senses Quotes

“The earth is speaking to us, but we can’t hear because of all the racket our senses are making. Sometimes we need to erase them, erase our senses. Then–maybe-the earth will touch us. The universe will speak. The stars will whisper.”

“The soul has wants which must be satisfied; and whatever pains be taken to divert it from itself, it soon grows weary, restless, and disquieted amidst the enjoyments of sense.”

“Consider the nature of all worldly sensible things; of those especially, which either ensnare by pleasure, or for their irksomeness are dreadful, or for their outward lustre and show are in great esteem and request, how vile and contemptible, how base and corruptible, how destitute of all true life and being they are.”

“The sense of the tragic increases and declines with sensuousness.”

“The belly is the reason why man does not so readily take himself for a God.”

“I stood in that room for a long time, watching the sunlight and listening to the sounds on the street outside. I stood there, tasting the room and the sunlight and the sounds, and thinking of the long hospital ward. . . Somehow everything had changed. I had spent five days in a hospital and the world around seemed sharpened now and pulsing with life.”

“The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.”

“That’s death and life, you see. We all shine on. You just have to release your hearts, alert your senses, and pay attention. A leaf, a star, a song, a laugh. Notice the little things, because somebody is reaching out to you. Qualcuno ti ama. Somebody loves you.”

“On Sunday mornings as he passed the church door he glanced coldly at the worshippers who stood bareheaded, four deep, outside the church, morally present at the mass which they could neither see nor hear. Their dull piety and the sickly smell of the cheap hair-oil with which they had anointed their heads repelled him from the altar they prayed at.”

“There was a cold night smell in the chapel. But it was a holy smell. It was not like the smell of the old peasants who knelt at the back of the chapel at Sunday mass. That was a smell of air and rain and turf and corduroy. But they were very holy peasants. They breathed behind him on his neck and sighed as they prayed.”

“He who has not turned away from evil conduct, whose senses are uncontrolled, who is not tranquil, whose mind is not at rest, he can never attain this Atman even by knowledge.”

“He who is without discrimination and whose mind is always uncontrolled, his senses are unmanageable, like the vicious horses of a driver.”

“What can you do when your five senses are not enough?”

“It smelled like the country. It was a filet mignon farm, all of it, and the tissue spread for miles around the paths where we were walking. It was like these huge hedges of red all around us, with these beautiful marble patterns running through them. They had these tubes, they were bringing the tissue blood, and we could see the blood running around, up and down. It was really interesting. I like to see how things are made, and to understand where they come from.”

“A faint sense of danger brushed her, like the breath of a cold fog.”

“Love as education is one of the great powers of the world, but it hangs in a delicate suspension; it achieves its harmony as seldom as does love by the senses. Frustrated, it creates even greater havoc, for like all love it is a madness.”

“I have heard that for mortals, the feeling of falling in love is very like the feeling of fear. Your heart beats fast. Your senses are heightened. You grow light-headed, maybe even dizzy.”

“When the bear finds something unpleasant, like a smelly skunk or a prickly porcupine, he learns that the five senses have both good and bad traits.”

“The Bear went over the mountains, the Bear went over the mountain, the Bear went over the mountain To see what he could see.”

“But that is all right, because there is always something just as exciting to try next! ”

“Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.”

“Nature inspires creativity in a child by demanding visualization and the full use of the senses.”

“He would never forget his first taste of English fog. A wet white wall that ate through clothes, flesh and senses, letting him loose in a limbo world to face the evil English Spirits. Were they evil though? ”

“It’s not wandering if I know how to get home.”

“But, as for me, I come to the inquest with other senses than they possess. I shall seek this man, as I have sought truth in books; as I have sought gold in alchemy. There is a sympathy that will make me conscious of him. I shall see him tremble. I shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and unawares. Sooner or later, he must needs be mine!”

Sight and scent became remarkably keen, while his hearing developed such acuteness that in his sleep he heard the faintest sound and knew whether it heralded peace or peril.

And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him. And his cadences were their cadences, the cadences which voiced their woe and what to them was the meaning of the stiffness, and the cold, and dark.