Quotes about touch
page 15

“A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian,
Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched,
And touched nothing that he did not adorn.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Epitaph on Goldsmith
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“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

“No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.”

Milan Kundera The Joke

The Joke (1967)

World, Change

“There is one inevitable criterion of judgment touching religious faith in doctrinal matters. Can you reduce it to practice? If not, have none of it.”

Hosea Ballou (1771–1852) American Universalist minister (1771–1852)

Manuscript, Sermons; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 254.

Faith

“Science has taught us that what we see and touch is not what is really there.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 5, Abstraction, Beyond concrete reality, p. 35

Science

“In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man — these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We can not continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

People, World, Faith

“In a world that both desexualizes and hypersexualizes transfeminine people, I am desperate to find companionship and touch.”

Jacob Tobia (1991) american LGBTIQ activist

Sissy Diaries: The Harsh Realities of Dating for Gender-Nonconforming Femmes https://www.them.us/story/sissy-diaries-dating-while-nonbinary (April 25, 2018).

People, World

“A truly great architecture grew up in Mexico after the time of the Conquest of Cortez. It was probably not on account of any lack desire on the part of the early Fathers that architecture was not transplanted to California in the days of the Missions. It is apparent their simple crude touches of ornament, that Padres were trying to simulate the richness of the churches of Mexico City and Puebla—they were pitifully limited, however, not only in wealth but also in the skill of the workmen had at hand.”

Clarence Stein (1882–1975) American architect

A Triumph of Spanish Colonial Style (1916)

Time, Parting, Wealth

“The sea — this truth must be confessed — has no generosity. No display of manly qualities — courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness — has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Source: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Ch. 36

Truth, Faith, Courage, Sea

“Some consider… all wants of the body as shame, disgrace, and defect to which they are compelled to attend; this is chiefly the case with the sense of touch, which is a disgrace to us according to Aristotle, and which is the cause of our desire for eating, drinking, and sensuality. Intelligent persons must, as much as possible, reduce these wants, guard against them, abstain from speaking of them, discussing them, and attending to them in company of others. Man must have control over all these desires, reduce them as much as possible, and only retain of them as much as is indispensable. His aim must be the aim of man as man, viz., the formation of ideas, and nothing else. The best and sublimest among them is the idea which man forms of God, angels, and the rest of the creation according to his capacity. Such men are always with God, and of them it is said, "Ye are princes, and all of you are children of the Most High."”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

(Ps. lxxxii. 6) This is man's task and purpose.
Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.8

Men, God, Children, Angels

“1154. Content is the Philosopher’s Stone, that turns all it touches into Gold.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Compare Poor Richard's Almanack (1758) : Content is the Philosopher’s Stone, that turns all it touches into Gold.
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

“They made some low wide gallows on which the hanged victim's feet almost touched the ground, stringing up their victims in lots of thirteen, in memory of Our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles, then set burning wood at their feet and thus burned them alive.”

Bartolomé de las Casas (1474–1566) Spanish Dominican friar, historian, and social reformer

History of the Indies (1561)

Memory

“It must have been in his teens, perhaps rather early, that he and his elder brother John, with William Bell (afterwards of Wylie Hill, and a noted drover) and his brother, all met in the kiln at Eelief to play cards. The corn was dried then at home. There was a fire, therefore, aud perhaps it was both heat and light. The boys had played, perhaps, often enough for trifling stakes, and always parted in good humor. One night they came to some disagreement. My father spoke out what was in him about the folly, the sinfulness, of quarreling over a perhaps sinful amusement. The earnest mind persuaded other minds. They threw the cards into the fire, and (I think the younger Bell told my brother James) no one of the four ever touched a card again through life. My father certainly never hinted at such a game since I knew him. I cannot remember that I, at that age, had any such force of belief. Which of us can?”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

Life, Age, Home, Game

“"You know that in all tombs there is always a false door?"
Renisenb stared. "Yes, of course."
"Well, people are like that too. They create a false door - to deceive. If they are conscious of weakness, of inefficiency, they make an imposing door of self-assertion, of bluster, of overwhelming authority - and, after a time, they get to believe in it themselves. They think, and everybody thinks, that they are like that. But behind that door, Renisenb, is a bare rock … And so when reality comes and touches them with the feather of truth - their true self reasserts itself."”

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

(1945)

People, Truth, Thinking, Reality

“I'm safe,
Up high.
Nothing can touch me.
But why do I feel this party's over?
No pain,
Inside.
You're like protection.
How do I feel this good sober?”

Pink (singer) (1979) American singer-songwriter

Sober, written by Pink, Nate Hills, Kara DioGuardi, and Marcella Araica
Song lyrics, Funhouse (2008)

Pain, Feeling

“Listen to the rain
Here it comes again
Hear it in the rain
Feel the touch
of tears that fall
— they won't fall forever
In the way the day will flow
all things come,
all things go.”

Enya (1961) Irish singer, songwriter, and musician

Song lyrics, Amarantine (2005)

Way, Feeling, Tear

“If you wear black, then kindly, irritating strangers will touch your arm consolingly and inform you that the world keeps on turning.
They're right. It does.
However much you beg it to stop.
It turns and lets grenadine spill over the horizon, sends hard bars of gold through my window and I wake up and feel happy for three seconds and then I remember.
It turns and tips people out of their beds and into their cars, their offices, an avalanche of tiny men and women tumbling through life…
All trying not to think about what's waiting at the bottom.
Sometimes it turns and sends us reeling into each other's arms. We cling tight, excited and laughing, strangers thrown together on a moving funhouse floor.
Intoxicated by the motion we forget all the risks.
And then the world turns…
And somebody falls off…
And oh God it's such a long way down.
Numb with shock, we can only stand and watch as they fall away from us, gradually getting smaller…
Receding in our memories until they're no longer visible.
We gather in cemeteries, tense and silent as if for listening for the impact; the splash of a pebble dropped into a dark well, trying to measure its depth.
Trying to measure how far we have to fall.
No impact comes; no splash. The moment passes. The world turns and we turn away, getting on with our lives…
Wrapping ourselves in comforting banalities to keep us warm against the cold.
"Time's a great healer."
"At least it was quick.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

"The world keeps turning.
Oh Alec—
Alec's dead."
Swamp Thing (1983–1987)

Life, Women, Men, God

“I heard Edwin Fischer, who did not mean much to me. I heard another pianist in Berlin who had a big success and I thought he was awful — Mischa Levitzki. Just fingers, and you cannot listen only to fingers. There is a difference between artist and artisan. Levitzki was an artisan. But Ignaz Friedman, who I admired, was a great artist. He had wonderful fingers and a very personal, individual way of playing, even if some of his ideas were very strange to me. He had no hesitation touching up the music. I got annoyed with him at one concert when he changed the basses in Chopin's F minor Ballade. I didn't like that. For some reason he was happier making records than he was on the stage.”

Vladimir Horowitz (1903–1989) American classical pianist and composer

quoted in Harold C. Schonberg, Horowitz: his life and music

Music, Way, Idea, Change

“I am not a great fan of shouting down people or being rude to people, I think we have a situation and a Congress that's way out of touch with where the American people are. People have a right to be angry when Congress gives tax breaks to billionaires and wants to cut nutrition programs for low income pregnant women. You have a right to be angry. Take that out in a constructive way. … I think people have a right to go into a restaurant and have dinner, that's where we got to place our energy. I do know that people are angry. They are angry about these terribly inhumane immigration policies. They're angry about the fact they can't afford prescription drugs. They are angry about tax breaks that go to billionaires. The way to deal with that is exactly what Alexandria did. Organize at the grass roots level. Win elections and get involved in the political process.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

About the Red Hen restaurant controversy. Video online https://www.mediaite.com/tv/bernie-sanders-defends-sarah-sanders-people-have-a-right-to-go-to-a-restaurant-for-dinner/ at Mediaite, 27 June 2018. <br class="br">2010s, 2018

Women, People, Way, Thinking

“For my own part, I may desire in general to be other than I am; I may condemn and dislike my whole form, and beg of Almighty God for an entire reformation, and that He will please to pardon my natural infirmity: but I ought not to call this repentance, methinks, no more than the being dissatisfied that I am not an angel or Cato. My actions are regular, and conformable to what I am and to my condition; I can do no better; and repentance does not properly touch things that are not in our power; sorrow does.. I imagine an infinite number of natures more elevated and regular than mine; and yet I do not for all that improve my faculties, no more than my arm or will grow more strong and vigorous for conceiving those of another to be so.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 2
Essais (1595), Book III

God, Angels, Imagination, Nature

“The confused mass of rules of conduct called law, which has been bequeathed to us by slavery, serfdom, feudalism, and royalty, has taken the place of those stone monsters, before whom human victims used to be immolated, and whom slavish savages dared not even touch lest they should be slain by the thunderbolts of heaven.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

Source: Law and Authority (1886), I

Law

“Oh I’m on my way, I know I am,
Somewhere not so far from here
All I know is all I feel right now,
I feel the power growing in my hair
Sitting on my own not by myself,
Everybody’s here with me
I don’t need to touch your face to know,
And I don’t need to use my eyes to see”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Sitting
Song lyrics, Catch Bull at Four (1972)

Way, Feeling

“Call the sun in the dead of the night
And the sun gonna rise in the sky
Touch a man who can't walk upright
And that lame man, he gonna fly.
And I fly, yeah, And I fly.”

Neil Diamond (1941) American singer-songwriter

Holly Holy
Song lyrics, Touching You (1969)

Sun, Flying, Night, Dead

“Can believe it, like no other,
love is a gift and you take it so much!
You need the blue night to discover
only true lovers have the magic touch.”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Islands (1987)

Love, Lovers, Night

“More and more as we come closer and closer in touch with nature and its teachings are we able to see the Divine and are therefore fitted to interpret correctly the various languages spoken by all forms of nature about us.”

George Washington Carver (1864–1943) botanist

How to Search for Truth, letter to Hubert W. Pelt (1930-02-24)

Nature

“And thirdly, [we have] to defeat the absurd pantheist ideologies that believe that the walls are gods and the air is a god. In the end, to return to such primitive forms of religiosity where one is told, “don’t touch this hill because it is an Apu and is filled with millennia-old spirit,” and who knows what else. Well, if we reach that point, we wouldn’t do anything, much less mining. Don’t touch those fish because they are creatures of god and expressions of the god Poseidon. We would return to this, let’s say, primitive animism. Right? I think that we need more education [of these people], but that is long-term work that just can’t be fixed right away.”

Alan García (1949–2019) Peruvian politician

Alan García in an interview with Cecilia Valenzuela (channel Willax) in January 2011, translation by Carwil without Borders, 27 June 2011 https://woborders.wordpress.com/tag/peru/

God, People, Education, Thinking

“There was about Alexandra something of the impervious calm of the fatalist, always disconcerting to very young people, who cannot feel that the heart lives at all unless it is still at the mercy of storms; unless its strings can scream to the touch of pain.”

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part IV, Chapter 1 : "The White Mulberry Tree"
O Pioneers! (1913)

Pain, People, Feeling, Heart

“In French there is an old expression, 'la patte', meaning the artist's touch, his personal style, his 'paw'. I wanted to get away from la patte and all that retinal painting.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

posthumous

Painting, Personality

“From me you fly! Ah! let me crave,
By these poor tears, that hand you gave—
Since, parting with my woman's pride,
My madness leaves me nought beside—
By that our wedlock, by the rite
Which, but begun, could yet unite,
If e'er my kindness held you bound,
If e'er in me your joy you found,
Look on this falling house, and still,
If prayer can touch you, change your will.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book IV, p. 123

Tear, Change, Joy, Parting

“Gentlest one, I bow to thee,
Rose-lipp'd queen of poesy,
Sweet Erato, thou whose chords
Waken but for love-touched words!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(9th August 1823) Poetical Catalogue of Pictures. Stothard’s Erato
23rd August 1823) Change see The Improvisatrice (1824
30th August, 6th and 13th September 1823) The Bayadere see The Improvisatrice (1824
The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Love

“The study of economic lift-off is well developed; touch-down has not been considered. There is an asymmetry here which would invite comment if applied to aviation.”

David Fleming (1940–2010) British activist

Lean Logic, (2016), p. 473, entry on Touch-Down http://www.flemingpolicycentre.org.uk/lean-logic-surviving-the-future/

Study

“The content of his theology was that there was a supreme being who had tried to make us perfect, but presumably had failed; that if one was a Good Man he would go to a place called Heaven…. Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one's business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse; and that the pastor's sermons, however dull they might seem at the time of taking, yet had a voodooistic power which 'did a fellow good — kept him in touch with higher things.”

Sinclair Lewis book Babbitt

~ Ch. 16
Babbitt (1922)

Religion, Business, Time, Perfection

“If He wasn’t going to use that hard thing for your good, it wouldn’t have happened. He had to sign off on every single thing that touches your life.”

James MacDonald (1960) American pastor

Source: Always True (Moody, 2011), p. 90

Life

“A field of clay touched by the genius of man becomes a castle.”

Og Mandino book The Greatest Salesman in the World

Source: The Greatest Salesman in the World (1968), Ch. 15 : The Scroll Marked VIII, p. 88.

“Is God happy with your music? You see God loves music. God invented music. But Satan has invented some ungodly music you shouldn't listen to. Someone asked me one time Hovind, do you know what you get when you get when you play country music backwards? I said, "No." You get your wife back, you get your dog back, your pickup truck back, and you get out of jail. God created them male and female. Did you know that God invented marriage and the family and sex? He invented the whole thing, and he wants it to be wonderful? So He put some rules down; boys don't touch the girls until you are married to them. Now if you don't want to touch them then stay away from me. I saw your kind at San Francisco. God put the rules down. He put the rules down, because he wants the best for you.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), Dinosaurs and the Bible

Love, God, Marriage, Happiness

“I was angry with you about him, furious that he so much as set eyes on you. I would rather kill you than see you lie in his arms.” “is that love then? A thing that leads to murder?” “I don’t know. In all honesty, I don’t know. You’re mine. What’s mine I keep, I rule, and give my body over to defend. I offer you my honor, and my life. That’s not an easy thing. Its within your power to break my pride, and take that life, insignificant though it is.” “you put it very simply.” “its not. Such a gift rouses strange passions, fears of treachery, and deep distrust. I’m not immune to them.” “no one told me it would be like this. Perhaps it won't go into words, what I feel for you. Its not desire, yet I love your touch, the warm softness of your flesh against mine.””

Alice Borchardt (1939–2007) American fiction writer

Devoted

Love, Life, Lie, Fear

“Satire should, like a polished razor keen,
Wound with a touch that's scarcely felt or seen.”

Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) writer and poet from England

To the Imitator of the First Satire of Horace, Book ii.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“I'm passing through the world invisibly. Even when people see or speak to me it's as if I didn't exist, as if I had no right to exist. I tread across their lands and they don't see me. I act and act and act and nothing makes any difference in the world. But they touch me.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Treason (1988)

People, World

“Mister Gladstone is an Englishman and a scholar. Had he walked by the side of that soldier, remembering Cromwell's Ironsides who trusted in God and kept their powder dry, and the old Continental militia, I think he would not have declared as he did that 'Jefferson Davis had created a nation', but he would rather have said, 'If Bunker Hill sends the first soldiers to this war, it is already decided. My lords and gentlemen, John Bull had better touch no American bonds which Bunker Hill does not endorse.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

God, War, Thinking

“I don’t say I’ve got much of a soul, but, such as it is, I’m perfectly satisfied with the little chap. I don’t want people fooling about with it. ‘Leave it alone,’ I say. ‘Don’t touch it. I like it the way it is.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Joy in the Morning

Joy in the Morning (1947)

People, Fools, Way, Soul

“The alphas are the most important members because they are the decision makers and without them the pack is leaderless. So their survival is paramount. If food is scarce, they will eat first and they may be the only ones who do eat. Other members of the pack will go hungry, even the pups, and starve if necessary. And the rest of the pack knows better than to touch something that has the beta's scent on it.”

Shaun Ellis (1977) American football player, defensive end

The Man who lives with Wolves (2010)

Food, Decision

“You are a miracle, and everything you touch could be a miracle.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Episode of the National Public Radio program Speaking of Faith : "Brother Thay: A Radio Pilgrimage with Thich Nhat Hanh" (2003)

“Better understanding of the Asian mind ‑ Indian and Chinese ‑ had one further consequence which needs emphasis. It had been almost a dogma of European thought that everything of value arose in the regions that touched the Aegean Sea. Religion, philosophy, art and even science, it was claimed, originated in this area. In fact, for all civilization a Greek origin was postulated. A persistence in this belief was responsible in the early years of Oriental research for the futile attempts made to date events in Asia, especially Indian history, to periods where they could be conveniently adjusted to developments in Greece. That belief in a monopoly of wisdom for the Greeks had to be reluctantly abandoned, as a result of increased knowledge of Asian civilizations. The liberalization of the Furopean mind consequent upon the recognition of the fact that all nations have contributed towards the growth of human civilization, is a gain of considerable significance.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

Wisdom, Religion, Art, History

“I have sometimes come upon the Iguana, the big lizard, as they were sunning themselves upon a flat stone in a river-bed. They are not pretty in shape, but nothing can be imagined more beautiful than their colouring. They shine like a heap of precious stones or like a pane cut out of an old church window. When, as you approach, they swish away, there is a flash of azure, green and purple over the stones, the color seems to be standing behind them in the air, like a comet's luminous tail.
Once I shot an Iguana. I thought that I should be able to make some pretty things from his skin. A strange thing happened then, that I have never afterwards forgotten. As I went up to him, where he was lying dead upon his stone, and actually while I was walking the few steps, he faded and grew pale, all colour died out of him as in one long sigh, and by the time that I touched him he was grey and dull like a lump of concrete. It was the live impetuous blood pulsating within the animal, which had radiated out all that glow and splendor. Now that the flame was put out, and the soul had flown, the Iguana was as dead as a sandbag.”

Karen Blixen book Out of Africa

Out of Africa (1937)

Beauty, Color, Soul, Imagination

“Your thoughts about life and music have changed within the 45 years of the existence as a band and so it still can be seen as a burning process in order to transform the entire picture of everything you came in touch with.”

Edgar Froese (1944–2015) German musician and founder of Tangerine Dream

Life, Music, Change

“We had had the help during the past 20 months…of a number of Dominion statesmen. Our touch with those who guided the destinies of the Commonwealth was very close and constant. That was very right and necessary, because we were all engaged in the same great venture, we were all defending a common heritage—the cause of freedom and democracy. The links which united us with the free peoples of the Commonwealth proved their strength, and as we stood together in war so we should stand together in peace to create a new and better world.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the 65th anniversary luncheon of the United Wards' Club in the Connaught Rooms, London (23 February 1942), quoted in The Times (24 February 1942), p. 2.
War Cabinet

War, People, World, Peace

“I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything.”

E. L. Konigsburg (1930–2013) American writer and illustrator

Mrs. Frankweiler in From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967)

Feeling, Thinking, Learning, Time

“Every phenomenon of nature was a word, — the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas. Everything the human being heard from the beginning, saw with its eyes, looked upon and touched with its hands was a living word; for God was the word.”

Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) German philosopher

Sämtliche Werken, ed. Josef Nadler (1949-1957), vol. III, p. 32.

God, Communication, Idea, Nature

“I have written a good number of drafts and small reflections. They are not waiting for the last touch but for the sunlight to wake them up.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

B 29
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook B (1768-1771)

Waiting

“Looking back on my attitude to the commonly accepted pleasures of life, I can say that I have never set much store by them. I hardly care what I eat, provided it suffices, and I care not at all for wine or spirits. When I was fourteen someone gave me a glass of beer, and I thought it so unpleasant I have never touched beer again. As for cigarettes, I dislike even being in a room where people are smoking. Sex has been of no great consequence to me, and the celibacy of desert life left me untroubled. Marriage would certainly have been a crippling handicap. I have therefore been able to lead the life of my choice with no sense of deprivation. Existence in the desert had a simplicity that I found wholly satisfying; there, everything not a necessity was an encumbrance. It was those three months in the Sahara in 1938 that taught me to appreciate things that most Europeans are able to take for granted: clean water to drink; meat to eat; a warm fire on a cold night; shelter from the rain; above all, tired surrender to sleep.”

Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003) British explorer

Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 295.

Life, Marriage, People, Pleasure

“Quaternions came from Hamilton after his really good work had been done, and though beautifully ingenious, have been an unmixed evil to those who have touched them in any way.”

William Thomson (1824–1907) British physicist and engineer

Letter to Robert Baldwin Hayward (1892), as quoted in Energy and Empire : A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin (1989) by Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise

Way, Evil

“Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.”

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

Between Going and Staying

Love, Books, World, Light

“In response to the plummeting popularity of the Administration itself, revealed at Newbury and in the shire county elections, we have the Prime Minister's botched reshuffle. If we were to offer that tale of events to the BBC light entertainment department as a script for a programme, I think that the producers of "Yes, Minister" would have turned it down as hopelessly over the top. It might have even been too much for "Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'em". The tragedy for us all is that it is really happening— it is fact, not fiction. The man with the non-Midas touch is in charge. It is no wonder that we live in a country where the Grand National does not start and hotels fall into the sea.”

John Smith (1938–1994) Labour Party leader from Scotland (1938-1994)

Hansard http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199293/cmhansrd/1993-06-09/Debate-1.html, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 226, col. 292.<br>House of Commons speech, 9 June 1993. That year's Grand National horse race had been declared void after a start-line mishap. The Holbeck Hall Hotel in Scarborough began to fall into the sea on 3 June 1993 due to coastal erosion.

Thinking, Light, Sea, Country

“I am delighted, one more time, by the daring of my species and the audacity of our flying machines. There is poetry and music in our technology, a beauty as touching as that of eagle, moss campion, raven or yonder limestone boulder shining under the Arctic sun.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

"Gather at the River", page 164
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside (1984)

Beauty, Music, Time, Sun

“God's ways seem dark, but, soon or late,
They touch the shining hills of day;
The evil cannot brook delay,
The good can well afford to wait.”

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 282

God, Way, Evil, Waiting

“Mountcastle discovered that tactile sensation is made up of several distinct modalities; for example, touch includes… hard pressure on the skin as well as a light brush… He found that each distinct submodality has its own private pathway within the brain and that this segregation is maintained at each relay…”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

Light

“We have an aura about us which becomes stronger when you have faith in yourself. And when your aura is strong, evil dare not touch you.”

Lydia Canaan Lebanese singer-songwriter

As quoted in an interview with Sudha Chandran, Gulf Today/Panorama, November 24, 2000

Faith, Strong, Evil

“The need for sociability induce man to be in touch with his fellow men. However, this need might not ("ne saurait", Fr.) find its full (or complete) satisfaction in the conventional (or superficial, - "conventionnel", Fr.) and deceitful world, in which (or where) everyone is mainly (or mostly) trying to assert oneself in front of others ("devant les autres", Fr.), to appear, and hoping to find in society ("mondaine", Fr.) relationships some advantages for his interest and vanity”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

or vainglory or conceit", Fr
Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 53.

Men, World, Hope, Appearance

“I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened a little, and all I have to do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over again, every time I can make the mouth I want appear, the mouth which my hand chooses and sketches on your face, and which by some chance that I do not seek to understand coincides exactly with your mouth which smiles beneath the one my hand is sketching on you.”

Julio Cortázar book Hopscotch

Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963)

Smile, Understanding, Appearance, Chance

“Anytime a fan touches you, you have the right to beat the hell out of him.”

Charles Barkley (1963) American basketball player

From CNN interview, Nov 22 2004, following a fight between players and fans at a recent Pistons-Pacers game.

Hell

“Every false philosophy is an imagination of a world propitious to irrational demands and unregulated desires. The false philosopher's dream infects someone in closer touch than himself with everyday experience, this agent of his desire seeks to translate the dream into reality, and disaster follows. It is the Cinderella story in actual life. Rousseau was Robespierre's fairy godmother, Karl Marx was Lenin's, Nietzsche was Hitler's.”

Hugh Kingsmill (1889–1949) British writer and journalist

"Oscar Wilde's Fairy Godmother", The Best of Hugh Kingsmill (1973) p. 278 (1948)

Life, World, Dreams, Imagination

“None of our republics would be anything if we weren't all together, but we have to create our history — our Yugoslavian socialist history, that is unique, in the future — that is our path; not touching the national rights of the some republics to preserve their own traditions, not at the expense of, but in the interest of the whole community, to mutually complete each other. That is what we want, and not the destruction of our unity.”

Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman

Frequently quoted fragment of Tito's speech in Split 1962 Source: YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7s7ldiX6lc <br class="br">Other

History, Communication, Future

“Right now, [the Israel lobby] has become a subject that you can barely talk about without people immediately trying to silence you, immediately trying to discredit you in various ways, such that no American politicians will touch this, which is quite remarkable when you consider how much Americans argue about every other controversial political issue. To me, this is a national security priority for us, and we ought to be having an open debate on it, not one where only one side is being heard from.”

Stephen M. Walt (1955) American political scientist

Ferment Over 'The Israel Lobby' http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060515/weiss Philip Weiss, The Nation, April 27, 2006

People, Way, Silence

“The leading Nazis were divided as a rule between the three normal German points of view in regard to external policy. Some wanted an accommodation with France, some wanted to come to terms with Great Britain at the expense of France, and the third and most active group were trying to get an alliance with Soviet Russia against the whole of the West. I knew that [Eric] Koch was the chief advocate of this last policy. He took pains to keep in personal touch with Russian emissaries. He wanted to go to Russia himself. Assuming that I had Hitler's ear on questions of eastern policy, he repeatedly asked me to put forward his ideas in talking to Hitler.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: Men in Chaos (1942), p. 247

Pain, Idea, Question, Personality

“A thousand touching traits testify to the sacred power of the love which a righteous war awakes in noble nations.”

Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896) Historian, political writer

German History, Volume I, p. 482.

Love, War

“If they live in the world, they should see and touch and hear and learn things.”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

Source: His Dark Materials, The Amber Spyglass (2000), Ch. 23 : No Way Out

World, Learning

“Several months later I had this dream. I was kneeling in the field where I'd seen the eye. A figure appeared in front of me: a man with green-flecked eyes, his smile mocking and oddly compassionate. As I stared up at him, he extended his hand until his finger touched the center of my forehead.
There was a blinding flash. I fell on my face, terrified, woke in bed with my ears ringing. It was the morning of my seventeenth birthday”

Elizabeth Hand book Generation Loss

Source: Generation Loss (2007), Ch. 1

Smile, Dreams, Birthday, Appearance

“He is like an angel who floats for a little while on this planet and touches with his wings the canvas.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Angels

“In the desert, initially, everywhere is like everywhere else—sky, sand, mountains. So far, this was the extent of what I’d seen in my involuntary roost. Then the day began to ebb, the world turned to topaz and gold, and the color of the sky seemed to sink away into the disc of the sun. I found I really could touch the beauty of it then, as I had touched its beauty so long ago when I was free to travel where I wished, and the city still owned me. Now, tinged with my sorrow, the loveliness was bittersweet, but strong as wine.”

Tanith Lee book Drinking Sapphire Wine

Part 2, Chapter 3 (pp. 69-70)
Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977)

World, Beauty, Color, Travel

“To be true, you have to take the plunge, to touch bottom. But most people want to be in control. They fear the worst. You can’t control anything. What you have to do is let yourself be taken over... All the paintings I have made, I was compelled to make. You must never force yourself.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

People, Fear, Painting

“Supplementing the task assigned to you by the decree of January 24, 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of emigration and evacuation in the best possible way according to present conditions, I hereby charge you to carry out preparations as regards organizational, financial, and material matters for a total solution (Gesamtlösung) of the Jewish question in all the territories of Europe under German occupation.Where the competency of other central organizations touches on this matter, these organizations are to collaborate.I charge you further to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution (Endlösung) of the Jewish question.</p”

Hermann Göring (1893–1946) German politician and military leader

Letter sent to Reinhard Heydrich, 31 July 1941 http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/order1.htm

Way, Question, Problem

“Two small aisles on each side of this chapel present a touching instance of the equality of the grave; which brings down the oppressor to a level with the oppressed, and mingles the dust of the bitterest enemies together.”

Washington Irving book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

"Westminster Abbey".
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820)

“In the case of a novel, or any imaginative work, especially if the tone is poetic, my own preference is for ending with a touch of symbolism which shall leave the reader brooding. A fine novel, a well-written story, "proves" nothing. Certain characters have played their parts, life goes on, and the final passage may be allowed to remain with one foot in the air, as is the case with some of Chopin's conclusions. But there is no absolute rule in such matters, and there are epic novelists who like to end on a powerful crescendo, as Ravel does in Bolero, or Dvorak in the New-World Symphony. Composition has features which are common to all the arts, and the author can learn as much about his business in the concert hall as in the library.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

The Art of Writing

Life, World, Art, Imagination

“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

“I can understand the ignorant masses loving to soak themselves in drink—oh, yes, it's very shocking that they should, of course—very shocking to us who live in cozy homes, with all the graces and pleasures of life around us, that the dwellers in damp cellars and windy attics should creep from their dens of misery into the warmth and glare of the public-house bar, and seek to float for a brief space away from their dull world upon a Lethe stream of gin. But think, before you hold up your hands in horror at their ill-living, what "life" for these wretched creatures really means. Picture the squalid misery of their brutish existence, dragged on from year to year in the narrow, noisome room where, huddled like vermin in sewers, they welter, and sicken, and sleep; where dirt-grimed children scream and fight and sluttish, shrill-voiced women cuff, and curse, and nag; where the street outside teems with roaring filth and the house around is a bedlam of riot and stench. Think what a sapless stick this fair flower of life must be to them, devoid of mind and soul. The horse in his stall scents the sweet hay and munches the ripe corn contentedly. The watch-dog in his kennel blinks at the grateful sun, dreams of a glorious chase over the dewy fields, and wakes with a yelp of gladness to greet a caressing hand. But the clod-like life of these human logs never knows one ray of light. From the hour when they crawl from their comfortless bed to the hour when they lounge back into it again they never live one moment of real life. Recreation, amusement, companionship, they know not the meaning of. Joy, sorrow, laughter, tears, love, friendship, longing, despair, are idle words to them. From the day when their baby eyes first look out upon their sordid world to the day when, with an oath, they close them forever and their bones are shoveled out of sight, they never warm to one touch of human sympathy, never thrill to a single thought, never start to a single hope. In the name of the God of mercy; let them pour the maddening liquor down their throats and feel for one brief moment that they live!”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Love, Life, Women, God

“The Chinese used the intervals between things as the primary means of getting 'in touch' with situations.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 77

“So what's one little kiss, one tiny little touch?
Aah, he's wanting it so much.
I swear that this is royal blood, running through my skin.
Oh, can you see the state I'm in?
Kiss it better, kiss it better.”

Peter Gabriel (1950) English singer-songwriter, record producer and humanitarian

Kiss That Frog
Song lyrics, Us (1992)

Kiss

“The crime is how we deliberately keep out of touch,
Pretending it has nothing to do with us…

How familiar the metaphors, we think, suspecting our
House servants of having killed & eaten our pet cats!

At the University, expatriate lecturers gesticulate,
Finger the leaves of Marx to a batch of yawning students,
Nervously trying to define something or other…

Colonies of storks in flamboyant trees look down on
The valley dust and the last of the sweet bananas.”

Jack Mapanje (1944) Malawian poet

"When the Shire Valley Dries Up Patiently"
The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison (1993)

Cats, Thinking, Tree, Universe

“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

“The sunshine of thine eyes,
(O still celestial beam!)
Whatever it touches it fills
With the life of its lambent gleam.

The sunshine of thine eyes,
Oh, let it fall on me!
Though I be but a mote of the air,
I could turn to gold for thee.”

George Parsons Lathrop (1851–1898) United States novelist and poet

"The Sunshine of thine Eyes" in Dreams and Days (1892).

Life

“Greig, currently hot in the TV comedy Green Wing, has a dark, brittle glamour that isn't quite beauty (there's a disconcerting touch of Edwina Currie about her) and suggests an incipient unhappiness lurking beneath the ready wit.”

Tamsin Greig (1966) English actress

About her performance as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, by Charlie Spencer in The Telegraph. After reading the part about Edwina Currie, she refused to read any more of the article.
Criticism, A review of her as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing

Beauty

“My father was miserably treated by the mining company, but he had imbibed the false humility and meekness that the oppressors of his race and class had hypocritically taught him. He sought consolation from his torment in a touching devotion to his church, distracting himself from the sordid realities of his life and that of his family with dreams of the Reward Hereafter.”

Angelo Herndon (1913–1997) African American communist

Source: Let Me Live (1937), p. 8

Life, Family, Dreams, Reality

“What! the girl I adore by another embraced?
What! the balm of her breath shall another man taste?
What! pressed in the dance by another's man's knee?
What! panting recline on another than me?
Sir, she's yours; you have pressed from the grape its fine blue,
From the rosebud you've shaken the tremulous dew;
What you've touched you may take. Pretty waltzer—adieu!”

Henry Englefield (1752–1822) British antiquarian

Sir Henry Englefield, The Waltz, Dancing. in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 156-158.

Girl, Dance

“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)

“Cancer – regardless of the type – is a disease that has touched every one of us through family or friends. It is my hope that in being candid about my battle, that i will raise awareness that will ultimately benefit others.”

Larry Hogan (1956) American politician

" Full Remarks: Governor Larry Hogan Announces Cancer Diagnosis http://governor.maryland.gov/2015/06/22/full-remarks-governor-larry-hogan-announces-cancer-diagnosis/"(22 June 2015)

Disease, Family, Hope

“Memories belong in the soil, in stone, in wind. They are the land's unseen meaning, such that touches the soul of all who would look — truly look — upon it. Touches, in faintest whisper, old, almost shapeless echoes — to which a mortal life adds its own.”

Steven Erikson book Memories of Ice

Memories of Ice (2001)

Life, Soul, Memory

“And the harder the SSC ["safe, sane and consensual"] gets pushed at me, the harder I feel like pushing back. Passion, that's what I'm into, passion and blood and honor, so powerful that it pounds through my veins and blinds me, so terrible that I can't look away. Danger, Dementia, and Denial. I want to hear that panic, scream "No, Please!" and struggle through the haze of pain and pleasure and all that stuff that goes on between the moment we touch eyes and the moment when we both collapse and try to catch our breaths and break the silence.”

Laura Antoniou (1963) American novelist

Source: "Unsafe at Any Speed or: Safe, Sane and Consensual, My Fanny", p. 14

Pain, Pleasure, Feeling, Silence

“I pulled On The Road off the shelf and found myself reading it between classes, and at that time in my life it was exactly what I craved, exactly what I needed to hear. I thought, “That’s the way, that’s the ideal life, that’s great. You get in a car and you drive and you see your friends and you end up in a city for a night and you go out drinking and you catch up and you share these really intense experiences. And then you’re on the road and you’re doing it again.” The romance of the road, particularly from Kerouac’s work, encapsulated how I wanted to live. I found a way to do it by being a musician, which is what I always wanted to be. The traveling and the being on tour and being away from home set a precedent for me where I thought, “Oh yeah, this is how it works.”
But then in reading Big Sur, it’s the end of the road. You end up with a series of failed relationships and you end up being an alcoholic and in your late 30s, and not having any kind of real grip on the lives of the people around you. That’s the potential other end of the spectrum when you’re never tied to anybody or anything. I run the risk of losing touch with the people in my life that mean the most to me because I have made the decision to live like this.”

Ben Gibbard (1976) American singer, songwriter and guitarist

Source: The Meaning Of Life, I

Life, People, Alcohol, Cars

“O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
When the grass is soft as the breast of doves
And shivering-sweet to the touch?
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?”

Frances Cornford (1886–1960) English poet

"To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train", from Poems (Hampstead: Priory Press, 1910) p. 20.

Love, Grass

“Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Pt. 2
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

Life, Death, Food, Home

“I only have one superstition: I make sure to touch all the bases when I hit a home run.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

As quoted in Baseball's Greatest Quotes (1982) by Kevin Nelson; reproduced in "Morning Briefing: Babe Ruth Was Not a Superstitious Man, Except on 714 Occasions," in The Los Angeles Times (March 1, 1982), p. D2
Unsourced variants:
Just one.Whenever I hit a home run, I make certain I touch all four bases.
I have only one superstition. I touch all the bases when I hit a home run.

Home

“The touch, sure and light [is] fixing something of the passing moment.... memory is the true, imperishable life, that which has sunk without trace and been forgotten was not worth experiencing, the sweet hours, and the great and dread, are immutable. Dreams are life itself – and dreams are more true than reality; in them we behave as our true selves – if we have a soul it is there.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

Quote from her letter to her friend Mallarmé 1882; as cited in The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot, ed. Denis Rouart; Camden, London 1986 / Kinston, R. I. Moyer Bell, 1989, p. 160
after her visit to Italy
1881 - 1895

Life, Dreams, Soul, Reality

“To speak for Him will be our impulse. No matter how timid, nervous, self-diffident, we are in ourselves, as we touch His pierced and royal hand, we shall be instantly masterful and strong.”

Richard Salter Storrs (1821–1900) American Congregational clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 561.

Strong

“If you try to look
But you don't touch
Then you won't touch
But you'll never feel
And if you don't feel
You'll never cry
And if you don't cry
Then you'll never heal.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

If You Want to Feel
Song lyrics, Living Room Suite (1978)

Feeling, Cry

“And I say again, you need not worry any more about money. If I were to drop dead this instant, I have enough to double your present income if you never touched a cent of the principle. If you take a notion to do something that costs more than your income warrants, you need only let me know. You can have it.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Letter from Albania to Laura Ingalls Wilder, (October 27, 1926).

Money, Dead

“I like to play any character that allows me the freedom to explore it and teach the audience something they didn't know, and show them a journey they identify with … or be inspired, or moved. Anything that touches someone's heart is important for me.”

Alicia Witt (1975) American actress

Filmcritic.com interview (2000)

Freedom, Heart

“you'll know it's true, that you are blessed and lucky
it's true, that you are touched by something
that will grow and bloom in you”

Natalie Merchant (1963) American singer-songwriter

Song lyrics, Our Time In Eden (1992), These Are Days

“The review was more a satisfaction to me than a joy. Joy, overpoweringly beautiful moments, comes to an artist without other noticing. The same is true for moments of sadness. That's why it is true that artists live mostly in solitude... Otto [Modersohn] and I shall be coming home [ Worpswede ] again in the spring. That man is touching in his love. We are going to try to buy the Brünjes place in order to make our lives together freer and more open... If the dear Lord will allow me once again to create something beautiful, then I shall be happy and satisfied; if only I have a place where I can work in peace. I will be grateful for the portion of love I've received. If one can remain healthy and not die too young..”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

In a letter from Paris, 18 November 1906, to her sister Milly; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 206
1906 + 1907

Love, Happiness, Sadness, Peace

“How are men and women to think about their maleness and their femaleness in this twentieth century, in which so many of our old ideas must be made new? Have we over-domesticated men, denied their natural adventurousness, tied them down to machines that are after all only glorified spindles and looms, mortars and pestles and digging sticks, all of which were once women's work? Have we cut women off from their natural closeness to their children, taught them to look for a job instead of the touch of a child's hand, for status in a competitive world rather than a unique place by a glowing hearth? In educating women like men, have we done something disastrous to both men and women alike, or have we only taken one further step in the recurrent task of building more and better on our original human nature?”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 1; Start of first chapter entitled "The Significance of the Questions We Ask"

Women, Men, Children, World

“Rows of houses, all bearing down on me,
I can feel their blue hands touching me,
All these things into position,
All these things we'll one day swallow whole.
And fade out again,
And fade out…”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

Street Spirit (Fade Out)
Lyrics, The Bends (1995)

Feeling, Housing

Quotes about touch page 15

Quotes about touch
page 15