my strength. Everywhere and all the time.”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

On his performance in Woyzeck. p. 315
Kinski Uncut : The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski (1996)

World, Fear, Hope, Feeling

“Many a young fellow has found himself in a similar predicament, but I doubt whether anyone ever became so desperately hungry as I did on that day. I recollect that, having rashly eaten up my sausage before eight o'clock, I felt a sinking towards twelve; it was aggravated by the savoury smell of roast meat which steamed from the cookshops and dining-rooms as I walked along the streets. About one o'clock I gazed with malignant envy on the happy clerks who could go in and order platefuls of the roast and boiled which smoked in the windows, and threw a perfume more delicious than the sweetest strains of music into the streets where I lingered and looked. And at two I observed the diners come out again, walking more slowly, but with an upright and satisfied air, while I -- the sinking had been succeeded by a dull gnawing pain -- was slowly doubling up. At half-past two I felt as if I could bear it no longer. I had been walking about, trying different offices for a clerkship. I might as well have asked for a partnership. But I could walk no more.”

Walter Besant (1836–1901) English novelist and historian

The Case of Mr. Lucraft (with James Rice), 1875 http://books.google.com/books?id=fn5lH8qnLygC&pg=PA19, p. 19

Pain, Happiness, Music, Past

“For the intimate fusion of touch, temperature and sometimes also taste and smell sensations into a single unified total impression raises the question of whether we do not have here Gestalt qualities which are built up upon a foundation belonging to several sensory regions. As can easily be recognized, it is just as possible that a complex of, say, touch and temperature sensations should provide the foundation for a Gestalt quality as should a complex of sound sensations. Indeed no a priori objection can be raised even against the idea that there should exist sound-colour-Gestalten spanning the data of the senses of sound and vision as something like a bridge - even though we do not believe that we can detect anything of this sort in sensation.”

Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932) Austrian philosopher

Source: "On Gestalt Qualities," 1890, p. 97

Idea, Question, Sense

“And all the world is football shaped,
It's just for me to kick in space,
And I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste,
And I've got one, two, three, four, five
Senses working overtime,
Trying to take this all in,
I've got one, two, three, four, five
Senses working overtime,
Trying to taste the difference,
'Tween the lemons and limes,
The pain and the pleasure,
And the church bells softly chime.”

Andy Partridge (1953) British musician

"Sense Working Overtime".
English Settlement (1982)

Pain, Pleasure, World, Sense

“To tell the truth, I often felt uneasy when I thought of the excessive brittleness and fragility of the moon. The moon is generally repaired in Hamburg, and very imperfectly. It is done by a lame cooper, an obvious blockhead who has no idea how to do it. He took waxed thread and olive-oil—hence that pungent smell over all the earth which compels people to hold their noses. And this makes the moon so fragile that no men can live on it, but only noses. Therefore we cannot see our noses, because they are on the moon.”

Nikolai Gogol book Diary of a Madman

Diary of a Madman (1835)

Men, People, Truth, Idea

“One would think that agents charged with protecting us from "dirty nukes" would enjoy the same discretionary search authority as partrolmen who make traffic stops. In fact, they have less. If a patrolman pulls you over for weaving between lanes, and smells bourbon on your breath, he does not need a warrant to give you a breath test. But if an FBI agent learns that you are a member of a known terrorist group, and that you behaved suspiciously at a flight school, he must jump through bureaucratic hoops of fire to search your laptop computer.”

Mark Riebling (1963) American writer

Uncuff the FBI: Congress Must Undo the Church Committe's Damage (2002)

School, Search, Thinking, Learning

“No daintie flowre or herbe that growes on grownd,
No arborett with painted blossoms drest
And smelling sweete, but there it might be fownd
To bud out faire, and throwe her sweete smels al arownd.”

Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene

Canto 6, stanza 12
The Faerie Queene (1589–1596), Book II

Painting

“But--criminals are remote from you--as in love, they turn away and turn me away from the world and its laws. Thiers smells of sweat, sperm, and blood. In short, to my body and my thristy soul it offers devotion. It was because their world contains these erotic conditions that I was bent on evil.”

Jean Genet book The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal (1949)

Love, World, Law, Soul

“The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Way

“We old bachelors smell like dogs, do we? So be it. But I must take issue with your claim that doctors who treat female illnesses are womanizers and cynics at heart. Gynecologists deal with savage prose the likes of which you have never dreamed of.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to E.M. Shavrova (September 16, 1891)
Letters

Dogs, Dreams, Heart

“Later on you will find buried near the coconut tree
the knife which I hid there for fear you would kill me,
and now suddenly I would be glad to smell its kitchen steel
used to the weight of your hand, the shine of your foot:
under the dampness of the ground, among the deaf roots,
in all the languages of the men only the poor will know your name,
and the dense earth does not understand your name
made of impenetrable divine substances.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Enterrado junto al cocotero hallarás más tarde
el cuchillo que escodí allí por temor de que me mataras,
y ahora repentinamente quisiera oler su acero de cocina
acostumbrado al peso de tu mano y al brillo de tu pie:
bajo la humedad de la tierra, entre las sordas raíces,
de los lenguajes humanos el pobre sólo sabría tu nombre,
y la espesa tierra no comprende tu nombre
hecho de impenetrables y substancias divinas.
Tango del Viudo (The Widower's Tango), Residencia I (Residence I), III, stanza 3.
Alternate translation by Donald D. Walsh:
Buried next to the coconut tree you will later find
the knife that I hid there for fear that you would kill me,
and now suddenly I should like to smell its kitchen steel
accustomed to the weight of your hand and the shine of your foot:
under the moisture of the earth, among the deaf roots,
of all human labguages the poor thing would know only your name,
and the thick earth does not understand your name
made of impenetrable and divine substances.
Residencia en la Tierra (Residence on Earth) (1933)

Men, Fear, Understanding, Tree

“Rich people always smell good.”

Gavin Free (1988) English filmmaker

"Lets Play Tuesdays - Let's Build in Minecraft - Ghast Man Standing" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lrI6PvmoBQ. youtube.com. August 20, 2013. Retrieved January 3, 2016.

People

“The air was cold and smelled of earth. Birds twittered. “Beyond one or two hundred years back,” Havig once said to me, “the daytime sky is always full of wings.””

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 6 (p. 60)

Bird

“Besides, they always smell of bread and butter.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Stanza 39.
Beppo (1818)

“The continent had to be discovered emotionally. It had to become a homeland and feel like home. The sense of overpowering space, the isolation, the warmth of summer, the garish light, the shiny-leafed trees, the birds and insects, the smell of air filled with dust, the strange silences, and the landscapes in all their oddness had to become familiar.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

A Land Half Won (1980)

Feeling, Home, Bird, Sense

“The courtly person (cortegiano, gentilhomme, gentleman, Hofmann) has gone through a training in self-esteem that expresses itself in many ways: in aristocratically pretentious opinions, in polished or majestic manners, in gallant or heroic patterns of feeling as well as in a selective, aesthetic sensitivity for that which is said to be courtly or pretty. The noble, far removed from any self-doubt, should achieve all this with a complete matter-of-factness. Any uncertainty, any doubt in these things signifies a slackening in the nobility’s cultural “identity.” This class narcissism, which has petrified into a form of life, tolerates no irony, no exception, no slips, because such disturbances would give rise to unwelcome reflections. The French nobles did not turn up their noses at Shakespeare’s “barbarism” without reason. In his plays one already “smells” the human ordinariness of those who want to stand before society as the best.
With the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, the place of the “best” is awarded anew. The bourgeois ego, in an unprecedented, creative storming to the heights of a new class consciousness won for itself an autonomous narcissism.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 62

Life, Way, Feeling, Personality

“Ganga Devi wife of Kumar Kampana (died 1374 CE) of Vijayanagar writes as follows in her Madhuravijayam regarding the state of things in the Madura region when it was under Muslim rule:
"The temples in the land have fallen into neglect, as worship in them has been stopped… The sweet odour of the sacrificial smoke and chant of the Vedas have deserted the villages which are now filled with the foul smell of roasted flesh and the fierce noise of the ruffianly Turushkas… The wicked mlechchas pollute the religion of the Hindus every day."”

Gangadevi Indian princess and Sanskrit poetess

Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 4

Religion

“It's so nice to get flowers while you can still smell the fragrance.”

Lena Horne (1917–2010) American singer, actress, civil rights activist and dancer

Quoted in People magazine, 10 November 1980 http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20077832,00.html

Flowers

“Many of the strongest proponents of climate change are now coming out and saying “it’s simply not true?” Citations please? Who were the “top” [ten? ] proponents of anthropogenic climate change over the last decade or more? Has even one of them come out and said that it’s just not true? Because I gotta be honest here. (Someone has to be). I smell bullshit.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Orwellian Legislative Duplicity on HB 1485 http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2017/05/05/orwellian-legislative-duplicity-hb-1485/ (May 5, 2017)

Change

“A novel is a marketable commodity, of the class collectively termed “luxuries,” as not contributing directly to the support of life or the maintenance of health. It is of the class "artistic luxuries" because it does not appeal to any of the three material senses — touch, taste, smell; and it is of the class "intellectual artistic luxuries,” because it is not judged by the superior senses — sight and hearing.”

Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909) Novelist, short story writer, essayist (1854-1909)

The Novel: What It Is (1893)

Life, Health, Support, Sense

“Just as a maistre Fifi mocks those who hold their noses [in his presence]. because he has handled filth for so long that he can no longer smell his own foulness; so likewise do idolaters make light of those who are offended by a stench they cannot themselves recognize. Hardened by habit, they sit in their own excrement, and yet believe they are surrounded by roses.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Excuse, CR 6.595. as quoted in ibid, p.220

Light

“This consideration must alter the form of our proposed inquiry; for the question being thus at least partly decided, since it is ascertained that we have rays of heat which give no light, it can only become a subject of inquiry whether some of these heat-making rays may not have a power of rendering objects visible, superadded to their now already established power of heating bodies. This being the case, it is evident that the onus probandi [burden of proof] ought to lie with those who are willing to establish such an hypothesis, for it does not appear that Nature is in the habit of using one and the same mechanism with any two of our senses. Witness the vibration of air that makes sound, the effluvia that occasion smells, the particles that produce taste, the resistance or repulsive powers that affect the touch—all these are evidently suited to their respective organs of sense.”

William Herschel (1738–1822) German-born British astronomer, technical expert, and composer

Source: Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works (1880), Ch.4 "Life and Works" on his discovery of the infrared.

Lie, Question, Nature, Sense

“A strict allegory is like a puzzle with a solution: a great romance is like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can't quite place. I think the something is 'the whole quality of life as we actually experience it.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

C. S. Lewis' Letters to Children – letter to Lucy (11 September 1958)

Life, Flowers, Thinking

“A trembling and some laughter, / a squirt of pee, a spit, / whispers of the heart, / a smell, / the drift to sleep, / pursuit by Gods, / exposure of the bum, / mathematics …”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

"The Schultz Song"
M is for Man, Music, and Mozart

God, Mathematics, Laughter, Sleep

“It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1996)

Cars

“Never, ever retract. The smell of weakness is like blood to sharks.”

Pamela Geller (1958) blogger, author, political activist, and commentator

"Pamela Geller speaks to the Sugar Land Tea Party in Sugar Land, Texas" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLzlQ7WrvfQ&t=0h20m41s, Sugar Land, Texas

“Those soldiers hacked and slashed. Their faces were distorted with the horror of their actions but they were out of control, far past the point where they could stop. The flicker of firelight made everything seem more hellish and surreal.
I had seen this before. I had seen my own brothers this way, a few times, back in the north. The blood smell takes control and kills the mind and deadens the soul and there is nothing human left.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 71 (p. 197)

Way, Soul, Time, Past

“Bernie wants us to live under the heavenly socialist–communist system like China. We never hear the left criticize that Mao Tse-Tung killed over 80 million people—the Chinese government admits—biggest mass murder in history. That's why there's so many liberal trendy places in Austin, in Denver, in New York, in LA, and San Francisco named after Mao. And people go and love play on their iPhones and the free market and their Chinese slave goods, and they drink beer and expensive wine and giggle about how fun it is to wear red stars. You couldn't put more bad luck on you, you couldn't trash your mojo better. Wearing swastika armbands, you stupid snot-nosed crud! That live off the backs of everybody that fought Nazism and Communism. You need to have your jaws broken! Don't you worry, reality is gonna crash in on you, trash! Who lowered our defenses and brought the Republic down; oh, we're already gone! And you celebrate it like you've joined the globalists mounting America's head on the wall, your great victory! A mass rape of women across Europe. The national draft coming in for women! The families falling apart! Women degraded into nothing but sexual objects! ALL in the name of Gloria Steinem and the Central Intelligence Agency program! And a Bernie Sanders with his fake Einstein hair, and his 'I'm a man of the people!' We go out and talk to Bernie Sanders' supporters, they can hardly talk—they're like him—'Free! Free! I want free stuff!' As if the New World Order is gonna give you anything free! Oh, it's free like a piece of cheese. And a little mouse comes out and it smells it and goes to bite it and, WA BAM! Breaks your neck. But your stupider than the little mouse. You can see all the countries and all the people caught in the mouse traps, caught in the big bear traps. You know what you do? You go into a trendy shop. On some capitalist strip. And you go in and you snuggle in with that credit card that daddy put money in for the trust fund. And you put on that little fur-rimmed coat and you're all sexy with your hammer and sickle on, and your Che Guevara and, you know, shirt from Rage Against the Machine, and the whole capitalist record company system selling it to you, and you go out on the street and you walk into McDonald's and you have yourself a double latte, oh yeah. Pathetic! Scum! Oh, how you'll burn in the camps, later. Wishing you had done something; I mean, you are the ultimate chumps, the ultimate buffoons, the ultimate schmucks!… But the public had so much freedom! They were so wealthy, even our poorest, they had no idea that what they were replacing it with was abject slavery.”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

"Sanders Supporters are Pathetic Scum" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooNxJnf_UAI, February 2016

Love, Women, Money, Bad luck

“The European races are barbaric. They wear freshly pressed suits and ties, and they smell of eau de cologne, but deep down, they still have the same barbaric nature known from history. They kill with ease. They murder people without any problem. Therefore, beating women in their homes is of no consequence to the [Europeans] and Americans, whereas in an Islamic environment, it is unimaginable.”

Ali Khamenei (1939) Iranian Shiite faqih, Marja' and official independent islamic leader

May 10, 2010 address at a conference for women http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/3844.htm 2010

Women, People, Home, History

“I stopped taking drugs when I realized that pot smelled bad and LSD trips were becoming like TV reruns. I had had enough inner journeys — I felt I knew myself well enough, thank you.”

John Waters (1946) American filmmaker, actor, comedian and writer

Books, Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste (1981)

“For he has seen a road by healing waters
Hushed into wintry slate against the sand,
And spoken there with the wind's elfin daughters,
And mingled in their dusty saraband.

He has known winds that blow from blossomy closes,
Rich with the fruity smell of summertide,
And kissed warm faery lips… Now he reposes,
While we are not quite certain he has died.”

Donald Davidson (1893–1968) American poet, essayist, critic and author

A Dead Romanticist

Kiss, Daughters

“[paintings as] the plastic equivalent of the sounds, noises and smells found in theaters, music-halls, cinemas, brothels, railways station, ports.”

Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) Italian painter

1910's
Source: 'Piani plastici come espanzione sferica nello spazio', Carrà, March 1913

Music, Painting

“Oh-ho-ho-man. I could sit here and smell this pole all day, I kid you not.”

Darby Conley (1970) American cartoonist

Bucky Katt's Big Book of fun, page 124
Bucky Katt, Satchel Pooch

“The smell of subjectivity clings to the mechanical definition of complexity as stubbornly as it sticks to the definition of information.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 12, Randomness, The flip side of information, p. 104

“The United States is different because I've spent a lot of time there since, and so there's more of a continuum. It's definitely the U. S. that has the deepest roots in my soul. I spent my childhood believing I was English, and would one day be going home. But when we came back to live here, I started to realise how much of me was bedded somewhere else. Whenever I walk out of an airport in the U. S. and smell the air, a bit of me feels it's coming home.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Associated Content Interview (October 23, 2006)

Feeling, Home, Soul, Time

“1. Laughter is the Wild Body's song of triumph.
2. Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously.
3. Laughter is the bark of delight of a gregarious animal at the proximity of its kind.
4. Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion.
5. Laughter is the representative of Tragedy, when Tragedy is away.
6. Laughter is the emotion of tragic delight.
7. Laughter is the female of Tragedy.
8. Laughter is the strong elastic fish, caught in Styx, springing and flapping about until it dies.
9. Laughter is the sudden handshake of mystic violence and the anarchist.
10. Laughter is the mind sneezing.
11. Laughter is the one obvious commotion that is not complex, or in expression dynamic.
12. Laughter does not progress. It is primitive, hard and unchangeable.”

Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) writer and painter

"Inferior Religions" (1917), cited from Lawrence Rainey (ed.) Modernism: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) pp. 208-9.

Spring, Fish, Laughter, Strong

“(Sylvia) Rita! Get my smelling salts! (Rita) Ma, you used them up when you discovered that repeal of the estate tax benefits only the very, very rich.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 87

“We live small lives on the periphery; we are marginalized and there's a great deal in which we choose not to participate. We wanted silence and we have that silence now. We arrived here speckled in sores and zits, our colons so tied in knots that we never thought we'd have a bowel movement again. Our systems had stopped working, jammed with the odor of copy machines, Wite-Out, the smell of bond paper, and the endless stress of pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause. We had compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was enough. But now that we live here in the desert, things are much, much better.”

Douglas Coupland (1961) Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and graphic designer

Generation X (1991)

Silence, Night

“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

"God's Grandeur", lines 5-8
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Feeling

“Vodka is a very deceptive drink, because you drink it and you think, "What is this? This is pointless! It's— you can't taste it, you can't smell it… Why did we waste our money on this, bloody— why are we on a traffic island?"”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

On vodka.
Monster (2004)

Money, Drink, Thinking

“A fresher green the smelling leaves display
And glittering as they tremble, cheer the day.”

Thomas Parnell (1679–1718) Anglo-Irish cleric, writer and poet.

from the poem The Hermit.

“I don't believe pumpkin pie is even made from pumpkin. I mean, how can something that smells that shitty make a pie so sweet? There's not enough sugar in the universe.”

Lewis Black (1948) American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor

Nothing’s Sacred (2005)

Universe

“If you've ever bought drugs before, you understand that for some bizarre reason you have to feign this relationship with your dealer. It's like you're not really going to him to buy drugs. You're going for a social visit. Drugs are the surprise that just happens when you get there. "Oh, hash? I didn't know!" And he's talkin' to you and you're tryin' to be interested, you know, "Oh yeah? No, really…I love Foghat. No, seriously." And inside you're like, "Just fuckin' give it! I hate you. Your house smells like cat pee!"”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

Why do all drug dealers' houses smell like cat pee?
From Her Tours and CDs, The Notorious C.H.O. Tour

Love, Hate, Cats, Understanding

“And I'm going to give it to you if you hold your breath just for a moment … I can smell the uranium on it as you lean towards me.”

David Lange (1942–2005) New Zealand politician and 32nd Prime Minister of New Zealand

Commonly misquoted as "I can smell the uranium on your breath", as in A New Zealand Dictionary of Political Quotations, p. 94.
During the Oxford Union Debate, 1 March 1985.
Source: http://publicaddress.net/default,1578.sm#post

“I’m sure you have heard it said that appearance does not matter so much, and that it is what's on the inside that counts. This is, of course, utter nonsense, because if it were true then people who were good on the inside would never have to comb their hair or take a bath, and the whole world would smell even worse than it already does. -Lemony Snicket”

Daniel Handler book The Miserable Mill

The Miserable Mill (2000)

People, World, Appearance

“He [the chief psychiatrist] complimented me on how brilliant my diagnoses were: "You can smell a delusion, you can ferret out a hallucination, but"—and this has always stuck in my mind—"did you know that this woman grew prize camellias? Did you know that this man played the piano?" "No," I replied, a little bemused, "I wasn't trained to find the good things." But from then on I started to, and ever since I have looked for the good things. What the patient can do, not what he can't. His deficiencies and his weaknesses are so obvious, but his strengths, tragically, are deeply hidden: that is what makes him a patient, a sufferer. For it is his strength alone that will alleviate his suffering.”

John Diamond (doctor) (1934) Australian doctor

Source: Facets of a Diamond: Reflections of a Healer (2002), p. 109

Suffering, Training

“If I take things slowly today in order to appreciate life better, and if I take time to listen to the messages that life sends me, then I will have less time to do the things I need to do today. Then tomorrow I will have to do everything that much faster and I will be that much more unable to appreciate life. It is dangerous to stop and smell the roses.”

John S. Hall (1960) Poet, author, singer, lawyer

November 26
Quotes from Daily Negations (2007)

Life, Time

“This added the element of mystery that made the comparison inevitable: life is a thing that reminds me quite a bit of the beaches around Tokyo Bay. Anything goes. Strange and unique things are being washed up all the time. I’m one of them and so are you. We spend some time on the beach, maybe side by side, and then that slopping, smelling, chilly thing rakes it with the liquid fingers of a crumbling hand and some of the things are gone again.”

Roger Zelazny Isle of the Dead

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 1 (p. 6)

Life, Time

“I remember the last time we were in the studio that Nick (Mason) ripped this fart. It was one of the most atrocious things the others had ever smelled in their lives. While Roger and Rick fled in terror, I asked Nick for seconds.”

Syd Barrett (1946–2006) English musician

Billboard, February 1967

Time

“French music is really very sensory, and appeals to sense of smell, taste, touch. It can be languorous, and almost erotic. Russian music is very subjective, sometimes whiny, breast-beating 'Look how I suffer, look how I suffer!'. German music is, to use your word, metaphysical. It really asks those existential questions of 'How do I relate to the Universe?', 'Is there a heaven?', 'How am I like a brook, or a leaf on a tree?'. I know this was the music that most challenged Schnabel. He said Mozart was the most inaccessible of the great masters, because with the fewest number of notes, he accesses the deepest levels of human awareness and experience.”

Leon Fleisher (1928) American conductor and pianist

Interview with pianist Leon Fleisher http://www.examiner.com/article/interview-with-pianist-leon-fleisher by Elijah Ho (October 1, 2014)

Music, Question, Sense, Tree

“It’s funny how one summer can change everything. It must be something about the heat and the smell of chlorine, fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle, asphalt sizzling after late-day thunderstorms, the steam rising while everything drips around it. Something about long, lazy days and whirring air conditioners and bright plastic flip-flops from the drugstore thwacking down the street. Something about fall being so close, another year, another Christmas, another beginning. So much in one summer, stirring up like the storms that crest at the end of each day, blowing out all the heat and dirt to leave everything gasping and cool. Everyone can reach back to one summer and lay a finger to it, finding the exact point when everything changed. That summer was mine.”

Sarah Dessen book That Summer

That Summer (1996)

Grass, Change, Christmas, Summer

“And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U. S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean."”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
Essays

Coffee, Thinking

“Let me put it another way. Most people are what they sense and if all you see day after day is a mat on a floor that belongs to the rats and four walls with tiny piles of plaster at the bottom, and all you eat is starch, and all you hear is continuous music, you smell garbage and piss which drips through the walls continually, and all the people you know live like you, it's not horrible, it's just… Who they are.”

Kathy Acker book Blood and Guts in High School

Blood and Guts in High School (1978)

People, Music, Way, Sense

“It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognised plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and almost forgotten.”

Graham Greene book The Honorary Consul

The Honorary Consul (1973)

Men, Hope, Sense, Light

“There is a programming smell here… which is kind of like the smell in your refrigerator, you know. There's a sign that there's something wrong, but you can't quite put your finger on it. But you know if you leave it there, its only going to get worse.”

Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki

Geek Noise (2004)

“Some days hang over Manhattan like a huge pair of unseen pincers, slowly squeezing the city until you can hardly breathe. A low growl of thunder echoed up the cavern of Fifth Avenue and I looked up to where the sky started at the seventy-first floor of the Empire State Building. I could smell the rain. It was the kind that hung above the orderly piles of concrete until it was soaked with dust and debris and when it came down it wasn't rain at all but the sweat of the city.”

Mickey Spillane book The Killing Man

The Killing Man (1989)

“Well, I looked at Picasso [at the Picasso exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, in 1939] until I could smell his armpits and the cigarette smoke on his breast. Finally, in front of one picture – a bone figure on a beach – I got it. I saw that the figure was not his real subject. The plasticity wasn't either – although the plasticity was great. No. Picasso had uncovered a feverishness in himself and is painting it – a feverishness of death and beauty.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

Modern Art U.S.A., R. Blesh, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1956, pp. 268-69
1950s

Death, Beauty, Art, Painting

“Men smell of leather. … The leather of huntsmen, furniture movers, porters.”

Renée Vivien (1877–1909) British poet who wrote in the French language

Quoted in Mercure de France, I-XII (1953), trans. Jeannette H. Foster (1977)

Men

“Snatch them baldheaded, slap their teeth out. Little starved faces four feet from the screen, you’d speak to them in a loud, commanding voice, get not even a twitch. Use of the preemptive splint, not everyone knows about it. The world reminds us of its power, again and again and again. Going along minding your own business, and suddenly an act of God, right there in front of you. Great falls of snow and bursting birds. Getting guilty, letting it all slide. Sown here and there like little…petunias, one planted in Old Lyme, one in Fairbanks, one in Tempe. Alleged that he slept with her while she was asleep, I can see it, under certain circumstances. You may wink, but not at another person. You may wink only at pigeons. You may pound in your tent pegs, pitch your tent, gather wood for the fire, form the hush puppies. They seek to return? Back to the nest? The warm arms? The ineffable smells? Not on your tintype. Well, I think that’s a little harsh. Think that’s a little harsh do you? Yes, harsh. Harsh. Well that’s a sketch, that is, that’s a tin-plated sketch— They write and telephone. Short of cash? Give us a call, all inquiries handled with the utmost confidentiality. They call constantly, they’re calling still, saying williwaw, williwaw”

Donald Barthelme book Sixty Stories

“Aria”.
Sixty Stories (1981)

God, World, Business, Bird

“I don't like the definition 'war correspondent'. It is history, not journalism, that has condemned the Middle East to war. I think 'war correspondent' smells a bit, reeks of false romanticism: it has too much of the whiff of Victorian reporters who would view battles from hilltops in the company of ladies, immune to suffering, only occasionally glancing towards the distant pop-pop of cannon fire.”

Robert Fisk (1946) English writer and journalist

Preface (page XXI)
The Great War for Civilization (2005)

War, History, Thinking, Suffering

“Always hold your sales meetings in rooms too small for the audience, even if it means holding them in the WC. 'Standing room only' creates an atmosphere of success, as in theatres and restaurants, while a half-empty auditorium smells of failure.”

David Ogilvy (1911–1999) Advertising executive

Ogilvy on Advertising, p. 172

Failure, Success

“Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing — who is really one of them and who is not — and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.”

Peggy Noonan (1950) American author and journalist

"Open Mic Night at MSNBC" The Wall Street Journal (3 September 2008) http://online.wsj.com/article/declarations.html

Life, Death, Way, History

“You please me much by saying that no other fault [in the portrait Gainsborough recently made and sent] is to be found in your picture than the roughness of the surface; for that part being of use in giving force to the effect at a proper distance.... I urn [earn? ] much better pleased that they should spy out things of that kind than to see an eye half an inch out of its place or a nose out of drawing when view'd at a proper distance. I don't think it would be more ridiculous for a person to put his nose close to the canvas and say the colours smell offensive than to say how rough the paint lies; for one is just as material as the other with regard to hurting the effect and drawing of a picture. For Sir Godfrey Kneller used to tell them that pictures were not made to smell of..”

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) English portrait and landscape painter

Quote in Gainborough's letter, March 1758 from Ipswich, to a correspondent in the neighbouring town of Colchester; as cited in Thomas Gainsborough, by William T, Whitley https://ia800204.us.archive.org/6/items/thomasgainsborou00whitrich/thomasgainsborou00whitrich.pdf; New York, Charles Scribner's Sons – London, Smith, Elder & Co, Sept. 1915, pp. 20-21 1755 - 1769

Thinking, Parting, Hurt, Drawing

“April 1945. My unit was in Germany, and we were the ones who liberated Dachau. Thirty thousands breathing skeletons. You've seen the pictures, but the pictures don't tell you what it was like. You have to go there and smell it for yourself; you have to be there and touch it with your own hands. Human beings did it to human beings, and they did it with a clear conscience. That was the end of mankind […] I'm sure you've read the stories about how some of them couldn't stop eating. The starved ones. They'd thought about food for so long, they couldn't help it. They ate until their stomachs burst, and they died. Hundreds of them.”

Paul Auster book Oracle Night

Paul Auster, Oracle Night, New York: Henry Holt and Company, p. 92.
Oracle Night (2003)

Food, Reading, Help

“And I remembered the inside of that apartment, how it smelled of mice and dust, and the old women who sat in the lobby on hot afternoons, and the old woman with the pretty legs. Then there was the elevator man, a broken man from Milwaukee, who seemed to sneer every time you called your floor, as though you were such a fool for choosing that particular floor, the elevator man who always had a tray of sandwiches in the elevator, and a pulp magazine.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Women, Fools, Time

“The child most at risk [to be accessed by a predatory pedophile] is the child not bonded deeply to anything or anybody. Children who are most deeply bonded with parents, parents who are protective, it's almost like, I don't know if you've seen predatory animals that put a kind of smell on their young to protect them? Okay? I think your 'luck' was much more likely due to your parent[s] than it was to any blind confluence of the planets.”

Andrew Vachss (1942) American writer and lawyer

Spence Abbott in a two–part interview, published on IGN.com in November 2000

Children, Thinking, Parent, Animals

“By any precise definition, Washington is a city of advanced depravity. There one meets and dines with the truly great killers of the age, but only the quirkily fastidious are offended, for the killers are urbane and learned gentlemen who discuss their work with wit and charm and know which tool to use on the escargots.
On New York's East Side one occasionally meets a person so palpably evil as to be fascinatingly irresistible. There is a smell of power and danger on these people, and one may be horrified, exhilarated, disgusted or mesmerized by the awful possibilities they suggest, but never simply depressed.
Depression comes in the presence of depravity that makes no pretense about itself, a kind of depravity that says, "You and I, we are base, ugly, tasteless, cruel and beastly; let's admit it and have a good wallow."
That is how Times Square speaks. And not only Times Square. Few cities in the country lack the same amenities. Pornography, prostitution, massage parlors, hard-core movies, narcotics dealers — all seem to be inescapable and permanent results of an enlightened view of liberty which has expanded the American's right to choose his own method of shaping a life.
Granted such freedom, it was probably inevitable that many of us would yield to the worst instincts, and many do, and not only in New York. Most cities, however, are able to keep the evidence out of the center of town. Under a rock, as it were. In New York, a concatenation of economics, shifting real estate values and subway lines has worked to turn the rock over and put the show on display in the middle of town.
What used to be called "The Crossroads of the World" is now a sprawling testament to the dreariness which liberty can produce when it permits people with no taste whatever to enjoy the same right to depravity as the elegant classes.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"Cheesy" (p.231)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

Life, People, Age, World

“It is a peculiarity of time that in retrospect it appears so compact, an indivisible solid object, a dish with only one smell and one flavor.”

Cees Nooteboom book Rituals

Page 4
Rituals (1980)

Appearance, Time

“There is nothing more splendid than the prospect of sitting in the morning before a new ink-stone and a sheet of white paper. The smell of the white paper is like the scent of the skin of a new lover who has just paid a surprise visit out of a rainy garden. And the black ink is like lacquered hair. And the quill? Well the quill is like the instrument of pleasure whose purpose is never in doubt but whose surprising efficiency one always -- always forgets.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

, quoted in Peter Greenaway's The
The Pillow Book

Pleasure, Lovers, Forgetting

“I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet, keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) English poet, illustrator, painter and translator

Sudden Light http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/roset03.html#1, st. 1 (1881).

Light, Grass

“On the Lüneberg Heath, it was near where Bergen-Belsen had been, and everything round there smelled of garlic and it was all Jews, because who was buying anything at that time? Only the Jews, and then I said to myself, I, I who was bargaining with Jews over wood and eggs, I was amazed and astounded, and I thought you see - goddammit! They all should have been killed, and there those fellas are, doing deals with me, you know?”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

Argentina Audiotapes (1957)

Time

“A very interesting report on the London property market as a refuge for secret assets and dirty money – published in March 2015 by Transparency UK – spoke of money coming from corruption or corrupt individuals, without ever mentioning the word “”; nor did it ever mention “organised crime”. The reason is simple: with the exception of a few very rare cases, in the UK the mafia is not something that you can see or hear. There aren’t dead bodies on the streets, or shootings. In Mexico or in Italy, between corpses, blood and drug seizures it’s impossible to think that the Mafia doesn’t exist. In Italy and in Mexico Mafia is loud and it smells of blood. In London, as in Paris, it exists, but it’s quiet, it acts in the dark. And most of all it doesn’t have the pungent smell of blood, but the reassuring smell of money. It’s not true that money doesn’t smell, it does smell indeed, but you definitely can’t rely on your sense of smell to identify criminal money.”

Roberto Saviano (1979) Italian journalist, writer and essayist

Dirty Money in London event (2016)

Money, Secret, Thinking, Sense

“A man should not love the moon.
An ax should not lose weight in his hand.
His garden should smell of rotting apples
And grow a fair amount of nettles.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"Should, Should Not" (1961), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz
King Popeil and Other Poems (1962)

Love

“Oh redwood tree,
Please let us under,
When we were young we used to go,
Under the redwood tree,
And it smelled like rain,
Maybe even thunder,
Won't you keep us from all harm,
Wonderful redwood tree.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Redwood Tree
Song lyrics, Saint Dominic's Preview (1972)

Tree

“Life is dull, but it could be worse and it could be better. We accept that a corporation determines our life’s routines. It’s the trade-off so that we don’t have to be chronically unemployed creative types, and we know it. When we were younger, we’d at least make a show of not being fooled and leave copies of Adbusters on our desktops. After a few years it just doesn’t matter. You trawl for jokes or amusingly diversionary. wav files. You download music. A new project comes along, then endures a slow-motion smothering at the hands of meetings. All ideas feel stillborn. The air smells like five hundred sheets of paper.
And then it’s another day.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

Life, Fools, Music, Feeling

“Now all that was left 'neath the bad-smelling sky
was my big empty factory…
the Lorax…
and I.
The Lorax said nothing.
Just gave me a glance,
just gave me a very sad, sad backward glance,
as he lifted himself by the seat of his pants.
And I'll never forget the grim look on his face
when he heisted himself and took leave of this place,
through a hole in the smog, without leaving a trace.
And all that the Lorax left here in this mess
was a small pile of rocks with the one word:
UNLESS.”

Dr. Seuss The Lorax

Whatever that meant . . . well, I just couldn't guess.
The Lorax (1971)

Sadness, Forgetting

“time in an allegory of itself imparts to us lessons of wisdom which the moment they are formulated are immediately destroyed by the merest flickers of light or shadow which are nothing more than time in its incarnations and disincarnations which are the phrases that I am writing on this paper and that disappears as I read them:
they are not the sensations, the perceptions, the mental images, and the thoughts which flare up and die away here, now, as I write or as I read what I write: they are not what I see or what I have seen, they are the reverse of what is seen and of the power of sight—but they are not the invisible: they are the unsaid residuum;
they are not the other side of reality but, rather, the other side of language, what we have on the tip of our tongue that vanishes before it is said, the other side that cannot be named because it is the opposite of a name:
what is not said is not this or that which we leave unsaid, nor is it neither-this-nor-that: it is not the tree that I say I see but the sensation that I feel on sensing that I see it at the moment when I am just about to say that I see it, an insubstantial but real conjunction of vibrations and sounds and meanings that on being combined suggest the configuration of a green-bronze-black-woody-leafy-sonorous-silent presence;
no, it is not that either, if it is not a name it surely cannot be the description of a name or the description of the sensation of the name or the name of the sensation:
a tree is not the name tree, nor is it the sensation of tree: it is the sensation of a perception of tree that dies away at the very moment of the perception of the sensation of tree;
names, as we already know, are empty, but what we did not know, or if we did know, had forgotten, is that sensations are perceptions of sensations that die away, sensations that vanish on becoming perceptions, since if they were not perceptions, how would we know that they are sensations?;
sensations that are not perceptions are not sensations, perceptions that are not names—what are they?
if you didn’t know it before, you know now: everything is empty;
and the moment I say everything-is-empty, I am aware that I am falling into a trap: if everything is empty, this everything-is-empty is empty too;
no, it is full, full to overflowing, everything-is-empty is replete with itself, what we touch and see and taste and smell and think, the realities that we invent and the realities that touch us, look at us, hear us, and invent us, everything that we weave and unweave and everything that weaves and unweaves us, momentary appearances and disappearances, each one different and unique, is always the same full reality, always the same fabric that is woven as it is unwoven: even total emptiness and utter privation are plenitude (perhaps they are the apogee, the acme, the consummation and the calm of plenitude), everything is full to the brim, everything is real, all these invented realities and all these very real inventions are full of themselves, each and every one of them, replete with their own reality;
and the moment I say this, they empty themselves: things empty themselves and names fill themselves, they are no longer empty, names are plethoras, they are donors, they are full to bursting with blood, milk, semen, sap, they are swollen with minutes, hours, centuries, pregnant with meanings and significations and signals, they are the secret signs that time makes to itself, names suck the marrow from things, things die on this page but names increase and multiply, things die in order that names may live:”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 9

Wisdom, Secret, Feeling, Thinking

“The controlled laboratory studies of Harry F. and Margaret K. Harlow… separated infant monkeys… in single cages in an animal colony room where they could develop social relationships… through seeing, hearing, and smelling, but not through touching or movement. These and other studies indicate that it is the deprivation of body contact and body movement—not deprivation of the other body senses—that produces the wide variety of abnormal emotional behaviors in these isolation-reared animals.”

James W. Prescott (1930) American psychologist

"Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence" (1975)

Behavior, Sense, Study, Animals

“I must have a talk with you, David, and learn all the new ideas. As far as I can see, one must hate everybody but at the same time give them free medical attention and a lot of extra education, poor things! All those helpless little children herded into schoolhouses every day — and cod liver oil forced down babies’ throats whether they like it or not — such nasty-smelling stuff.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

Lucy Angkatell
The Hollow (1946)

Hate, Children, Education, Idea

“That's the beauty of the Web: You can roll around in a stranger's obsession without having to smell his or her house. You can amscray whenever you want without being rude. The site gets its "hit" and you know more about our species' diversity.”

Penn Jillette (1955) American magician

"Free Celebrity Nudes!" in Penn's Columns (15 October 1997) http://pennandteller.com/sincity/penn-n-teller/excite/celnude.html at Penn & Teller.com 1990s

Beauty, Housing

“I stepped inside. It was almost pitch dark, smelling of old underwear and the sleep of a sick body. A feeble light came from a crack in the window covered by a slice of sacking. Before I could stop him, Sammy had bolted the door…Vapors spilled from our mouths in the cold air. "Let her in, Sammy," I said. "What the hell."”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Hell, Sleep, Light

“When I look at creation, how can know that there was a Creator? I can't see Him, hear Him, touch Him, taste Him, or smell Him. How can I know that He exists? Why, creation proves, beyond the shadow of the smallest doubt, that there is a Creator.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

God doesn't believe in atheists (2002)

“It was a yellow voice, a high, shrill treble in the nursery
White always and high, I remember it so,
White cupboard, off-white table, mugs, dolls’ faces
And I was four or five. The garden could have been
Miles away. We were taken down to the green
Asparagus beds, the cut lawn, and the smell of it
Comes each summer after rain when white returns. Our bird,
A canary called Peter, sang behind bars. The black and white cat
Curled and snoozed by the fire and danger was far away.”

Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001) poet

" A Bird in the House" in Collected Poems (Carcanet, 1987)

Cats, Bird, Summer

“Early on, I made the mistake of wanting spiritual feelings to endure and remain romantic. Like a new couple expecting to always feel in love, I operated my faith thinking God and I were going to walk around smelling flowers. When this didn't happen, I became confused.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Love, God, Faith, Feeling

“.. that dizzy seething of forms and acoustic lights, rowdy and smelly [visible in the paintings at the Futurist exhibition, February 1912 in Paris].... to obtain this total painting which calls for the active cooperation of all the senses: painting of the plastic mood of the universal, you have to paint the way drunkards sing and vomit, sounds, noises and smells.”

Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) Italian painter

Quote in The painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells Carrà, in 'Lacerba' vol. 1. no. 17, 1,Florence, 1 September 1913, pp. 186-187
1910's

Way, Mood, Sense, Light

“That diabolical deviant is smarter than he smells.”

Malcolm Azania book From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain

Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 11 “Self-Distraction is Self-Destruction” (p. 323)

“It doesn't smell of sulphur any more. No, it smells of something else. It smells of hope, and you have to have hope in your heart.”

Hugo Chávez (1954–2013) 48th President of Venezuela

Speech at the U.N, welcoming the Obama administration. (September 2009) BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-20712033 2009

Hope, Heart

“FATIMA (raises her head, brightens up, and makes a beautiful smile): Husein, this qanoon scents like crazy, you would think a rose from Ta’if smells. C’mon, bend and get a sniff of it, it won’t bite you.”

Vinko Vrbanić (1951)

Dvadeseto pjevanje, drama, 2nd shared prize, Act 3
Qanoon

Smile, Beauty, Thinking

“As I walk through my beloved Krakowski Park and pass by a group of young people from which I can smell beer, I give them a wide berth. But when I feel the weed, I go boldly through their group and sometimes chat. Yes, the abuse of marijuana causes trouble with memory, concentration, but it is a short-lived condition. I'm not talking about extreme cases, but there are few of them. Less than after alcohol. Oneself should sometimes detach from reality to deal with it somehow.”

Jerzy Vetulani (1936–2017) Polish scientist

(7 April 2017): „Mama powiedziała mi: Obyś był dobry i szczęśliwy”. Co prof. Jerzy Vetulani mówił o swoim życiu, pasjach i nauce? http://wyborcza.pl/magazyn/7,124059,21608877,mama-powiedziala-mi-obys-byl-dobry-i-szczesliwy-co-prof.html. Wyborcza.pl (in Polish).

People, Alcohol, Feeling, Beer

“Free speech means being able to express an honest opinion—in case you didn't know—and my honest opinion is that Wahhabi Islam is such an obvious mental affliction, that science ought to be looking for a cure. It's a truly horrible, heartless and cruel ideology that despises human kind, especially the female half, and I believe its presence on this planet is a stain on all humanity; and when it finally passes, as one day it surely must, because nothing that unnatural and inhuman could possibly last forever, its memory will linger like a bad smell, as a warning for generations to come; like a ghostly gibbet by the roadside of history, a bony finger of death, beckoning us back to a more brutal and primitive past. It'll serve as a grim reminder of what happens to human beings when religion is allowed to go too far.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Can I say this?" (27 May 2012) http://youtube.com/watch?v=nlhxadPHt4s · transcript http://dotsub.com/view/d1843b5a-19d8-4bd0-8e91-2b84ee780b61/viewTranscript/eng 2012

Death, Religion, History, Affliction

“Before I met him, I wasted so much time. I was just annoying and narcissistic, and smelled bad. He’s protective without being possessive, passionate without needing to show his temper. I’m sorry, I know I sound insipid.”

Anne Hathaway (1982) American actress

On her boyfriend, Raffaello Follieri, as quoted in "Anne Hathaway : I'm Not a Saint" in People magazine (20 February 2007)

Passion, Time

“Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for the better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities, and a disgust for cheapjacks. We ought to smell, as it were, the difference of quality in men and their proposals when we enter the world of affairs about us.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

The Social Value of the College-Bred http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/jaCollegeBred.html 1910s, Memories and Studies (1911)

Men, World, Loss

“I don't want to hold you and feel so helpless
I don't want to smell you and lose my senses
And smile in slow motion
With eyes in love.”

Rufus Wainwright (1973) American-Canadian singer-songwriter and composer

Foolish Love
Song lyrics, Rufus Wainwright (1998)

Love, Smile, Feeling, Sense

“The exquisite smell of the south, clean but funky, like a big woman.”

Thomas Wolfe book Look Homeward, Angel

69
Look Homeward, Angel (1929)

“The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, 'This is jessamine, this violet, this rose'. But at last Dahoum drew me: 'Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all', and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. 'This,' they told me, 'is the best: it has no taste.”

T. E. Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom

My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.
Source: Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), Ch. 3

World, Dogs, Way, Flowers

“Criticisms from democratic personages can be of only two kinds, those that are wrong and those that are not. Criticisms that are not wrong can help remedy our shortcomings while wrong ones must be refuted. As for such types as Liang Shu-ming, Peng Yi-hu and Chang Nai-chi, if they want to fart, let them. That will be to our advantage, for everybody can judge whether the smell is good or foul, and through discussion the majority can be won over and these types isolated.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

Talk at a Conference of Secretaries of Provincial, Municipal and Autonomous Region Party Committees http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_57.htm (27 January 1957)

Change, Help

Quotes about smell page 5

Quotes about smell
page 5