Quotes about touch
page 2

“He was afraid of touching his own wrist. He never attempted to sleep on his left side, even in those dismal hours of the night when the insomniac longs for a third side after trying the two he has.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pnin

Source: Pnin

Sleep, Night

“I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.”

Allen Ginsberg book Howl and Other Poems

Source: Howl and Other Poems

Books, Dreams, Feeling

“Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth…. Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Source: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Truth

“Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Source: Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

Solitude, Personality

“It's often just enough to be with someone. I don't need to touch them. Not even talk. A feeling passes between you both. You're not alone.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

Feeling

“Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Flowers, Kiss

“Everything that ever happened to you, you experienced right within you. Light and darkness, pain and pleasure, agony and ecstasy—all of it happened within you. If someone touches your hand right now, you may think you are experiencing their hand, but the fact of the matter is you are only experiencing the sensations in your own hand. The whole experience is contained within. All human experience is one hundred percent self-created.”

Sadhguru book Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Source: Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Pain, Pleasure, Thinking, Light

“Actually, since I'm gay I think I should count for two guys instead of just one. I mean, in me you get the male point of view and you don't have to worry about me wanting to touch your boobies.”

P. C. Cast book Marked

Source: Marked

Guy, Thinking

“For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.”

Iris Murdoch book Under the Net

Source: Under the Net

Truth, Silence

“I know there is a God, because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists and therefore I know there is a God.”

Roméo Dallaire (1946) Canadian politician

Shake Hands with the Devil (2003)
Source: Shake Hands With The Devil

God

“How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?”

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

Soul, Past

“I'll always touch you.”

Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) American musician, singer and songwriter

“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank
Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness, and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

Music, Sleep, Night

“Rumour is information distilled so finely that it can filter through anything. It does not need doors and windows -- sometimes it does not need people. It can exist free and wild, running from ear to ear without ever touching lips.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

People

“The sick do not ask if the hand that smoothes their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Kiss

“I don't think you will ever fully understand how you've touched my life and made me who I am. I don't think you could ever know just how truly special you are that even on the darkest nights you are my brightest star”

Erica Jong (1942) Novelist, poet, memoirist, critic

Life, Star, Understanding, Thinking

“and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us
which will we claim
how will we go on living
how will we touch, what will we know
what will we say to each other.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

“Meet me where the sky touches the sea. Wait for me where the world begins.”

Jennifer Donnelly (1963) American writer

World, Waiting, Sea

“Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.”

Terry Pratchett book Thief of Time

Source: Thief of Time

World, Time, Painting

“This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

“He moved to run a hand through her cornrows, then pulled back remembering the one time he's tried that-Connie had lectured him on the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not touch thy black girlfriend's hair. Ever.”

Barry Lyga (1971) American writer

Source: I Hunt Killers

Time

“A whole woman will always attract a whole man. And when they touch, they will fuse to create a whole marriage. Ultimately, when the time is right, they will produce whole children.”

T.D. Jakes (1957) American bishop

Marriage, Children, Time

“Welcome the view that the things which you think are wrecking your life - like your thoughts and emotions, or illness and death - are actually gifts for your transformation… Whether life presents us with a pleasant sound or an unpleasant sound, a pleasant smell or an unpleasant smell, a pleasant thought or an unpleasant thought, it's sheer delight because instead of identifying with the experience, we simply touch it and let it go.”

Dilgo Khyentse (1910–1991) Bhutanese Buddhist Lama

Life, Death, Thinking

“Okay, you were probably taught there are five senses," he said. "We see, hear, touch, smell and taste. But how do we know those are the only five? What are the senses that we don't have? What are we failing to perceive?”

Louis Sachar (1954) American writer of children's books

Source: The Cardturner: A Novel about a King, a Queen, and a Joker

Sense

“Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be, like the reality of yesterday, an illusion tomorrow.”

Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) Italian dramatist, novelist, short story writer, and poet, Nobel Prize for Literature laureate

Reality

“You have witchcraft in your lips, there is more eloquence in a sugar touch of them than in the tongues of the French council; and they should
sooner persuade Harry of England than a general petition of monarchs.”

William Shakespeare Henry V

Source: Henry V

“Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Marriage Plot

Source: The Marriage Plot

Hurt, Depressing

“There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart -
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge,
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: Ariel: The Restored Edition

Heart, Clothes

“Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her—doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection there.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Life, Fear, Light, Waiting

“The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.”

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Variant: Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.
Source: The Glass Menagerie

Memory, Heart

“Her eyes are pure stars, and her fingers, if they touch you, freeze you to the bone.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

Star

“Granny sighed. "You have learned something," she said, and thought it safe to insert a touch of sternness into her voice. "They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.”

Terry Pratchett book Equal Rites

Source: Equal Rites

Knowledge, Learning

“Alas, why are my nights all thus lost? Ah, why do I ever miss his
sight whose breath touches my sleep?”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Source: Gitanjali: Song Offerings

Sleep, Night

“Enlightenment is always there. Small enlightenment will bring great enlightenment. If you breathe in and are aware that you are alive—that you can touch the miracle of being alive—then that is a kind of enlightenment”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: Living Buddha, Living Christ

“A book,
a book full
of human touches,
of shirts,
a book
without loneliness, with men
and tools,
a book
is victory.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Source: Odes to Common Things

Men, Books, Victory, Loneliness

“The secret is not to dream," she whispered. "The secret is to wake up. Waking up is harder. I have woken up and I am real. I know where I come from and I know where I'm going. You cannot fool me any more. Or touch me. Or anything that is mine.”

Terry Pratchett book The Wee Free Men

Source: The Wee Free Men

Secret, Dreams, Fools

“To see the years touch ye gives me joy", he whispered, "for it means that ye live.”

Diana Gabaldon (1952) American author

Joy

“People with BPD are like people with third degree burns over 90% of their bodies. Lacking emotional skin, they feel agony at the slightest touch or movement.”

Marsha M. Linehan (1943) psychologist, professor, author

People, Feeling

“Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.”

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

Love, Art, Solitude

“People are islands,' she said. 'They don't really touch. However close they are, they're really quite separate. Even if they've been married for fifty years.”

Ian Fleming book Casino Royale

Source: Casino Royale

People

“There are spaces of sorrow only God can touch.”

Helen Prejean (1939) advocate for the abolition of the death penalty

Source: Dead Man Walking: The Eyewitness Account Of The Death Penalty That Sparked a National Debate

God

“Do you know what happens when you always look before you leap?"

She reached out and touched his hand before hurrying toward the door.

"You hardly ever make the jump.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Key of Light

“Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, to-day's civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

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

People, Age, World, Fear

“When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes.”

William Shakespeare Henry V

Source: Henry V

Music, Singing

“We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Source: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Life, Feeling, Question, Problem

“To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.”

Stephen R. Covey (1932–2012) American educator, author, businessman and motivational speaker

Soul

“I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

Sadness, Beauty, Dreams, Thinking

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

World, Nature, Beauty, Peaceful

“Anything that brings spiritual, mental, or physical weakness, touch it not with the toes of your feet.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

“You must find a boy your own age. Someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered. Someone whose fingers are a poem.”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

Age, Beauty, Boy, Lovers

“It wasn't the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog. It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you any more. Its the foghorn I hate. It won't let you alone. It keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back.”

Eugene O'Neill Long Day's Journey into Night

Page 100-101 (Act 3)
Long Day's Journey into Night (1955)
Source: Long Day's Journey Into Night

Love, Hate, World, Feeling

“See how she leans her cheek upon her hand.
O, that I were a glove upon that hand
That I might touch that cheek!”

William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet

Source: Romeo and Juliet

“The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.”

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

Source: The Hungering Dark

Life

“Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Lady Bracknell, Act I.
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays
Context: I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.

“You touched my flawed life so gently with love
burning upward in dark steady flame
burning me, burning me into healing.”

Christy Brown (1932–1981) Irish artist

Source: Of Snails and Skylarks

Love, Life

“We live in a troubled, but wonderful time. It is our good fortune to witness and benefit from scientific advances that would have been literally unimaginable to our grandparents. However, there are dark clouds on the horizon. The rate of growth of scientific knowledge has been so great as to outstrip the ability of our society to assimilate it, the capacity of the educational system to teach it properly and the wisdom of government adequately to sustain and apply it. There is growing indifference to science among the young. Even medical science, which touches the lives of us all, is generally left to the practitioners. Whatever the reason for this disparity between the importance of science and the lack of general public understanding, it is important to address it.”

Elias James Corey (1928) American chemist

E. J. Corey, ‎Barbara Czakó, ‎László Kürti, Molecules and Medicine (2007). Introduction

Wisdom, Education, Understanding, Knowledge

“As a general rule, I abstain from reading the reports of attacks upon myself, wishing not to be provoked by that to which I can not properly offer an answer. In spite of this precaution, however, it comes to my knowledge that I am much censured for some supposed agency in setting up, and seeking to sustain, the new State government of Louisiana. In this I have done just so much as, and no more than, the public knows. In the Annual Message of Dec. 1863 and accompanying Proclamation, I presented a plan of re-construction (as the phrase goes) which, I promised, if adopted by any State, should be acceptable to, and sustained by, the Executive government of the nation. I distinctly stated that this was not the only plan which might possibly be acceptable; and I also distinctly protested that the Executive claimed no right to say when, or whether members should be admitted to seats in Congress from such States. This plan was, in advance, submitted to the then Cabinet, and distinctly approved by every member of it. One of them suggested that I should then, and in that connection, apply the Emancipation Proclamation to the theretofore excepted parts of Virginia and Louisiana; that I should drop the suggestion about apprenticeship for freed-people, and that I should omit the protest against my own power, in regard to the admission of members to Congress; but even he approved every part and parcel of the plan which has since been employed or touched by the action of Louisiana. The new constitution of Louisiana, declaring emancipation for the whole State, practically applies the Proclamation to the part previously excepted. It does not adopt apprenticeship for freed-people; and it is silent, as it could not well be otherwise, about the admission of members to Congress. So that, as it applies to Louisiana, every member of the Cabinet fully approved the plan. The message went to Congress, and I received many commendations of the plan, written and verbal; and not a single objection to it, from any professed emancipationist, came to my knowledge, until after the news reached Washington that the people of Louisiana had begun to move in accordance with it. From about July 1862, I had corresponded with different persons, supposed to be interested, seeking a reconstruction of a State government for Louisiana. When the message of 1863, with the plan before mentioned, reached New-Orleans, General Banks wrote me that he was confident the people, with his military co-operation, would reconstruct, substantially on that plan. I wrote him, and some of them to try it; they tried it, and the result is known. Such only has been my agency in getting up the Louisiana government. As to sustaining it, my promise is out, as before stated. But, as bad promises are better broken than kept, I shall treat this as a bad promise, and break it, whenever I shall be convinced that keeping it is adverse to the public interest. But I have not yet been so convinced.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Last public address (1865)

People, Confidence, Knowledge, Reading

“The smile that flickers on baby's lips when he sleeps — does anybody know where it was born? Yes, there is a rumor that a young pale beam of a crescent moon touched the edge of a vanishing autumn cloud, and there the smile was first born in the dream of a dew-washed morning.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

61 <br class="br"> Gitanjali http://www.spiritualbee.com/gitanjali-poems-of-tagore/ (1912)

Smile, Dreams, Autumn, Sleep

“A book in shape but, really, pure crude fact
Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard,
And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since.
Give it me back! The thing's restorative
I'the touch and sight.”

Robert Browning The Ring and the Book

Book I : The Ring and the Book.
The Ring and the Book (1868-69)

Life, Secret, Books, Heart

“They that touch pitch will be defiled.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Actually spoken by Dogberry in William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing (III.3). The KJV Bible (Ecclesiasticus 13:1) has "He that toucheth pitch shall be defiled therewith".
Misattributed

“Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 100
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Entre mim e a vida há um vidro ténue. por mais nitidamente que eu veja e compreenda a vida, eu não lhe posso tocar.

Life, Understanding

“For mum we're fly. What mum you don't know who am I? I am Józio. And this is my sister Rózia. Now we're fly in sky! There is better than mum. See how heads in ray. Clothes with lucifer light. And on my hand as butterfly airfoil in sky we have all what we want, every day other toy, where we go here is grass, where we touch here is a flower. But we have what we want, torture us boring and trepidation. Oh mum for Your children road to heaven has been closed! On Always!”

Adam Mickiewicz book Dziady

Do mamy lecim do mamy! Cóż to, mamo nie znasz Józia? Ja to Józio ja ten samy. A to moja siostra Rózia. My teraz w raju latamy, Tam nam lepiej niż u mamy. Patrz jakie główki w promieniu, Ubiór z jutrzenki światełka, A na oboim ramieniu Jak u motylków skrzydełka, w raju wszystkiego dostatek, Co dzień to inna zabawka, gdzie stąpim wypływa trawka, gdzie dotkniem rozkwita kwiatek. Lecz choć wszystkiego dostatek dręczy nad nuda i trwoga. Ach mamo dla twoich dziatek zamknięta do nieba droga! <br class="br">Part two. <br class="br">Dziady (Forefathers' Eve) http://www.ap.krakow.pl/nkja/literature/polpoet/mic_fore.htm

Children, Flowers, Sister, Light

“The vicious lover is the follower of earthly Love who desires the body rather than the soul; his heart is set on what is mutable and must therefore be inconstant. And as soon as the body he loves begins to pass the first flower of its beauty, he "spreads his wings and flies away," giving the lie to all his pretty speeches and dishonoring his vows, whereas the lover whose heart is touched by moral beauties is constant all his life, for he has become one with what will never fade.”

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

183e, M. Joyce, trans, Collected Dialogues of Plato (1961), p. 537
The Symposium

Love, Life, Lie, Beauty

“Me still alone, me sip on the rum
Me wonder when the boat she come
To bring me love, oh sweet little thing
She rock 'n' roll, she dance and sing
She hold me tight, she touch me lips
Me eyes they close, me heart she flip
Havana moon, Havana moon”

Chuck Berry (1926–2017) American rock-and-roll musician

"Havana Moon" (1957)
Song lyrics

Love, Singing, Heart, Dance

“I wrote my name upon the sand;
I thought I wrote it on thine heart.
I had no touch of fear, that words,
Such words, so graven, could depart.”

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

Friendship's Offering, 1827 (1826) Song
Other Gift Books

Fear, Heart

“You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.”

Aurelius Augustinus book Confessions

Confessions (c. 397)

Hunger, Peace, Feeling

“Don't be afraid of us, we are all the same. You can't get AIDS if you touch, hug, kiss, hold hands with someone who is infected.”

Nkosi Johnson (1989–2001) South African child AIDS activist

The Body: The Complete HIV/AIDS Resource http://www.thebody.com/content/news/art42594.html

Kiss

“The past was real. The present, all about me, was unreal, unnatural, repellent. I saw the big ships lying in the stream… the home of hardship and hopelessness; the boats passing to and fro; the cries of the sailors at the capstan or falls; the peopled beach; the large hide houses, with their gangs of men; and the Kanakas interspersed everywhere. All, all were gone! Not a vestige to mark where one hide house stood. The oven, too, was gone. I searched for its site, and found, where I thought it should be, a few broken bricks and bits of mortar. I alone was left of all, and how strangely was I here! What changes to me! Where were they all? Why should I care for them — poor Kanakas and sailors, the refuse of civilization, the outlaws and the beachcombers of the Pacific! Time and death seemed to transfigure them. Doubtless nearly all were dead; but how had they died, and where? In hospitals, in fever climes, in dens of vice, or falling from the mast, or dropping exhausted from the wreck "When for a moment, like a drop of rain/He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan/Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown." The lighthearted boys are now hardened middle-aged men, if the seas, rocks, fevers, and the deadlier enemies that beset a sailor's life on shore have spared them; and the then strong men have bowed themselves, and the earth or sea has covered them. How softening is the effect of time! It touches us through the affections. I almost feel as if I were lamenting the passing away of something loved and dear — the boats, the Kanakas, the hides, my old shipmates! Death, change, distance, lend them a character which makes them quite another thing.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815–1882) United States author and lawyer

Twenty-Four Years After (1869)

Love, Life, Death, Men

“Quite apart from the fact that it conflicts with the demands and the content of the word of God, nihilism is a denial of the humanity and of the very identity of the human being. It should never be forgotten that the neglect of being inevitably leads to losing touch with objective truth and therefore with the very ground of human dignity.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Encyclical Fides et Ratio, 14 September 1998 <br class="br">Source: www.vatican.va http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091998_fides-et-ratio_en.html

God, Truth

“I never yet touched a fig leaf that didn't turn into a price tag.”

Saul Bellow book Humboldt's Gift

Humboldt's Gift (1975), p. 159
General sources

“I really enjoy it -- it's like a videogame on wheels. The GPS touch screen is one of the most entertaining things I've ever seen in a car. I still have a Range Rover that I don't drive much anymore, because I started feeling bad about it.”

Mike Shinoda (1977) American musician

On his hybrid (Variety Interviw, 7/16/2007)

Cars, Feeling

“We must all educate ourselves to the reality of the horrors taking place. Doctors today know that unborn children can feel a touch within the womb and that they respond to pain.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

1980s, First term of office (1981–1985), Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation (1983)

Pain, Children, Education, Feeling

“Yes [death has become a taboo]. Today people want to avoid the subject and hide the deaths that happen around them. It is as if the world were a hotel where the dead usually disappear at night, without any guest being able to notice their presence. While movies and television address death, they do not touch the fundamental point of finitude. The deaths are false, the good guys get shot and come back to life. It's another way of treating death as unreal.”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

ÉPOCA Interview (in Portuguese) http://revistaepoca.globo.com/Epoca/0,6993,EPT1061569-1666-2,00.html, São Paulo, 2005.

Life, Death, People, World

“Sir, I beseech you for all the love that hath been between us, and for the love of God, let me have justice and right. Take of me some pity and compassion, for I am a poor woman, and a stranger, born out of your dominion. I have here no assured friend and much less indifferent counsel. I flee to you, as to the head of justice within this realm. Alas, Sir, where have I offended you? Or what occasion have you of displeasure, that you intend to put me from you? I take God and all the world to witness that I have been to you a true, humble and obedient wife, ever comfortable to your will and pleasure. I have been always well pleased and contented with all things wherein you had any delight or dalliance. I never grudged a word or countenance, or showed a spark or discontent. I loved all those whom ye loved, only for your sake, whether I had cause or no, and whether they were my friends or enemies. This 20 years or more I have been your true wife and by me ye have had divers children, although it hath pleased God to call them from this world, which hath been no default in me. And when ye had me at first, I take God to my judge; I was a true maid, without touch of man.”

Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536) first wife of Henry VIII of England (1485–1536)

Joanna Denny (2006) Anne Boleyn: A New Life of England's Tragic Queen, Da Capo Press, ISBN 0306814749, p. 140.

Love, God, Children, Pleasure

“Anxiety was a philosophical concept before it taken up by psychology and psychiatry. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard (1813-1855) argued that anxiety is part of human nature. Anxiety arises where possibility and actuality come into contact and the present touches the future. Anxiety is a product of having the freedom to make choices and act, and by doing so make a commitment to one’s identity, ways of being in the world, and standing in relation to other people. For Kierkegaard, anxiety can be an avenue to stand in relation to God. This is why he wrote, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”
One can bracket out the God dimensions and still learn something valuable from Kierkegaard, namely that anxiety can cause inaction, which is, in its most basic sense, a loss of freedom. What is possible may never actualize and one may lose the present by tending to an imagined future. One becomes immobilized and unable to meet needs and realize goals and aspirations.”

Peg O'Connor (1965) American philosopher

"Anxiety Is a Part of Human Nature" https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/philosophy-stirred-not-shaken/201703/anxiety-is-part-human-nature, Psychology Today, (Mar 24, 2017).

God, People, World, Way

“In infancy I was afraid of the dark, which I peopled with all sorts of things; but my grandfather cured me of that by daring me to walk through certain dark parts of the house when I was 3 or 4 years old. After that, dark places held a certain fascination for me. But it is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now—but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived. At the ages of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, & 8 I have been whirled through formless abysses of infinite night and adumbrated horrors as black & as seethingly sinister as any of our friend Fafhrd's [a nickname Lovecraft used for Fritz Leiber] "splatter-stencil" triumphs. That's why I appreciate such triumphs so keenly, I have seen these things! Many a time I have awaked in shrieks of panic, & have fought desperately to keep from sinking back into sleep & its unutterable horrors. At the age of six my dreams became peopled with a race of lean, faceless, rubbery, winged things to which I applied the home-made name of night-gaunts. Night after night they would appear in exactly the same form—& the terror they brought was beyond any verbal description. Long decades later I embodied them in one of my Fungi from Yuggoth pseudo-sonnets, which you may have read. Well—after I was 8 all these things abated, perhaps because of the scientific habit of mind which I was acquiring (or trying to acquire). I ceased to believe in religion or any other form of the supernatural, & the new logic gradually reached my subconscious imagination. Still, occasional nightmares brought recurrent touches of the ancient fear—& as late as 1919 I had some that I could use in fiction without much change. The Statement of Randolph Carter is a literal dream transcript. Now, in the sere & yellow leaf (I shall be 47 in August), I seem to be rather deserted by stark horror. I have nightmares only 2 or 3 times a year, & of these none even approaches those of my youth in soul-shattering, phobic monstrousness. It is fully a decade & more since I have known fear in its most stupefying & hideous form. And yet, so strong is the impress of the past, I shall never cease to be fascinated by fear as a subject for aesthetic treatment. Along with the element of cosmic mystery & outsideness, it will always interest me more than anything else. It is, in a way, amusing that one of my chief interests should be an emotion whose poignant extremes I have never known in waking life!”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Harry O. Fischer (late February 1937), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 416-417
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, People, Youth, Age

“When I look at a building, how can I know there was a builder? Can't see him, hear him, touch him, taste him or smell him, so how can I know there was a builder? Well, the building is absolute proof there was a builder. I couldn't want better proof that there was a builder than to have the building as evidence. I don't need faith to believe in a builder, all I need is eyes that can see and a brain that works. Now the same deep, rich, scientific principle works with paintings and painters…. And the same principle works with God. When I look at Creation how can I know there was a creator? Well, creation is absolute proof there was a creator. I don't need faith to believe in a creator, all I need is eyes that can see and a brain that works.”

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

"The Beauty of a Broken Spirit—Atheism", The Way of the Master season 1 episode 7, 2003-05-12

God, Faith, Painting

“I believe neither in what I touch nor what I see. I only believe in what I do not see, and solely in what I feel.”

Gustave Moreau (1826–1898) French painter

As quoted at the J. Paul Getty Museum http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artMakerDetails?maker=333&page=1

Feeling

“Through centuries of centuries, fire and water face each other; the fire, upright, buoyant and leaping; the water flat, creeping, gliding, widening its lines and its surface. When they touch, is it the water which hisses and roars, or is it the fire?”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XVI - De Profundis Clamavi

Water

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

Stephen Hawking book The Grand Design

The Grand Design (2010)

God, Law, Light, Universe

“I touch God in my song
as the hill touched the far-away sea
with its waterfall.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

42
Fireflies (1928)

God, Sea

“Touch us gently, Time!
Let us glide adown thy stream
Gently,—as we sometimes glide
Through a quiet dream.”

Bryan Procter (1787–1874) English poet

Touch us gently, Time, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare "Time has touched me gently in his race, And left no odious furrows in my face", George Crabbe, Tales of the Hall, Book xvii., The Widow.

Dreams, Time

“My aim is to understand love. I know how alive I felt when I was in love, and I know that everything I have now, however interesting it might seem, doesn't really excited me.
But love is a terrible thing: I've seen my girlfriends suffer and I don't want the same thing to happen to me. … Although my aim is to understand love, and although I suffer to think of people to whom I gave my heart, I see that those who touched my heart failed to arouse my body, and that those who aroused my body failed to touch my heart.”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

Maria's diary entry at the age of 17, p. 16.
Eleven Minutes (2003)

Love, People, Understanding, Thinking

“Every form of catechesis would do well to attend to the “way of beauty” (via pulchritudinis). Proclaiming Christ means showing that to believe in and to follow him is not only something right and true, but also something beautiful, capable of filling life with new splendour and profound joy, even in the midst of difficulties. Every expression of true beauty can thus be acknowledged as a path leading to an encounter with the Lord Jesus. This has nothing to do with fostering an aesthetic relativism which would downplay the inseparable bond between truth, goodness and beauty, but rather a renewed esteem for beauty as a means of touching the human heart and enabling the truth and goodness of the Risen Christ to radiate within it. If, as Saint Augustine says, we love only that which is beautiful, the incarnate Son, as the revelation of infinite beauty, is supremely lovable and draws us to himself with bonds of love. So a formation in the via pulchritudinis ought to be part of our effort to pass on the faith. Each particular Church should encourage the use of the arts in evangelization, building on the treasures of the past but also drawing upon the wide variety of contemporary expressions so as to transmit the faith in a new “language of parables”. We must be bold enough to discover new signs and new symbols, new flesh to embody and communicate the word, and different forms of beauty which are valued in different cultural settings, including those unconventional modes of beauty which may mean little to the evangelizers, yet prove particularly attractive for others.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

Section 167
2010s, 2013, Evangelii Gaudium · The Joy of the Gospel

Love, Life, Truth, Faith

“The Common Sense, is that which judges of things offered to it by the other senses. The ancient speculators have concluded that that part of man which constitutes his judgment is caused by a central organ to which the other five senses refer everything by means of impressibility; and to this centre they have given the name Common Sense. And they say that this Sense is situated in the centre of the head between Sensation and Memory. And this name of Common Sense is given to it solely because it is the common judge of all the other five senses i. e. Seeing, Hearing, Touch, Taste and Smell. This Common Sense is acted upon by means of Sensation which is placed as a medium between it and the senses. Sensation is acted upon by means of the images of things presented to it by the external instruments, that is to say the senses which are the medium between external things and Sensation. In the same way the senses are acted upon by objects. Surrounding things transmit their images to the senses and the senses transfer them to the Sensation. Sensation sends them to the Common Sense, and by it they are stamped upon the memory and are there more or less retained according to the importance or force of the impression.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIV Anatomy, Zoology and Physiology

Way, Sense, Memory, Parting

“The past alone is truly real: the present is but a painful, struggling birth into the immutable being of what is no longer. Only the dead exist fully. The lives of the living are fragmentary, doubtful, and subject to change; but the lives of the dead are complete, free from the sway of Time, the all but omnipotent lord of the world. Their failures and successes, their hopes and fears, their joys and pains, have become eternal—our efforts cannot now abate one jot of them. Sorrows long buried in the grave, tragedies of which only a fading memory remains, loves immortalized by Death's hallowing touch these have a power, a magic, an untroubled calm, to which no present can attain. …On the banks of the river of Time, the sad procession of human generations is marching slowly to the grave; in the quiet country of the Past, the march is ended, the tired wanderers rest, and the weeping is hushed.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

On History (1904)
1900s

Love, Death, Pain, World

“No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty; none less inclined to take or touch aught which they have not honestly earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which if surrendered will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them till all of liberty shall be lost.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, First State of the Union address (1861)

Men

“Tormented by spiritual thirst,
I dragged myself through a somber desert.
And a six-winged seraph
Appeared to meet me at the crossing of the ways.
He touched my eyes
With fingers as light as a dream:
And my prophetic eyes opened
Like those of a frightened eagle.
He touched my ears
And they were filled with noise and ringing:
And I heard the shuddering of the heavens,
And the flight of the angels in the heights,
And the movement of the beasts of the sea under the waters,
And the sound of the vine growing in the valley.
He bent down to my mouth
And tore out my tongue,
Sinful, decitful, and given to idle talk;
with the right hand steeped in blood
He inserted the tongue of a wise serpent,
Into my benumbed mouth.
He clove my breast with a sword,
And plucked out my quivering heart,
And thrust a coal of live fire
Into my gaping breast.
Like a corpse I lay in the desert.
And the voice of God called out to me:
'Arise, O prophet, see and hear,
Be filled with my will,
Go forth over land and sea,
And set the hearts of men on fire with your Word.”

Aleksandr Pushkin The Prophet

English translation found in New Society, Volume 8, (1966). New Society Limited. p. 413.
Also quoted by Kahn, Andrew (2006). The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin. Cambridge University Press, p. 84.
The Prophet (1826)

Men, God, Dreams, Angels

“The energy to manufacture Art doesn't come merely from the superficial darshan (philosophy) of objects; nor from mere intellect and knowledge; but it comes from those subtle conscience, which finds emotional caressing from divine experience climbing above bestial eyes. The beast merely looks and remains satisfied, but man tries to touch the heart of everything. The superficial understandings do not satisfy him, in the world containing form-relation and conscience he cannot remain satisfied though philosophy. He tries to connect the things seen and experienced in his mind and outer nature with eternal and true and tries to touch them with the help of relation and support of chief reason.”

Laxmi Prasad Devkota (1909–1959) Nepali poet

कला र जीवन (Art and Life)
Art and Life

World, Art, Understanding, Support

“Marie falls back upon her idea, obdurately, and says, "A woman only lives by love and for love. When she's no longer good for that she's no longer anything."
She repeats, "You see — I'm nothing any more."
Ah, she is at the bottom of her abyss! She is at the extremity of a woman's mourning! She is not thinking only of me. Her thought is higher and vaster. She is thinking of all the woman she is, of all that love is, of all possible things when she says, "I'm no longer anything." And I — I am only he who is present with her just now, and no help whatever is left her to look for from any one.
I should like to pacify and console this woman who is gentleness and simplicity and who is sinking there while she lightly touches me with her presence — but exactly because she is there I cannot lie to her, I can do nothing against her grief, her perfect, infallible grief.
"Ah!" she cries, "if we came to life again!"”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XIX - Ghosts

Love, Life, Lie, Idea

“Lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance —
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Helas! http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/wilde/helas.html, l. 12-14 (1881)

Soul

“Of all that makes us suffer, nothing — so much as disappointment — gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.”

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Truth, Disappointment, Suffering

“It is just as ridiculous to get excited & hysterical over a coming cultural change as to get excited & hysterical over one's physical aging... There is legitimate pathos about both processes; but blame & rebellion are essentially cheap, because inappropriate, emotions... It is wholly appropriate to feel a deep sadness at the coming of unknown things & the departure of those around which all our symbolic associations are entwined. All life is fundamentally & inextricably sad, with the perpetual snatching away of all the chance combinations of image & vista & mood that we become attached to, & the perpetual encroachment of the shadow of decay upon illusions of expansion & liberation which buoyed us up & spurred us on in youth. That is why I consider all jauntiness, & many forms of carelessly generalised humour, as essentially cheap & mocking, & occasionally ghastly & corpselike. Jauntiness & non-ironic humour in this world of basic & inescapable sadness are like the hysterical dances that a madman might execute on the grave of all his hopes. But if, at one extreme, intellectual poses of spurious happiness be cheap & disgusting; so at the other extreme are all gestures & fist-clenchings of rebellion equally silly & inappropriate—if not quite so overtly repulsive. All these things are ridiculous & contemptible because they are not legitimately applicable... The sole sensible way to face the cosmos & its essential sadness (an adumbration of true tragedy which no destruction of values can touch) is with manly resignation—eyes open to the real facts of perpetual frustration, & mind & sense alert to catch what little pleasure there is to be caught during one's brief instant of existence. Once we know, as a matter of course, how nature inescapably sets our freedom-adventure-expansion desires, & our symbol-&-experience-affections, definitely beyond all zones of possible fulfilment, we are in a sense fortified in advance, & able to endure the ordeal of consciousness with considerable equanimity... Life, if well filled with distracting images & activities favourable to the ego's sense of expansion, freedom, & adventurous expectancy, can be very far from gloomy—& the best way to achieve this condition is to get rid of the unnatural conceptions which make conscious evils out of impersonal and inevitable limitations... get rid of these, & of those false & unattainable standards which breed misery & mockery through their beckoning emptiness.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 291
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

Life, Happiness, Pleasure, Youth

“The first really important book I read about filmmaking was The Film Technique by Pudovkin. This was some time before I had ever touched a movie camera and it opened my eyes to cutting and montage.”

Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor

Interviewed by Charles Reynolds, Popular Photography (1960)

Books, Time, Reading

“Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it.”

Stefan Zweig book The Post Office Girl

The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)

Distant

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”

E. F. Schumacher (1911–1977) British economist

"Small is Beautiful", an essay, in The Radical Humanist, Vol. 37, No. 5 (August 1973), p. 22 http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.32106019678082;view=1up;seq=230

Fools, Intelligence, Courage