Bodily Quotes
More Bodily Quotes
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
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)
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).
Thankstohis bodily formand thankstohismind, [man] is a universal machine, capable of an infinite diversity of movement.
— 1840 Resultate fur den Maschinenbau (published1848).
I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes.
George Bernard Shaw— 1905 Barbara Undershaft. Major Barbara, act 2.
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).
Just because the only way you can maintain control over your bodily passions is to sit straight in your chair, knees together, hands delicately arranged in our lap, fingers tightly intertwined, does not mean that I am required to do the same.
orson scott card— Chapter 13 (Seventh Son (1987))
Where fashion in clothes, bodily adornment, and music are concerned, it is the underclass that increasingly sets the pace. Never before has there been so much downward cultural aspiration.
anthony daniels— Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (2001)
We know nothing accurately in reality, but [only] as it changes according to the bodily condition, and the constitution of those things that flow upon [the body] and impinge upon it.
Democritus— Freeman (1948) , p. 142
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))
Woman is the symbol to man of the uncleanness of bodily existence, of which he purifies himself by putting her to noble uses. She thus has for him a double, contradictory significance; she is the subject of his bawdry and the subject of his romance.
laura riding— "The Damned Thing", from Anarchism Is not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)
If, when a man writes a poem or commits a murder, the bodily movements involved in his act result solely from physical causes, it would seem absurd to put up a statue to him in the one case and to hang him in the other.
bertrand russell— "The Doctrine of Free Will"
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 most significant change in a man is not the change in his bodily strength or mental capacity. The most marvelous and far-reaching change which man ever undergoes is in his moral character and spiritual nature.
— p.33 (Something More, A Consideration of the Vast, Undeveloped Resources of Life (1920))
Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive, Half wishing they were dead to save the shame. The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow; They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats, And flare up bodily, wings and all.
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856), Book II, line 732.
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.
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.
For the first twenty years you are still growing, bodily that is; as a poet, of course, You are not born yet. It's the next ten You cut your teeth on to emerge smirking For your brash courtship of the muse.
— 1963 'ToAYoung Poet'.
