Bodily Quotes
More Bodily Quotes
There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried.
Percy Bysshe Shelley— 'A Vindication of Natural Diet' (1813)
For each of the four hundred and four bodily ailments celebrated physicians have produced infallible remedies, but the malady which brings the greatest distress to mankind — to even the wisest and cleverest of us — is the plague of poverty.
ihara saikaku— Book III, ch. 1
Autonomy has never been recognized as a legally protectable interest. It has been vindicated only as byproduct of protection of two other interests – bodily security as protected by rules against consented contact, and bodily well-being as protected by rules governing professional competence.
— Marjorie Shultz, in "Informed Consent : Legal Theory and Clinical Practice: Legal Theory and ..." p147
Close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react on others from the outside inwards.
Caspar David Friedrich— Quoted in Caspar David Friedrich1774-1840, Tate Gallery (1972).
I have far more confidence in the one man who works mentally and bodily at a matter than in the six who merely talk about it — and I therefore hope and am fully persuaded that you are working. Nature is our kindest friend and best critic in experimental science if we only allow her intimations to fall unbiased on our minds. Nothing is so good as an experiment which, whilst it sets an error right, gives us (as a reward for our humility in being reproved) an absolute advancement in knowledge.
michael faraday— Letter to John Tyndall (19 April 1851); letter 2411, edited by Frank A. J. L. James (1999). The correspondence of Michael Faraday, Volume 4. IET. p. 281. ISBN 0863412513.
Poor shepherdless sheep! it was His delight, as the Good Shepherd, to lead them to rich pastures; and as they sat and stood around Him, they forgot their bodily wants in the beauty and power of His words.
john cunningham geikie— P. 59. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
Conscious mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts. Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things. Or, to say it another way with echoes of John Locke, there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first.
julian jaynes— Book I, Chapter 2, p. 66
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— “The Book-End,” Columbus Dispatch (1923) Collecting Himself (1989).
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
william james— To W. Lutoslawski (6 May 1906)
Science frees us in many ways...from the bodily terror which the savage feels. But she replaces that, in the minds of many, by a moral terror which is far more overwhelming.
Charles Kingsley— Sermon, The Meteor Shower (November 26, 1866),
Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought. . . . life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.
Clarice Lispector— The Passion According to G.H.
How much education may reconcile young people to pain and sufference, the examples of Sparta do sufficiently shew; and they who have once brought themselves not to think bodily pain the greatest of evils, or that which they ought to stand most in fear of, have made no small advance toward virtue.
john locke— Sec. 115 (Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693))
Hidden away amongst Aschenbach’s writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.
thomas mann— Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke
Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabond of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe ; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.
thomas mann— Ch. 1 (The Magic Mountain (1924))
In a word, the opinions of learned authors, though their bodily forms are absent, gain strength as time time goes on, and, when taking part in councils and discussions, have greater weight than those of any living men.
vitruvius— Introduction, Sec. 17
Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.
Alfred North Whitehead— Ch. 29, June 10, 1943
I have mental joys and mental health, Mental friends and mental wealth, I've a wife that I love and that loves me; I've all but riches bodily.
william blake— William Blake, Mammon.
I do not say the mind gets informed by action, bodily action; but it does get earnestness and strength by it, and that nameless something that gives a man the mastership of his faculties.
— William Mountford, p. 5. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
There is a great deal more correctness of thought respecting manhood in bodily things than in moral things. For men's ideas of manhood shape themselves as the tower and spire of cathedrals do, that stand broad at the bottom, but grow tapering as they rise, and end, far up, in the finest lines, and in an evanishing point. Where they touch the ground they are most, and where they reach to the heaven they are least.
— Henry Ward Beecher, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 404.
The head of Christians does not, as a rule, have power to punish secular wrongs with a capital penalty and other bodily penalties and it is for thus punishing such wrongs that temporal power and riches are chiefly necessary; such punishment is granted chiefly to the secular power. The pope therefore, can, as a rule, correct wrongdoers only with a spiritual penalty. It is not, therefore, necessary that he should excel in temporal power or abound in temporal riches, but it is enough that Christians should willingly obey him.
— "A Letter to the Friars Minor" (1334) as translated in A Letter to the Friars Minor and other Writings (1995) edited by A. S. McGrade and John Kilcullen, p. 204
A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.
Nathaniel Hawthorne— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850), Chapter X.
Jesus Christ who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens can now be eaten in the form of a cracker.
— Sam Harris, in The End of Faith (2004).
Well then, how will our statupply these needs? It will need a farmer, a builder, and a weaver, and also, I think, a shoemaker and one or two others to provide for our bodily needs. So that the minimum state would consist of four or five men...
— Plato The Republic, Page 103, Penguin Classics edition.
Socrates was the chief saint of the Stoics throughout their history ; his attitude at the time of his trial, his refusal to escape, his calmness in the face of death , and his contention that the perpetrator of injustice injures himself more than his victim, all fitted in perfectly with Stoic teaching. So did his indifference to heat and cold, his plainness in matters of food and dress, and his complete independence of all bodily comforts.
bertrand russell— Bertrand Russell, Ibid., Part III, Chapter XXVIII, Stoicism, p. 253
Yoga, ancient and perfect science, deals with evolution of humanity. This evolution includes all aspects of one’s being, from bodily health to self-realization. Yoga means union – the union of body with consciousness and consciousness with the soul.
— BKS Iyengar, in “The Little Red Book of Yoga Wisdom], p.22
Of myths some are theological, some physical, some psychic, and again some material, and some mixed from these last two. The theological are those myths which use no bodily form but contemplate the very essence of the Gods: e.g., Kronos swallowing his children. Since god is intellectual, and all intellect returns into itself, this myth expresses in allegory the essence of god.
— Sallustius, in On the Gods and the Cosmos, IV. That the species of myth are five, with examples of each.
