the Body

The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack.  We give it orders which make no sense.  ~Henry Miller


Every man is the builder of a Temple called his body, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead.  ~Henry David Thoreau


Blood is that fragile scarlet tree we carry within us.  ~Osbert Sitwell


The word arse is as much god as the word face.  It must be so, otherwise you cut off your god at the waist.  ~D.H. Lawrence


How idiotic civilization is!  Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?  ~Katherine Mansfield, Bliss and Other Stories


Scars are tattoos with better stories.  ~From a Toyota advertisement in Sports Illustrated magazine, 3 June 2002


Why should a man's mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his body?  ~Thomas Hardy


The human body is a machine which winds its own springs.  ~Julien Offroy de la Mettrie, L'Homme Machine


Beyond my body my veins are invisible.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


Emotion always has its roots in the unconscious and manifests itself in the body.  ~Irene Claremont de Castillejo


Man is the sole animal whose nudity offends his own companions, and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind.  ~Montaigne


Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat.  For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.  ~Samuel Johnson


Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.  ~Aldous Huxley


The body never lies.  ~Martha Graham


Our bodies are our gardens - our wills are our gardeners.  ~William Shakespeare


A trembling in the bones may carry a more convincing testimony than the dry documented deductions of the brain.  ~Llewelyn Powers


What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.  ~Aldous Huxley


Hormones, vitamines, stimulants and depressives are oils upon the creaky machinery of life.  Principal item, however, is the machinery.  ~Martin H. Fischer


If the mind, that rules the body, ever so far forgets itself as to trample on its slave, the slave is never generous enough to forgive the injury, but will rise and smite the oppressor.  ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Flesh goes on pleasuring us, and humiliating us, right to the end.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Yet this is health:  To have a body functioning so perfectly that when its few simple needs are met it never calls attention to its own existence.  ~Bertha Stuart Dyment


It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood:  our body.  ~Marcel Proust


What fools indeed we morals are
To lavish care upon a Car,
With ne'er a bit of time to see
About our own machinery!
~John Kendrick Bangs


Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other.  ~Henry David Thoreau


Most guys aren't that picky.  They may have quicker reflexes around large breasts, but they need more to keep them interested.  We know plenty of women whose sex appeal makes their breasts exactly the right size.  ~From "The Playboy Advisor," Playboy magazine, March 2004, in answer to the question, "If you have small breasts, how do you make yourself look sexy?  Most guys want girls with large breasts."


We use our brains too little, and when we do, it is only to make excuses for our reflexes and our instincts.  ~Martin H. Fischer


The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar, and is shocked by the unexpected:  the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.  ~W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand


Few of us have lost our minds, but most of us have long ago lost our bodies.  ~Ken Wilbur


You know the definition of the perfectly designed machine.... The perfectly designed machine is one in which all its working parts wear out simultaneously.  I am that machine.  ~Frederick Alexander Lindemann


Some patients I see are actually draining into their bodies the diseased thoughts of their minds.  ~Zacharty Bercovitz


The best and most efficient pharmacy is within your own system.  ~Robert C. Peale

Related Quotations:
Health


/body.html