Quotes about touch

A collection of quotes on the topic of touch, likeness, life, use.

Aristotle quote: “No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.”

Quotes about touch

“Dreams are like stars; you may never touch them, but if you follow them, they will lead you to your destiny.”

Liam Payne (1993) English singer and songwriter

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/6422617.Liam_Payne

Dreams, Star

“I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

Heart

“I declare to the whole world, the Bosnians are under protection. No one can disturb these people nor their churches, nor harm them. Nobody in the world will touch these people and not harm them.”

Mehmed II (1432–1481) Ottoman sultan

Source: Alphonse de Lamartine (Ottoman History)

People, World

“Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can't.”

Johnny Depp (1963) American actor, film producer, and musician

Music

“Every one interprets everything in terms of his own experience. If you say anything which does not touch a precisely similar spot in another man's brain, he either misunderstands you, or doesn't understand you at all.”

Aleister Crowley book Diary of a Drug Fiend

Source: Diary of a Drug Fiend

Understanding

“Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.”

Hunter S. Thompson book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Source: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

World, Music, Sense, Memory

“As touching the gods, I do not know whether they exist or not, nor how they are featured; for there is much to prevent our knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.”

Protagoras (-486–-411 BC) pre-Socratic Greek philosopher

Opening lines of Concerning the Gods (DK 80 B4).
Variant translation: "As to the Gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist, or if they do, what they are like."

Life, God

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Variant: The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.
Variant: The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen, nor touched... but are felt in the heart.

Deep, Inspirational, Beauty, love

“I know that I am mortal by nature and ephemeral, but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.”

Ptolemy book Almagest

In some of the manuscripts, the books begins with this epigram (Owen Gingerich, The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, American Institute of Physics, 1993, p. 55).
Almagest

Pleasure, Nature

“Consciousness expresses itself through creation. This world we live in is the dance of the Creator. Dancers come and go in the twinkling of an eye but the dance lives on. On many an occasion when I am dancing, I have felt touched by something sacred. In those moments, I felt my spirit soar and become one with everything that exists. I become the stars and the moon. I become the lover and the beloved. I become the victor and the vanquished. I become the master and the slave. I become the singer and the song. I become the knower and the known. I keep on dancing and then, it is the eternal dance of creation. The Creator and the creation merge into one wholeness of joy. I keep on dancing — until there is only … the dance.”

Michael Jackson (1958–2009) American singer, songwriter and dancer

"The Dance" - from inlay sleeve of Dangerous (1991)

World, Star, Lovers, Joy

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed. ”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Love, World, Dreams, Courage

“Magic exists. Who can doubt it, when there are rainbows and wildflowers, the music of the wind and the silence of the stars? Anyone who has loved has been touched by magic. It is such a simple and such an extraordinary part of the lives we live.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Love, Music, Star, Silence

“To Love is to reach God.
Never will a Lover's chest
feel any sorrow.
Never will a Lover's robe
be touched by mortals.
Never will a Lover's body
be found buried in the earth.
To Love is to reach God.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

Hush Don't Say Anything to God (1999)

Love, God, Feeling, Lovers

“For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet”

Plato (-427–-347 BC) Classical Greek philosopher

196
The Symposium

Love

“To be kind is to respond with sensitivity and human warmth to the hopes and needs of others. Even the briefest touch of kindness can lighten a heavy heart. Kindness can change the lives of people.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy

Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech (2012)
Context: Of the sweets of adversity, and let me say that these are not numerous, I have found the sweetest, the most precious of all, is the lesson I learnt on the value of kindness. Every kindness I received, small or big, convinced me that there could never be enough of it in our world. To be kind is to respond with sensitivity and human warmth to the hopes and needs of others. Even the briefest touch of kindness can lighten a heavy heart. Kindness can change the lives of people.

People, Hope, Change, Heart

“Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.... Humanity is in ‘final exam’ as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

From 1980s onwards, Critical Path (1981)

Universe

“Does it ever stop? The wanting you?" "Even when I've just left ye. I want you so much my chest feels tight and my fingers ache with wanting to touch ye again.”

Diana Gabaldon book Outlander

Source: Outlander

Feeling

“Learn to get in touch with silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences; all events are blessings given to us to learn from.”

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926–2004) American psychiatrist

As quoted in " Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Messenger of Love https://books.google.com/books?id=3esDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA2&lpg=PA2&dq=%22Yoga+Journal%22+Kronisch&source=bl&ots=B895e3lzeI&sig=7V4uALc6CTiPrF02-cV8AAzsgbw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjM1enasPLSAhWs6oMKHbpyAbQQ6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&q=%22Elisabeth%20Kubler-Ross%22&f=false" by Lennie Kronisch in Yoga Journal, Issue 11, November-December 1976, pp. 18-20 Context: Learn to get in touch with silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences; all events are blessings given to us to learn from. There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub.

Life, Silence, Learning

“The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
Variant: In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.
Source: Leonardo's Notebooks

Water, Time

“Don't touch me; I'll die if you touch me.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

“To be successful you have to be selfish, or else you never achieve. And once you get to your highest level, then you have to be unselfish. Stay reachable. Stay in touch. Don't isolate.”

Michael Jordan (1963) American retired professional basketball player and businessman

Success, Selfishness

“So you never know who you touch. You never know how or when you'll have an impact, or how important your example can be to someone else" (20).”

Denzel Washington (1954) actor, screenwriter, director, producer

Source: A Hand to Guide Me

“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.”

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy

Madness

“Nothing eases suffering like human touch.”

Bobby Fischer (1943–2008) American chess prodigy, chess player, and chess writer

Source: Chess Meets of the Century

Suffering

“You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing.”

Oscar Wilde A Woman of No Importance

Source: A Woman of No Importance

Love, Life, Beauty

“In terms of experience, we want to make this (referring to the self) very pleasant. We want this to be blissful, ecstatic. But, as I said before, even being ecstatic is not goal by itself. If you are blissful by your own nature, then the important thing is that you are no more the issue. There are other issues in this existence; we can look at those. But if you are an issue, what other issue will you take in your hands? You will not touch anything. When I am enough trouble myself, why do I want to take on this one or that one? When I am no more an issue, now I am willing to dig into the whole existence and see what it is all about.”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Source: Of Mystics & Mistakes

Nature

“Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

People, Universe, Painting

“When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

A New Earth (2005)
Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“And may my bronze name / touch always her thousand fingers / grow brighter with her weeping / until I am fixed like a galaxy / and memorized / in her secret and fragile skies.”

Leonard Cohen book Let Us Compare Mythologies

Source: Let Us Compare Mythologies

Secret

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”

Madeline Miller book The Song of Achilles

Source: The Song of Achilles

Death, World, Way

“I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you.
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.”

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

"Hallelujah"
Various Positions (1984)

Truth, Fools, Feeling

“Tried to call, or at least beep the lord, but didn't have a touch-tone”

Common (rapper) (1972) American rapper, actor and author from Illinois

"Respiration", Black Star (1998)
Albums, Compilations, Singles, and Cameos

“I hope that Cezanne will still be here and that he will join us, but he is so shy, so afraid of meeting new people, that I am afraid that he might let us down, even though he wants very much to meet you. How sad it is that this man hasn't had more patronage in his life! This is a true artist who has come to doubt himself far too much. He needs to be cheered up, so e was quote touched by your article.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

Quote in a letter from Giverny to Gustave Geffroy, 23 November 1894; as cited in: P. Michael Doran (2001), ‎Art Conversations with Cézanne, p. 3
1890 - 1900

Life, People, Sadness, Hope

“Somewhere, the deepest desire for us all is to be appreciated, to be loved, to be seen as somebody of value. But not just seen — and Aristotle makes a difference between being admired and being loved. When you admire people, you put them on pedestals. When you love people, you want to be together. So really, the first meeting I had with people with disabilities, what touched me was their cry for relationship.”

Jean Vanier (1928–2019) Canadian humanitarian

On Being, The Wisdom of Tenderness (transcript) http://www.onbeing.org/program/wisdom-tenderness/transcript/1369 Interview with Krista Tippett, December 24, 2009 From interviews and talks

Love, People, Cry

“Where the heart is full of kindness which seeks no injury to another, either in act or thought or wish, this full love creates an atmosphere of harmony, whose benign power touches with healing all who come within its influence. Peace in the heart radiates peace to other hearts, even more surely than contention breeds contention.”

Patañjali (-200–-150 BC) ancient Indian scholar(s) of grammar and linguistics, of yoga, of medical treatises

Translation by: Charles Johnston
Yoga Sutras of Patañjali

Love, Peace, Heart

“When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.”

Eckhart Tolle book A New Earth

Source: A New Earth (2005)

World

“How deeply you touch another life is how rich your life is. -Sadhguru”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
Sourced from newspapers and magazines

Life

“To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books. It has always seemed to me that symbolism should be restored to the structure of world education.”

Manly P. Hall (1901–1990) Canadian writer and mystic

Quoted in the tribute of The Lost Symbol (2009) by Dan Brown
The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928)
Context: A nation with culture is blessed. To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books. It has always seemed to me that symbolism should be restored to the structure of world education. The young are no longer invited to seek the hidden truths, dynamic and eternal, locked within the shapes and behavior of living beings.

Books, World, Education

“I dream that one day
we will look at each other
in the same way we look at the sun,
and we will touch each other
like the sun on earth,
and the blessings of light
will flow into our hearts.”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/14108295.alexis_karpouzos?page=2

Sun, Light, Dreams, Heart

“Impressive & soulful music is a good way to enrich oneself love for life.”

Zafar Mirzo (1972)

Soul, Music, Way, Love

“Although I'm big and strong I've never touched a women”

#1 Broncos Fan

Strong, Women

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

Childhood, Personality, Forgetting, Pain

“Everything you look at can become a fairy tale and you can get a story from everything you touch.”

Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) Danish author, fairy tale writer, and poet

“I am in chains. Don't touch my chains.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

“To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books.”

Dan Brown book The Lost Symbol

Source: The Lost Symbol

Books, World

“That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Love, Personality

“There is a saying in the Islands. Beware the women of the warrior class, for all they touch is both decorative and deadly.-Yuki”

Tamora Pierce Squire

Source: Squire

Women

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Source: Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation (1983)

Life, Pain, Way, Heart

“I love the ground under his feet, and the air over his head, and everything he touches and every word he says. I love all his looks, and all his actions and him entirely and all together.”

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) English novelist and poet

Love

“By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

The Critic as Artist (1891), Part I
Context: There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.
Context: Puritans cannot destroy a beautiful thing, yet, by means of their extraordinary prurience, they can almost taint beauty for a moment. It is chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people find expression. I regret it because there is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.
Context: It is chiefly, I regret to say, through journalism that such people find expression. I regret it because there is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.

Communication

“A true friend is the one who holds your hand and touches your heart”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

Variant: Friend is the person that holds your hand and touches your heart!

Heart

“For one moment our lives met, our souls touched.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Variant: For one moment our lives met our souls touched.

Soul

“And then I saw him and nothing was ever the same again.

The sky was never the same colour, the moon never the same shape: the air never smelt the same, food never tasted the same. Every word I knew changed its meaning, everything that once was stable and firm became as insubstantial as a puff of wind, and every puff of wind became a solid thing I could feel and touch.”

Stephen Fry book Moab Is My Washpot

Source: Moab Is My Washpot

Food, Feeling, Change

“I have loved in life and I have been loved.
I have drunk the bowl of poison from the hands of love as nectar,
and have been raised above life's joy and sorrow.
My heart, aflame in love, set afire every heart that came in touch with it.
My heart has been rent and joined again;
My heart has been broken and again made whole;
My heart has been wounded and healed again;
A thousand deaths my heart has died, and thanks be to love, it lives yet.
I went through hell and saw there love's raging fire,
and I entered heaven illumined with the light of love.
I wept in love and made all weep with me;
I mourned in love and pierced the hearts of men;
And when my fiery glance fell on the rocks, the rocks burst forth as volcanoes.
The whole world sank in the flood caused by my one tear;
With my deep sigh the earth trembled, and when I cried aloud the name of my beloved,
I shook the throne of God in heaven.
I bowed my head low in humility, and on my knees I begged of love,
"Disclose to me, I pray thee, O love, thy secret."
She took me gently by my arms and lifted me above the earth, and spoke softly in my ear,
"My dear one, thou thyself art love, art lover,
and thyself art the beloved whom thou hast adored.”

Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927) Indian Sufi

Source: The Dance of the Soul

Love, Life, Death, Men

“And then something truly bizarre happened. I could feel his touch through our eyes. I couldn't look away from him.”

P. C. Cast (1960) American writer

Feeling

“If I hold her hand she says, ‘Don’t touch!’
If I hold her foot she says ‘Don’t touch!’
But when I hold her waist-beads she pretends not to know.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart

“Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

Love, Life, Bird, Sea

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”

Henri Nouwen (1932–1996) Dutch priest and writer

Out of Solitude

For Friend, Pain, Reality, Personality

“I haven't touched a piano in so many years. I couldn't play with such crippled fingers, even if I wanted to. For a time after my marriage I tried to keep up my music. But it was hopeless. One-night stands, cheap hotels, dirty trains, leaving children, never having a home — [She stares at her hands with fascinated disgust. ] See, Cathleen, how ugly they are! So maimed and crippled! You would think they'd been through some horrible accident! [She gives a strange little laugh. ] So they have, come to think of it. [She suddenly thrusts her hands behind her back. ] I won't look at them. They're worse than the foghorn for reminding me — [Then with defiant self-assurance. ] But even they can't touch me now. [She brings her hands from behind her back and deliberately stares at them — calmly. ] They're far away. I see them, but the pain has gone.”

Eugene O'Neill Long Day's Journey into Night

Page 106 (Act 3)
Long Day's Journey into Night (1955)

Pain, Marriage, Children, Music

“Dwell in peace in the home of your own being, and the Messenger of Death will not be able to touch you.”

Nanak (1469–1539) Founder of Sikhism

Guru Nanak quotes

Death, Peace, Home

“Recently somebody asked me if I’m still in touch with my feminine side. They ask me why did I do the Lux ad and things like that. I think there is a feminine side to me, as people like to assume.”

Shahrukh Khan (1965) Indian actor, producer and television personality

From interview with Rajeev Masand

People, Thinking

“You can't believe it, you can't conceive it,
And you can't touch me, 'cause I'm untouchable,
And I know you hate it, and you can't take it,
You'll never break me, 'cause I'm unbreakable.”

Michael Jackson (1958–2009) American singer, songwriter and dancer

Unbreakable
Invincible (2001)

Hate

“I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No. I wouldn't touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.”

Matka Tereza (1910–1997) Roman Catholic saint of Albanian origin

1970s
Source: Malcolm Muggeridge, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, A Gift For God: Prayers and Meditations, New York: Harper & Row, 1975. p. 61; Cited in: M. Dhavamony. "Mother Teresa's mission of love for the poor" in: Studia missionalia, Vol 39. (1990), p. 137

Love, Money, God, People

“In order to touch the heart and gain the confidence, the assent, the adhesion, and the co-operation of the illiterate legions of the proletariat — and the vast majority of proletarians unfortunately still belong in this category — it is necessary to begin to speak to those workers not of the general sufferings of the international proletariat as a whole but of their particular, daily, altogether private misfortunes. It is necessary to speak to them of their own trade and the conditions of their work in the specific locality where they live; of the harsh conditions and long hours of their daily work, of the small pay, the meanness of their employer, the high cost of living, and how impossible it is for them properly to support and bring up a family.”

Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) Russian revolutionary, philosopher, and theorist of collectivist anarchism

Program and Object of the Secret Revolutionary Organisation of the International Brotherhood (1868)

Family, Confidence, Support, Suffering

“I've also gotten weird letters, suicide letters, girls threatening to jump if I don't get in touch with them. So you think, "This is bullshit," but then you think, "What if it's not? Who wants to take that chance?" I write them back, tell them to hang in there, if things are that bad, they have to get better. But I'm not altogether stable myself, so who am I to give advice?”

Johnny Depp (1963) American actor, film producer, and musician

Quoted in Johanna Schneller, "Johnny Depp: Girls' Best Friend," http://www.deppimpact.com/mags/transcripts/rollingstone_dec88.html Rolling Stone (December 1988)

Girl, Thinking, Suicide, Chance

“On a given day, a given circumstance, you think you have a limit. And you then go for this limit and you touch this limit, and you think, 'Okay, this is the limit.' As soon as you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.”

Ayrton Senna (1960–1994) Brazilian racing driver

Interview for Racing is in My Blood, 1991 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIzjx9z_vUg

Thinking, Flying

“Illustration from the late-1900s up through the middle of the 20th century was absolutely amazing. In general, American culture was at its highest skill wise in every aspect of human life in the 1940s. It’s all been downhill since then. You just open an old magazine from the 1930s and ’40s and look at the illustrations in it. There’s nobody alive that could touch the way they could draw back then.”

John Kricfalusi (1955) Canadian animator

In Amid Amidi The John Kricfalusi Interview, Part 2 http://www.cartoonbrew.com/old-brew/the-john-kricfalusi-interview-part-2-434.html, Cartoon Brew, 31 August 2004.

Life, Way, Drawing

“The revolutionary atmosphere remained as I had first known it. General and private, peasant and militiaman, still met as equals; everyone drew the same pay, wore the same clothes, ate the same food, and called everyone else 'thou' and 'comrade'; there was no boss-class, no menial-class, no beggars, no prostitutes, no lawyers, no priests, no boot-licking, no cap-touching. I was breathing the air of equality, and I was simple enough to imagine that it existed all over Spain. I did not realize that more or less by chance I was isolated among the most revolutionary section of the Spanish working class.”

George Orwell book Homage to Catalonia

Source: Homage to Catalonia (1938)

Food, Imagination, Chance, Clothes

“What heart touched is what is touched
what heart experienced is what is experienced
where heart lived is what is lived.”

Suman Pokhrel (1967) Nepali poet, lyricist, playwright, translator and artist

I shall bid no Farewell https://allpoetry.com/poem/11694634--I-shall-bid-no-Farewell-by-Suman-Pokhrel From Poetry

Heart

“If you have the courage to touch life for the first time, you will never know what hit you. Everything man has thought, felt and experienced is gone, and nothing is put in its place.”

U.G. Krishnamurti book Mind is a Myth

Source: Mind is a Myth (1987), Ch. 4: There Is Nothing To Understand

Life, Courage, Time

“Divine incarnations do not come to bring a new or exclusive religion, but to restore the One Religion of God-realization.
Many are the churches and temples founded in his name, often prosperous and powerful, but where is the communion that he stressed — actual contact with God? Jesus wants temples to be established in human souls, first and foremost; then established outwardly in physical places of worship. Instead, there are countless huge edifices with vast congregations being indoctrinated in churchianity, but few souls who are really in touch with Christ through deep prayer and meditation.”

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship

The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You, (2004) by Yogananda

God, Religion, Soul, Christ

“There is relationship between sight and touch, something about eyes being able to see through the fingers touching the clay, about fingers being able to feel what the eyes are seeing without the fingers actually touching it.”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 20 (Vintage 2003)

Feeling

“How long in woman lasts the fire of love,
If eye or touch do not relight it often.”

Dante Alighieri book Purgatorio

Canto VIII, lines 77–78 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Purgatorio

Love

“You're playing touch-butt with that dork in park, the pony tail.”

Nate Diaz (1985) American mixed martial artist

3 March 2016, UFC 196 pre-fight press conference, source: "UFC 196: Nate Diaz Says Conor McGregor Just Plays Touch Butt" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_O-FgRFlWc&feature=youtu.be&t=1m52s.

“And you want to travel with her,
And you want to travel blind,
And you know that she will trust you,
For you've touched her perfect body with your mind.”

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

"Suzanne" - Isle of Wight performance (1970) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_56ep729TE - Live in London (2008) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snMOmHzgssk Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967) Context: Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river. You can hear the boats go by, You can spend the night beside her, And you know that she's half crazy But that's why you want to be there, And she feeds you tea and oranges That come all the way from China. And just when you mean to tell her That you have no love to give her Then she gets you on her wavelength And she lets the river answer That you've always been her lover. And you want to travel with her, And you want to travel blind, And you know that she will trust you, For you've touched her perfect body with your mind.

Travel, Perfection

“God, the supreme being, is neither circumscribed by space, nor touched by time; he cannot be found in a particular direction, and his essence cannot change.”

Avicenna (980–1037) medieval Persian polymath, physician, and philosopher

As quoted in 366 Readings From Islam (2000), edited by Robert Van der Weyer
Context: God, the supreme being, is neither circumscribed by space, nor touched by time; he cannot be found in a particular direction, and his essence cannot change. The secret conversation is thus entirely spiritual; it is a direct encounter between God and the soul, abstracted from all material constraints.

God, Change, Time

“The light comes at the same time as the Voice. … I will not tell you all; I have not leave; my oath does not touch on that.”

Joan of Arc (1412–1431) French folk heroine and Roman Catholic saint

Third public examination (24 February 1431) http://www.stjoan-center.com/Trials/sec03.html; part of this testimony has sometimes been paraphrased: If I am not in the state of grace, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me. Trial records (1431) Context: The light comes at the same time as the Voice. … I will not tell you all; I have not leave; my oath does not touch on that. My Voice is good and to be honored. I am not bound to answer you about it. I request that the points on which I do not now answer may be given me in writing. … You shall not know yet. There is a saying among children, that 'Sometimes one is hanged for speaking the truth.'" [She is asked : Do you know if you are in the grace of God? ] If I am not, may God place me there; if I am, may God so keep me. I should be the saddest in all the world if I knew that I were not in the grace of God. But if I were in a state of sin, do you think the Voice would come to me? I would that every one could hear the Voice as I hear it.

Light, Time

“The male has a negative Midas Touch - everything he touches turns to shit.”

Valerie Solanas book SCUM Manifesto

Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. 5 (hyphen (not en- or em-dash) so in original).