Quotes about touch
page 8

“But then Froi looked back to where his work lay unfinished and it made him sad because there had been something about the touch of earth in his hands that made him feel worthwhile.”

Melina Marchetta Finnikin of the Rock

Source: Finnikin of the Rock

Sadness, Feeling

“To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.
In yourself you stretch, you are well.”

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) American writer

"To Be In Love"
Variant: To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.
Source: Selected Poems

Love

“She wanted—what some people want throughout life—a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of sympathy.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Scarlet Letter

Source: The Scarlet Letter

Life, People

“She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.”

Maggie O'Farrell (1972) British writer

Source: After You'd Gone

Life, Feeling, Reality, Reading

“Sage?" Adrian lightly touched my arm, and I jumped at the feel of his fingertips against my skin. "You okay?"
"I don't know," I said softly. "I just thought of something crazy."
"Welcome to my world.”

Richelle Mead book The Golden Lily

Source: The Golden Lily

World, Feeling

“I didn't have much to say to anybody but kept to myself and my books. With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw it's fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

Happiness, Books, Drawing

“You were not put on this Earth just to get in touch with god”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

God

“But hands are sacred things. Touch is personal, fingers of love, feelers of blind eyes, tongues of those who cannot talk…”

Keri Hulme book The Bone People

Source: The Bone People

Love, Personality

“At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Source: The Holy Terrors

World, Childhood

“I have noticed that people are dealing too much with the negative, with what is wrong…. Why not try the other way, to look into the patient and see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom?”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

People, Way

“You need anything else…

You to touch me like I matter…”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Acheron

“Touch has a memory.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Memory

“He looked at her, and the clarity of his dark eyes struck her heart with a sensation of a wound touched.”

Shannon Hale The Goose Girl

Source: The Goose Girl

Heart

“Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

World, Fear

“It's funny how close the past is, sometimes. Sometimes it seems as if you could almost reach out and touch it. Only who really wants to?”

Stephen King book From a Buick 8

Source: From a Buick 8

Past

“He had only to touch me to turn my tears into sighs and my anger to desire. How accomodating love is; it forgives everything.”

Isabel Allende (1942) Chilean writer

Love, Forgiveness, Tear, Anger

“Words have to find a man's mind before they can touch his heart, and some men's minds are woefully small targets.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: Chapter 14, “The Name of the Wind” (p. 113)
Context: Remember this son, if you forget everything else. A poet is a musician who can’t sing. Words have to find a man’s mind before they can touch his heart. And, some men’s minds are woeful small targets. Music touches their hearts directly, no matter how small or stubborn the mind of the man who listens.

Men, Heart

“Maureen wants to touch you,” Clary said with a sideways grin. “Bad touch.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

“Since the establishment of diplomatic ties in May 1997, Taipei has assisted São Tomé and Príncipe in promoting national development, with our bilateral cooperation touching upon the areas of public health, medicine, agriculture, basic infrastructure, energy and education. Accordingly, it disregarded its nearly 20-year friendship with us and approached both sides of the Taiwan Strait to seek the highest bidder. We regret and deplore São Tomé and Príncipe's reckless and unfriendly decision.”

David Lee (1949) politician and diplomat from Taiwan

David Lee (2016) cited in " Sao Tome and Principe cuts Taipei ties http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2016/12/22/2003661692" on Taipei Times, 22 December 2016

Friendship, Health, Education, Decision

“Tender inner weaknesses, revolting at mild touches of censure, are like diseased parts of the body, recoiling before even delicate handling.”

Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936) Indian yogi and guru

Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

Disease, Parting

“Nor peace nor ease the heart can know
Which, like the needle true,
Turns at the touch of joy or woe,
But turning, trembles too.”

Frances Greville (1727–1789) Irish poet

A Prayer for Indifference, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Peace, Heart, Joy

“The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him.”

Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Water Book

Spring, Thinking

“So here's my demonstration
A peep show
Tonight my body's an exhibition baby
Though it's on display don't be scared to
Touch It, It said so
So come and get it babe”

Janet Jackson (1966) singer from the United States

Feedback
Discipline (2008)

Baby

“This new quantum mechanics promised to explain all of chemistry. And though I felt an exuberance at this, I felt a certain threat, too. “Chemistry,” wrote Crookes, “will be established upon an entirely new basis…. We shall be set free from the need for experiment, knowing a priori what the result of each and every experiment must be.” I was not sure I liked the sound of this. Did this mean that chemists of the future (if they existed) would never actually need to handle a chemical; might never see the colors of vanadium salts, never smell a hydrogen selenide, never admire the form of a crystal; might live in a colorless, scentless, mathematical world? This, for me, seemed and awful prospect, for I, at least, needed to smell and touch and feel, to place myself, my senses, in the middle of the perceptual world.”

Oliver Sacks book Uncle Tungsten

Source: Uncle Tungsten (2001), pp. 312–313

World, Color, Feeling, Mathematics

“If you so much as touch him, I’ll have to smash every bone in your body—twice, to make sure I didn’t miss any the first time. I don’t recommend the experience.”

John Brunner (1934–1995) British author

Section 5 (p. 127)
Short fiction, You’ll Take the High Road (1973)

Time

“If you hold two arms out in front of you and someone grabs them, then you can use the third set elbow movement to escape. Bring the hand right in to touch the body. If the hand is held in a fist, it doesn't work. Then press down with the elbow.”

Wong Shun Leung (1935–1997) martial artist

Wong Shun Leung Comments on How to Respond to a Grab Standing Grappling Situations Source: Comments From Wong Shun Leung and Tsui Shan Ting, by Ray Van Raamsdonk http://www.springtimesong.com/wcqanda.htm

“It is a true, incorruptible purism... It is a religion that cannot be argued about. It has its saints, its disciples and its heretics. Modern life with its speed and tumult, dynamic and full of contrasts, beats furiously against this light, luminous, delicate structure, which emerges coldly from the chaos. Do not touch it, it is an accomplished fact. It had to be, it is there to stay.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

quote, 1945
Quote, 1945 of Fernand Leger, in Abstract Painting, Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co., 1964, p. 33
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1940's

Life, Religion, Quotes, Light

“The calculus is to mathematics no more than what experiment is to physics, and all the truths produced solely by the calculus can be treated as truths of experiment. The sciences must proceed to first causes, above all mathematics where one cannot assume, as in physics, principles that are unknown to us. For there is in mathematics, so to speak, only what we have placed there… If, however, mathematics always has some essential obscurity that one cannot dissipate, it will lie, uniquely, I think, in the direction of the infinite; it is in that direction that mathematics touches on physics, on the innermost nature of bodies about which we know little.”

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) French writer, satirist and philosopher of enlightenment

Elements de la géométrie de l'infini (1727) as quoted by Amir R. Alexander, Geometrical Landscapes: The Voyages of Discovery and the Transformation of Mathematical Practice (2002) citing Michael S. Mahoney, "Infinitesimals and Transcendent Relations: The Mathematics of Motion in the Late Seventeenth Century" in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg, Robert S. Westman (1990)

Truth, Lie, Mathematics, Nature

“Here it is night: I stay at the Summit Temple.
Here I can touch the stars with my hand.
I dare not speak aloud in the silence
For fear of disturbing the dwellers of Heaven.”

Li Bai (701–762) Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty poetry period

"The Summit Temple" (夜宿山寺), in The White Pony: An Anthology of Chinese Poetry from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (1947), p. 173

Fear, Star, Silence, Night

“Such a tendency has the slave-trade to debauch men's minds, and harden them to every feeling of humanity! For I will not suppose that the dealers in slaves are born worse than other men—No; it is the fatality of this mistaken avarice, that it corrupts the milk of human kindness and turns it into gall. And, had the pursuits of those men been different, they might have been as generous, as tender-hearted and just, as they are unfeeling, rapacious and cruel. Surely this traffic cannot be good, which spreads like a pestilence, and taints what it touches! which violates that first natural right of mankind, equality and independency, and gives one man a dominion over his fellows which God could never intend! For it raises the owner to a state as far above man as it depresses the slave below it; and, with all the presumption of human pride, sets a distinction between them, immeasurable in extent, and endless in duration! Yet how mistaken is the avarice even of the planters? Are slaves more useful by being thus humbled to the condition of brutes, than they would be if suffered to enjoy the privileges of men? The freedom which diffuses health and prosperity throughout Britain answers you—No. When you make men slaves you deprive them of half their virtue, you set them in your own conduct an example of fraud, rapine, and cruelty, and compel them to live with you in a state of war; and yet you complain that they are not honest or faithful! You stupify them with stripes, and think it necessary to keep them in a state of ignorance; and yet you assert that they are incapable of learning; that their minds are such a barren soil or moor, that culture would be lost on them; and that they come from a climate, where nature, though prodigal of her bounties in a degree unknown to yourselves, has left man alone scant and unfinished, and incapable of enjoying the treasures she has poured out for him!—An assertion at once impious and absurd. Why do you use those instruments of torture? Are they fit to be applied by one rational being to another? And are ye not struck with shame and mortification, to see the partakers of your nature reduced so low? But, above all, are there no dangers attending this mode of treatment? Are you not hourly in dread of an insurrection? […] But by changing your conduct, and treating your slaves as men, every cause of fear would be banished. They would be faithful, honest, intelligent and vigorous; and peace, prosperity, and happiness, would attend you.”

Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797) African abolitionist

Chap. V
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789)

Men, God, War, Happiness

“Action is the pointer which shows the balance. We must not touch the pointer but the weight.”

Simone Weil book Gravity and Grace

L’action est l’aiguille indicatrice de la balance. Il ne faut pas toucher à l’aiguille, mais aux poids.
La pesanteur et la grâce (1948), p. 57
Source: Gravity and Grace (1947), p. 97

“You have to find out for yourself. Take the leap. Go as far as you can. Try staying out of touch. Become a stranger in a strange land. Acquire humility. Learn the language. Listen to what people are saying.”

Paul Theroux (1941) American travel writer and novelist

Fresh Air Fiend (2000)

People, Learning

“[Apple] brings to mind the idea of a corporate edifice complex. That's where a successful company builds a monument to its greatness just as it is losing touch with the realities of its market. … The construction of a $5 billion palatial headquarters when the company is — at best — between hit products does reflect a certain corporate arrogance.”

Peter Cohan American businessman

Is Apple the Next Dell? http://forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2013/04/25/is-apple-the-next-dell in Forbes (25 April 2013)

Idea, Reality, Success

“You’re so hypnotizing,
Could you be the devil, could you be an angel?
Your touch magnetizing,
Feels like going floating, leaves my body glowing.
They say be afraid,
You’re not like the others, futuristic lovers.
Different DNA, they don’t understand you.”

Katy Perry (1984) American singer, songwriter and actress

E.T., written by Katy Perry, Lukasz Gottwald, Max Martin, Joshua Coleman, and Kanye West
Song lyrics, Teenage Dream (2010)

Angels, Feeling, Lovers, Understanding

“I wrote the first book, Harvest of Stars, and as I was writing it, I saw that certain implications had barely been touched on… It's perfectly obvious that two completely revolutionary things are going on, with cybernetics, and biological science.”

Poul Anderson (1926–2001) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Poul Anderson: Fifty Years of Science Fiction (1997)

Books, Star, Science

“I couldn't get to sleep at night without saying the Lord's Prayer because, when I was young, I felt I was touched by the hand of Jesus, and hated myself for challenging it.”

Bruce Parry (1969) British documentarian

As quoted in "Bruce Parry: 'My job doesn't allow me a private life" by Cassandra Jardine in The Telegraph (19 September 1007) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/main.jhtml?xml=/portal/2007/09/19/nosplit/fttribe119.xml

Hate, Sleep, Night

“Other countries may boast of this and that, but nobody can touch the United States for poisonous snakes. We have about twenty species, most of them deadly, and Europe has only five or six, none of them much good. We have fifteen kinds of Rattlesnakes alone and nobody else has even one. [Footnote: There is a species in Central and South America, but it probably came from here. ]”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Rattlesnake
How to Become Extinct (1941)

Country

“When I look at a work of Art I ask myself: does it inspire me, does it touch and move me, do I learn something from it, does it startle or amaze me - do I get excited, upset? That is the test any artwork has to pass: can it create an emotional impact on a human being even when he has no education or any information about art? I’ve always had a problem with art that you can only understand if you have a degree in art history, and I have a problem with theories. Most of them are bullshit anyway. Most critics and theorists have little respect for artists, and I think the importance of theory in art is totally overrated. Real art is self-evident. Real art is intense, enchanting, exciting and unsettling; it has a quality and magic that you cannot explain. Art is not logic, and if you want to experience it, your mind and rational thinking will be of little help. Art is something spiritual that you can only experience with your senses, your heart, your soul.”

Gottfried Helnwein (1948) Austrian photographer and painter

Interview by Brendan Maher http://www.gottfried-helnwein-interview.com/index.html, Start, Ireland, November 24, 2004

Education, Art, Soul, History

“The deeps are cold:
In that darkness camaraderie does not hold:
Nothing touches but, clutching, devours.”

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer

"Relic"
Lupercal (1960)

“[I] Pray do you remember carrying me to a picture-dealer's somewhere by Hanover Square, [London], and my being struck with the leaving and touch of a little bit of tree[? ]; the whole picture was not above 8 or 10 inches high and about a foot long. I wish if you had time that you'd inquire what it might be purchased for..”

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

Quote from Gainsborough's letter to his friend William Jackson of Exeter, from Bath, 11 May 1768; as cited in Thomas Gainsborough, by William T, Whitley https://ia800204.us.archive.org/6/items/thomasgainsborou00whitrich/thomasgainsborou00whitrich.pdf; New York, Charles Scribner's Sons – London, Smith, Elder & Co, Sept. 1915, p. 383 (Appendix A - Letter VI) 1755 - 1769

Tree, Time

“Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what ears have never heard? Listen to the bird's cry. Do you want to touch what hands have never touched? Touch the earth. Verily I say that God is about to create the world.”

Jorge Luis Borges book The Theologians

The Theologians, translated by James E. Irby (1964)

God, World, Bird, Cry

“But when a great artist or a great writer lays hold upon either sort of ugliness he transfigures it instantaneously. With a touch from the magic ring he metamorphoses it into beauty. His Is a sort of fairy alchemy. His Is a sort of fairy alchemy.
When Velasquez, paints Sebastian, King Philip's dwarf, he gives him such an appealing look that we read the poor creature's secret and see the tragedy it involved — a man forced to get his living by discarding his human dignity, and becoming a toy, a living joke. The more poignant his martyrdom, within that misshapen body, the more beautiful the artist's work.
When Millet paints a poor rustic leaning upon a hoe, a wretch broken by fatigue, scorched by the sun, degraded as a beast of the field, he has only to add an expression of resignation in order to make this hideous nightmare a magnificent symbol of humanity.
When Shakespeare gives us Tago or Richard III, and when Racine gives us Néron and Narcisse, moral ugliness, interpreted by minds so clear, so penetrating, becomes a marvelous theme of beauty.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Rodin on realism, 1910

Secret, Beauty, Reading, Sun

“As I understand it, the Holy Church teaches that there are two worlds: the world of everything we can see and hear and touch, and another world, the spiritual world of heaven and hell. Barnard and Stokes were two — how shall I put it — renegade theologians who postulated the existence of numerous other worlds like this one, neither heaven nor hell, but material and sinful. They are there, close by, but invisible and unreachable.”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

The Master of Jordan College to the Librarian, in Ch. 2 : The Idea of North
His Dark Materials, The Golden Compass (1995)

World, Hell, Understanding

“Advertising reaches out to touch the fantasy part of people's lives. And you know, most people's fantasies are pretty sad.”

Frederik Pohl (1919–2013) American science fiction writer and editor

The Way The Future Was, (autobiography, 1978)

People, Sadness, Parting

“Be advised what thou dost discourse of, and what thou maintainest whether touching religion, state, or vanity; for if thou err in the first, thou shalt be accounted profane; if in the second, dangerous; if in the third, indiscreet and foolish.”

Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer

Source: Instructions to his Son and to Posterity (published 1632), Chapter IV

Religion

“At the beginning of the last two decades of our century, we find ourselves in a state of profound, world-wide crisis. It is a complex, multi-dimensional crisis whose facets touch every aspect of our lives - our health and livelihood, the quality of our environment and our social relationships, our economy, technology, and politics. It is a crisis of intellectual, moral, and spiritual dimensions; a crisis of a scale and urgency unprecedented in recorded human history. For the first time we have to face the very real threat of extinction of the human race and of all life on this planet.”

Fritjof Capra book The Turning Point

Source: The Turning Point (1982), Ch. 1. The Turning of the Tide.

Life, Health, World, History

“An artist’s touches are sometimes no more articulate than the barking of a dog who would call attention to something without exactly knowing what. This is as it should be, and he is a great artist who can be depended on not to bark at nothing.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Inarticulate Touches
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part IX - A Painter's Views on Painting

Dogs, Dependency

“How wonderful is Cold Mountain
Climbers are all afraid
The moon shines on clear water twinkle twinkle
Wind rustles the tall grass
Plum trees flower in the snow
Bare twisted trees have clouds for foliage
A touch of rain brings it all alive
Unless you see clearly do not approach”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Mountain, Flowers, Tree, Grass

“In another life — this isn’t what I know, but how I feel — these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon — the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the upper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again into the sky.”

Peter Matthiessen book The Snow Leopard

The Snow Leopard (1978)

Life, Feeling, Home, Mountain

“A few can touch the magic string,
And noisy Fame is proud to win them;
Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

The Voiceless; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Music, Singing

“Even bold and revolutionary thinkers bow to the judgment of science. Kropotkin wants to break up all existing institutions, but he does not touch science. Ibsen goes very far in his critique of bourgeois society, but he retains science as a measure of truth. Levi Strauss has made us realize that Western thought is not the lonely peak of human achievement it was once thought to be, but he and his followers exclude science from their relativization of ideologies. Marx and Engels were convinced that science would aid the workers in their quest for mental and social liberation.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Science in a Free Society

pg 75.
Science in a Free Society (1978)

Truth, Science

“You could say that I am desperate — because I am. In a world that both desexualizes and hypersexualizes transfeminine people and treats us like street garbage, 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

“If you could breathe a breath so strong you could blow out the wolf. Like you blow out the copo. Like you blow out the fire from the candela. The wolf is made the way the world is made. You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

World, Way, Strong, Wolf

“When a woman reproaches a man, but at the same time acts affectionately towards him, she should be made love to in every way. A woman, who meets a man in lonely places, and puts up with the touch of his foot, but pretends, on account of indecision of her mind, not to be aware of it, should be conquered by patience and by continued efforts.”

Vātsyāyana book Kama Sutra

Source: Kama Sutra, p. 96

Love, Way, Effort, Time

“You know, Nellie, when I was young I would run on fly balls hit to the outfield. I'd go around second base and I suddenly realize the ball is going to be caught. Sometimes I would run across the infield and never re-touch second base. Sometimes the umpires wouldn't notice if the players wouldn't. I didn't know how to run the bases well the first couple of years.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Speaking with Nellie King in 1967 or later; as quoted by King in "Frustration in the Fifties" https://books.google.com/books?id=03XsO25A3I8C&pg=PA60&dq=%22As+Nellie+King+recalls,+Clemente+occasionally%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi63oCQjcfNAhWEOyYKHUvbBrMQ6AEIFDAA#v=onepage&q&f=false, from Roberto Clemente: The Great One (1998) by Bruce Markusen, pp. 60-61 Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1967</big>

Flying

“"I almost wish I were not a painter," observed my companion.
"Why so? one would think at such a time you would most exult in your privilege of being able to imitate the various brilliant and delightful touches of nature."
"No; for instead of delivering myself up to the full enjoyment of them as others do, I am always troubling my head about how I could produce the same effect upon canvas; and as that can never be done, it is more vanity and vexation of spirit."”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. IX : A Snake in the Grass; Helen to Gilbert

Nature, Thinking, Time

“The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible. By the time a man has grown old enough to have a son in college he has specialized. The university should generalize the treatment of its undergraduates, should struggle to put them in touch with every force of life.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

“The University's Part in Political Life” (13 March 1909) in PWW (The Papers of Woodrow Wilson) 19:99
1900s

Life, Universe, Time

“The long blue days, for his head, for his side, and the little paths for his feet, and all the brightness to touch and gather. Through the grass the little mosspaths, bony with old roots, and the trees sticking up, and the flowers sticking up, and the fruit hanging down, and the white exhausted butterflies, and the birds never the same darting all day long into hiding. And all the sounds, meaning nothing. Then at night rest in the quiet house, there are no roads, no streets any more, you lie down by a window opening on refuge, the little sounds come that demand nothing, ordain nothing, explain nothing, propound nothing, and the short necessary night is soon ended, and the sky blue again all over the secret places where nobody ever comes, the secret places never the same, but always simple and indifferent, always mere places, sites of a stirring beyond coming and going, of a being so light and free that it is as the being of nothing.”

Samuel Beckett book Watt

Part I, p. 39
Watt (1943)

Lie, Secret, Flowers, Bird

“I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being. It's a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

As quoted in Ingmar Bergman Directs (1972) by John Simon

“Many is the mirage I chased. Always I was overreaching myself. The oftener I touched reality, the harder I bounced back to the world of illusion, which is the name for everyday life. 'Experience! More experience!' I clamored. In a frantic effort to arrive at some kind of order, some tentative working program, I would sit down quietly now and then and spend long, long hours mapping out a plan of procedure. Plans, such as architects and engineers sweat over, were never my forte. But I could always visualize my dreams in a cosmogonic pattern. Though I could never formulate a plot I could balance and weigh opposing forces, characters, situations, events, distribute them in a sort of heavenly lay-out, always with plenty of space between, always with the certitude that there is no end, only worlds within worlds ad infinitum, and that wherever one left off one had created a world, a world finite, total, complete.”

Henry Miller book Plexus

The Rosy Crucifixion II : Plexus (1953)

Life, World, Dreams, Reality

“The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.”

John D. MacDonald (1916–1986) writer from the United States

Travis McGee series, (1965)

World

“But those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men, leave behind them something more real and warmly personal than bodily presence, an ineffable and eternal thing. It is everlasting life touching us as something more than a vague, recondite concept. The sound of a great name dies like an echo; the splendor of fame fades into nothing; but the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

“The Book-End,” Columbus Dispatch (1923) Collecting Himself (1989).
From other writings

Life, Men, Soul, Heart

“We embark unhesitatingly on the path, in a direction that is absolutely right and urgent, supported by everyone, in the knowledge that this path is but a learning process… We have to keep on learning, creating, applying, by-passing, touching upon, refining and clarifying a number of notions and details that need to be improvised and applied and which, thank God, we cannot foresee. The only rigidity lies in our will, our conviction that we are on the right road and that our initiatives are most pressing.”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Source: Jacob Bergen The Mandate http://books.google.co.in/books?id=1N6xXTCGzIMC&pg=PA33, Xulon Press, 1 June 2006, p. 33

God, Support, Knowledge, Learning

“[I]f neuroses were swimming pools one might, like Cheever's swimmer, steer a course from my house to the city limits and never touch dry land.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

The Mysteries of Berkeley (March 2002)

Housing

“Books are still being written defaming H. P. B. and Mrs. Besant and one wonders what their writers hope to achieve. As far as I can ascertain the modern generation of investigating students are not the least interested in the pros or cons of their characters… What they are interested in is the teaching and the truth. This is wholesome and right. I wish these modern writers who spend months in raking up dirt and endeavoring to prove someone was vile would realise the stupidity of their activities. They do not touch the truth; they do not change the loyalties of those who know; they do not change the trend towards occult realisation and they hurt nobody but themselves.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Unfinished Autobiography (1951), Chapter V - Part 1

Truth, Books, Stupidity, Hope

“Babe] also inspired me to become vegan. After having worked all morning with these extraordinary animals, I'd see their relatives on the lunch table. They had ham and duck, every animal except horse. That's when I said, "I've got to try to be a vegan." And for the most part, I have been vegan since 1994. [You were vegetarian before Babe. What inspired that change? ] I rode across the country on a motorcycle in 1975. I remember it was the worst time of year and bloody cold. When I was going through Texas, I went through the feedlots, which I had never seen before. It was a very sobering sight—heartbreaking and awful. It's a corporate system completely out of touch with what is sustainable, what is humane, what is compassionate. At the time, I didn't even know what a vegetarian was. I just thought, "I can't eat [animals] anymore."”

James Cromwell (1940) American actor and producer

"The Tale of an Unprejudiced Heart: An Interview with James Cromwell" http://www.humanesociety.org/news/magazines/2015/01-02/unprejudiced-heart-interview-with-babe-actor-james-cromwell.html by The Humane Society of the United States (17 December 2014)

Change, Time, Animals, Horse

“Pascal touched God behind the veil of scepticism.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

God

“Punk: Because here is the truth about Las Vegas, here is the truth about the WWE is that it doesn't matter that if you're the best wrestler, it doesn't matter if you're the best talker, it doesn't matter if you're the best overall performer, it doesn't matter if you make the two clowns sitting to my left on commentary look like amateur hour. There is a glass ceiling and nobody is allowed to break it. That's the simple story of this place. The more popular you are, the more money you make. The more you people cheer for any given superstar, the more opportunities you're afforded. Why do you think a guy like John Cena, who has admittedly had the worst year of his career, gets title shot after title shot after title shot after title shot? Or why a lethal grappler, why a serious submission specialist like Daniel Bryan puts a smile on his face and settles himself, belittles himself with catchphrases. Or why a 400 pound monster, Brodus Clay, soils his hands by touching your filthy, ugly, little children to get in the ring so he can shuck and jive for you. Or why an invisible child, Little Jimmy, is better positioned on the flagship show Monday Night RAW than a workhorse like Tyson Kidd.”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

WWE Raw

Money, Children, People, Truth

“That was top football. It was all one touch, the ball was perfect into the player they were passing to and the first time finish with his right foot was great. Our philosophy is to play football like that and get the ball down and play fast one or two touch football.”

Aaron Ramsey (1990) Welsh association football player

(Published 20 October 2013 on the Arsenal Website http://www.arsenal.com/news/news-archive/ramsey-it-was-breathtaking-at-times) Ramsey (EPL Player of the Month in September 2013) praising teammate Jack Wilshere's sublime 18th minute opener in a breathtaking 4-1 win over Norwich City at the Emirates Stadium. Newcomer Mesut Özil scored a brace while a wonderful individual effort from Rambo himself, coming on as a 38th minute substitute for the concussed Mathieu Flamini, saw the Gunners return to the top of the Premier League in October 2013

Time, Football, Perfection

“One man saluted him, another bowed,
Some kissed his hand, still others kissed his foot;
Whoever touched him, joyful was and proud,
For supernatural he seemed, if not
Divine; jostling around him in a crowd,
As close as possible the Bulgars got,
And clamoured for him raucously and cried
To be their king, their captain and their guide.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

Uno il saluta, un altro se gl'inchina,
Altri la mano, altri gli bacia il piede:
Ognun, quanto più può, se gli avvicina,
E beato si tien chi appresso il vede,
E più chi 'l tocca; che toccar divina
E sopranatural cosa si crede.
Lo pregan tutti, e vanno al ciel le grida,
Che sia lor re, lor capitan, lor guida.
Canto XLIV, stanza 97 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Kiss

“No one would listen to me when I tried to protest that foxhunting was cruel. And as a young boy it was hard to argue with my elders about being disrespectful, but it seemed to me that if you didn't want foxes to get into your henhouse, then you needed to build an enclosure that was foxproof. It seemed totally unjust to set foxhounds to kill foxes because human beings were too lazy to take proper care of their chickens. Whenever I tried to speak to anyone about it, I was told to mind my manners, what did I know? I was just a child. It was years before I was vindicated and foxhunting was banned in England and Wales. During the debate that raged beforehand, I was involved in researching the effect hunting had on the fox. The prohunting lobby said that they only caught old and sick animals, but that was simply not true. I examined foxes that had been caught and among them were carcasses of eighteen-month-old foxes - animals in the prime of life - too young to know how to save themselves. Another myth was that the lead dog brought down the fox and it was all over in seconds with a single bite. The truth was they ran the fox to exhaustion until its brain boiled and swelled, its lungs bled, and the fox drowned in its own blood. They were often dead before the hounds even touched them. It was the most horrific death.”

Shaun Ellis (1977) American football player, defensive end

The Man who lives with Wolves (2010)

Life, Death, Truth, Dogs

“The essence and foundation of House of Commons debating is formal conversation. The set speech, the harangue addressed to constituents, or to the wider public out of doors, has never succeeded much in our small wisely-built chamber. To do any good you have got to get down to grips with the subject and in human touch with the audience.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

In Great Contemporaries, "Clemenceau" (1937).
The 1930s

Housing

“Nothing is ever what you want it to be. The harder you grab for it, the more deeply it cuts. And it mocks you for being foolish enough to reach for it at all. You come to fear touching anything at all, because you know that if you do, it will become terrible.”

M. K. Hobson (1969) American writer

Source: The Hidden Goddess (2011), Chapter 19, “The Ruined Woman” (p. 310)

Fear

“Long time ago I called the greasy stuff on touch displays "hackerfat"… but it's better to change that to "socialsmear."”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

Twitter message https://twitter.com/johannes_mono/status/751789343333908481

Change, Time

“[as a Shakespearean narrator] Mind not my words — Let the play be the thing. I'll get back forth and touch myself anon.”

Robin Williams (1951–2014) American actor and stand-up comedian

Reality...What a Concept (1979)

“Men who cannot believe in the mystery of our Saviour's redemption can believe that spirits from the dead have visited them in a stranger's parlour, because they see a table shake and do not know how it is shaken; because they hear a rapping on a board, and cannot see the instrument that raps it; because they are touched in the dark, and do not know the hand that touches them.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

The New Zealander (1965), p. 73

Men, Dead

“I think mice
Are rather nice.
Their tails are long,
Their faces small,
They haven't any
Chins at all.
Their ears are pink,
Their teeth are white.
They run about the house at night
They nibble things they shouldn't touch,
And no one seems to like them much.”

Rose Fyleman (1877–1957) British writer

Mice

Thinking, Housing, Night

“They say that, hung in ancient halls,
At midnight from the silent lute
A melancholy music falls
From chords which were by daylight mute.
And so the human heart by night
Is touched by some inspired tone,
Harmonious in the deep delight,
By day it knew not was its own.”

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

Meditation
Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Music, Heart, Night

“The buzzard told the monkey "You're chokin' me
Release your hold and I'll set you free"
The monkey looked the buzzard right dead in the eye and said
"Your story's touching but it sounds like a lie."”

Nat King Cole (1919–1965) American singer and jazz pianist

"Straighten Up And Fly Right" (1937) written with Irving Mills.

Lie, Dead

“Great God! I thought to myself, how my heart swells out out to such magnanimous touch of humanity. Why do men fight who were born to be brothers?”

James Longstreet (1821–1904) Confederate Army general

The New York Times http://www.granthomepage.com/intlongstreet.htm (24 July 1885)

Men, God, Heart, Fight

“Much of the magical effect that poetry gives of rendering everything it touches pellucid comes from the necessity of compression that it imposes. The impossibility of pausing in poetry as long as may be needed to make sense clear causes many a set of words actually deficient in linguistic workmanship to pass for an eloquent brevity.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"The Promise of Words" in London Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 17, p. 23

Sense

“Living in age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.”

J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) English writer

"The Disillusioned", in The Balconinny, and Other Essays ([1929] 1969) p. 30.

Life, Age, Change, Perfection

“And reach out for her healing hands,
Reach out for her healing hands.
There's a light, where the darkness ends.
Touch me now and let me see again,
Rock me now in your gentle healing hands.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Healing Hands
Song lyrics, Sleeping with the Past (1989)

Light

“Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs
Receive our air, that moment they are free!
They touch our country, and their shackles fall.”

William Cowper The Task

Source: The Task (1785), Book II, The Timepiece, Line 40.

Country

“I wonder wonder why the wonder falls
I wonder why the wonder falls on me
I wonder wonder why the wonder falls
With everything I touch and hear and see”

Andy Partridge (1953) British musician

Theme song to Wonderfalls (2004).

“I too was filled with a sort of shyness and fear, as I was called to leave 'the world of will and idea' in which I had lived and created, and in whose reality I had believed. But the happy liberating touch of non-objectivity drew me out into the 'desert' where only feeling is real.... and so feeling became the content of my life. It was no 'empty square' I had exhibited but the feeling of non-objectivity. I perceived that the 'thing' and the 'idea' were taken to be equivalents of feeling, and understood the lie of the world of will and idea. Is the milk bottle the symbol of milk? Suprematism is the rediscovery of that pure art which in the course of time, and by an accretion of 'things', had been lost to sight.”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

As quoted in Artists on Art; from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 453
1921 - 1930

Life, Happiness, Lie, World

“What a queer thing touch is, the stroke of the brush. In the open air, exposed to wind, to sun, to the curiosity of the people, you work as you can, you feel your canvas anyhow... But when after a time you take up again this study and arrange your brush strokes in the direction of the objects - certainly it is more harmonious and pleasant to look at, and you add whatever you have of serenity and cheerfulness.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 10 Sept. 1889; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 605), pp. 33-34 1880s, 1889

People, Feeling, Study, Time

“Proposition 1. Two equal spheres are comprehended by one and the same cylinder, and two unequal spheres by one and the same cone which has its vertex in the direction of the lesser sphere; and the straight line drawn through the centres of the spheres is at right angles to each of the circles in which the surface of the cylinder, or of the cone, touches the spheres.”

Aristarchus of Samos ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician

p, 125
On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and the Moon (c. 250 BC)

“Another good touch. What do we charge for a regular martini?”
“Ninty-five cents—ninety-eight cents with tax.
What's it do to the tips?”
Builds them. There aren’t as many dimes and nickels around, so they usually leave two-bits. The two cents' change is a sting to conscience.””

Ross Thomas (1926–1995) 1926-1995 American writer

Cast a Yellow Shadow (1967)

Change

“[Most legislation] will have the effect of surrounding the industry which it touches with precautions and investigations, inspections and regulations, in which it will be slowly enveloped and stifled.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Statement to the Associated Chambers of Commerce (March 1891)
1890s

““Travel in the old ruts,” quotes my friend Meredith; some ancient Chinese maxim. The way lain down by elders. Pathways through the world, pathways through the mind—it’s a shame that these days we so seldom have a guide. That our atomized worldview, mimicking scientific doctrine, sees us as separate, distinct, alone, orbiting in space, touching only an infinite void.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

World, Way, Travel, Quotes

“The right hon. Gentleman is afraid of an election is he? Oh, if I were going to cut and run I'd have gone after the Falklands. Afraid? Frightened? Frit? Couldn't take it? Couldn't stand it? Right now inflation is lower than it has been for thirteen years, a record the right hon. Gentleman couldn't begin to touch!”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Prime Minister's Questions (19 April 1983) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=105294. The use of 'frit', an unusual Lincolnshire dialect abbreviation of 'frightened' which Mrs Thatcher evidently recalled from childhood, was missed by MPs in a noisy chamber but heard very distinctly on the audio feed from the chamber. First term as Prime Minister

“… [enabled] to touch the core, the essence of things. Even in as simple a subject, a great painter can achieve a majesty of vision and an intensity of feeling to which we immediately respond. [1937, referring to a still life by Cézanne and a river-sight with sandbank by Monet ]”

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) Italian painter

in Giorgio Morandi, E. Roditi; p. 63
1925 - 1945

Life, Feeling

“Why bother to remake Fame if you don't have clue about why the 1980 movie was special? Why take a touching experience and make it into a shallow exercise? Why begin with a R-rated look at plausible kids with real problems and tame it into a PG-rated after-school special? Why cast actors who are sometimes too old and experienced to play seniors, let alone freshmen?”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/fame-2009 of Fame (23 Sep 2009) Reviews, Two star reviews

School, Exercises, Problem

“Well, I want to start out that I was lucky in the ‘60s to also be taking a class in Classical Ethology by a professor named Tom Evans, where I learned that operant conditioning does not explain all animal behavior. He explained how fixed action patterns and hardwired instinctual behavior works. And I remember going on a visit to Dr. Skinner and I felt like I was visiting, you know, the grand temple of psychology. And I went up to his office and, you know, he seemed, I'm like, "oh, you mean he's actually an ordinary person?" And we got to talking and of course back then I wore a dress you know ‘cause, you know, ladies had to be, like, dressed up, and I had a very conservative dress on, and B. F. Skinner touched my legs.”

Temple Grandin (1947) USA-american doctor of animal science, author, and autism activist

Behavior, Learning, Animals, Personality

“Don't think about why you question, simply don't stop questioning. Don't worry about what you can't answer, and don't try to explain what you can't know. Curiosity is its own reason. Aren't you in awe when you contemplate the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure behind reality? And this is the miracle of the human mind—to use its constructions, concepts, and formulas as tools to explain what man sees, feels and touches. Try to comprehend a little more each day. Have holy curiosity.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Variant transcription from "Death of a Genius" in Life Magazine: "Then do not stop to think about the reasons for what you are doing, about why you are questioning. The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reasons for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity."
Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 138

Life, Feeling, Question, Thinking