Quotes and Sayings about Senses
"Our dreams drench us in senses, and senses steps us again in dreams."
- Amos Bronson Alcott
(Related: Dreams, Senses)
"Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits."
- Hervey Allen
(Related: Senses)
"There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses."
- Louis Aragon
(Related: Error, Flowers, Reason, Senses)
"Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason's imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work."
- Louis Aragon
(Related: Imagination, Men, Work, Fear, Ideas, Control, Error, Reason, Senses)
"Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses."
- Hannah Arendt
(Related: Nothing, Senses, Words)
"Variety is more than a means of avoiding boredom, since art is more than an entertainment of the senses."
- Rudolf Arnheim
(Related: Art, Boredom, Entertainment, Senses, Variety)
"In many instances, order is apprehended first of all by the senses."
- Rudolf Arnheim
(Related: First, Order, Senses)
"Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh."
- Marcus Aurelius
(Related: Death, Mind, Senses, Service)
"The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding."
- Francis Bacon
(Related: Nature, Senses, Understanding)
"It is, finally, a word is untimely in three different senses, and bearing it as one's treasure will not win one anyone's favours; one rather risks finding oneself outside everyone's camp... Beauty is the word that shall be our first."
- Hans Urs von Balthasar
(Related: Beauty, First, Senses, Treasure, Will, Word)
"Love is the poetry of the senses."
- Honore de Balzac
(Related: Love, Poetry, Senses)
"There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them - the senses, intelligent companions, and books."
- Henry Ward Beecher
(Related: Books, Senses, Will)
"Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age."
- William Blake
(Related: Age, Soul, Body, Man, Senses)
"Whoever realizes that the six senses aren't real, that the five aggregates are fictions, that no such things can be located anywhere in the body, understands the language of Buddhas."
- Bodhidharma
(Related: Body, Language, Senses)
"The strong man is the one who is able to intercept at will the communication between the senses and the mind."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
(Related: Communication, Man, Mind, Senses, Will)
"The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: People, Heart, Absence, Friends, May, Senses)
"It is clear that every immediate object of our senses both exists and is real in the primary meaning of these terms so long as we remain aware of the object."
- Charles D. Broad
(Related: Meaning, Senses)
"If my senses don't feel right then I don't do it."
- Melanie Brown
(Related: Right, Senses)
"How good is man's life, the mere living! How fit to employ all the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!"
- Robert Browning
(Related: Life, Soul, Heart, Man, Senses)
"I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order."
- John Burroughs
(Related: Nature, Order, Senses)
"God Almighty is, to be sure, unmoved by passion or appetite, unchanged by affection; but then it is to be added that He neither sees nor hears nor perceives things by any senses like ours; but in a manner infinitely more perfect."
- Joseph Butler
(Related: God, Affection, Appetite, Passion, Senses)
"Both our senses and our passions are a supply to the imperfection of our nature; thus they show that we are such sort of creatures as to stand in need of those helps which higher orders of creatures do not."
- Joseph Butler
(Related: Nature, Imperfection, Senses)
"When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses, then it has missed the point."
- Maria Callas
(Related: Music, Heart, Senses)
"I am perhaps the oldest musician in the world. I am an old man but in many senses a very young man. And this is what I want you to be, young, young all your life, and to say things to the world that are true."
- Pablo Casals
(Related: Life, Man, Old, Senses, Want, World)
"For disorder obstructs: besides, it doth disgust life, distract the appetities, and yield no true relish to the senses."
- Margaret Cavendish
(Related: Life, Disgust, Disorder, Senses, Yield)
"On recovering my senses, I hastened to quit a place where I hoped there was nothing further to detain me. I first filled my pockets with gold, then fastened the strings of the purse round my neck, and concealed it in my bosom."
- Adelbert von Chamisso
(Related: First, Gold, Nothing, Senses)
"Purity of speech, of the mind, of the senses, and of a compassionate heart are needed by one who desires to rise to the divine platform."
- Chanakya
(Related: Heart, Mind, Purity, Senses, Speech)
"The wise man should restrain his senses like the crane and accomplish his purpose with due knowledge of his place, time and ability."
- Chanakya
(Related: Time, Knowledge, Purpose, Ability, Man, Senses)
"My fam is just a regular family. But all of them have great senses of humor."
- Dane Cook
(Related: Humor, Family, Senses)
"One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past."
- George Crumb
(Related: Culture, Past, Senses)
"We must get the American public to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship, to the reality, the hard substance of things. And we'll do it not so much with speeches that will bring people to their feet as with speeches that bring people to their senses."
- Mario Cuomo
(Related: People, American, Feet, Past, Public, Reality, Senses, Will)
"Your senses are reeling all the time. Finally you find something to write and the very next day you go out and see something else which totally contradicts what you've written and every conclusion you've come to."
- Charles Dance
(Related: Time, Day, Senses)
"Now multitudes of root words are identical in the American languages over vast areas some of them with precisely the same senses, and others with various shades of analogical meaning."
- John W. Dawson
(Related: American, Meaning, Now, Senses, Words)
"Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part."
- Claude Debussy
(Related: Beauty, Effort, Enjoyment, Senses)
"The eye is the most refined of our senses, the one which communicates most directly with our mind, our consciousness."
- Robert Delaunay
(Related: Consciousness, Eye, Mind, Senses)
"The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once."
- Rene Descartes
(Related: Time, Trust, Senses)
"We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves."
- Denis Diderot
(Related: Feeling, Memory, Senses)
"All of science to me, everything that we have learned, is important to the extent that it brings us to our senses."
- Ann Druyan
(Related: Science, Senses)
"Inspiration in Science may have to do with ideas, but not in Art. In art it is in the senses that are instinctively responsive to the medium of expression."
- Arthur Erickson
(Related: Art, Science, Inspiration, Ideas, Expression, May, Senses)
"Where the senses fail us, reason must step in."
- Galileo Galilei
(Related: Reason, Senses)
"We also maintain - again with perfect truth - that mystery is more than half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through the imagination."
- Richard Le Gallienne
(Related: Imagination, Beauty, Truth, Mystery, Senses)
"Our senses convey that all is not well with the natural world."
- Peter Garrett
(Related: Senses, World)
"I acknowledge the privilege of being alive in a human body at this moment, endowed with senses, memories, emotions, thoughts, and the space of mind in its wisdom aspect."
- Alex Grey
(Related: Wisdom, Thoughts, Being, Body, Emotions, Memories, Mind, Privilege, Senses, Space)
"The whole memorial is for different senses... seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling. I probably would have come up with something different if I had not lived through it."
- Lawrence Halprin
(Related: Feeling, Hearing, Senses)
"Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?"
- Frank Herbert
(Related: Fact, May, Senses, World)
"A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world."
- Hans Hofmann
(Related: Art, Work, Artist, Emotions, Senses, World)
"Our senses are indeed our doors and windows on this world, in a very real sense the key to the unlocking of meaning and the wellspring of creativity."
- Jean Houston
(Related: Creativity, Key, Meaning, Sense, Senses, Windows, World)
"Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science."
- Edwin Powell Hubble
(Related: Science, Adventure, Man, Senses, Universe)
"We know that our senses are subject to decay, that from our middle years they are decaying all the time; but happily it is as if we didn't know and didn't believe."
- William Henry Hudson
(Related: Time, Senses, Years)
"There are movements which impinge upon the nerves with a strength that is incomparable, for movement has power to stir the senses and emotions, unique in itself."
- Doris Humphrey
(Related: Power, Strength, Emotions, Nerves, Senses)
"He is the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart."
- Washington Irving
(Related: Imagination, Heart, Senses)
"There is always a point when one senses one's lack of skill, the doubt."
- Arne Jacobsen
(Related: Doubt, Senses, Skill)
"When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive."
- Jasper Johns
(Related: Experience, Senses)
"There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution."
- Franz Kafka
(Related: Evil, Evolution, Necessity, Nothing, Senses, Spiritual, World)
"All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason."
- Immanuel Kant
(Related: Knowledge, Nothing, Reason, Senses, Understanding)
"The fact that maybe I had some success playing G'Kar doesn't guarantee me three years later that I can still do it, so I have to keep my senses alive and still be working on it."
- Andreas Katsulas
(Related: Success, Fact, Senses, Years)
"Good men, whether they be Christians or rationalists, do not desire to discriminate between races, but the distinctions implanted by Nature are too conspicuous to escape the observation of our senses."
- Arthur Keith
(Related: Nature, Men, Desire, Observation, Senses)
"Of all the senses, sight must be the most delightful."
- Helen Keller
(Related: Senses, Sight)
"Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness."
- Helen Keller
(Related: Embarrassment, Friends, Literature, Senses, Talk, Utopia)
"I believe every chess player senses beauty, when he succeeds in creating situations, which contradict the expectations and the rules, and he succeeds in mastering this situation."
- Vladimir Kramnik
(Related: Beauty, Chess, Expectations, Rules, Senses)
"He was one of those inexplicable gifts of nature, an artist who leaps over boundaries, changes our nervous systems, creates a new language, transmits new kinds of joy to our startled senses and spirits."
- Jack Kroll
(Related: Nature, Artist, Gifts, Inexplicable, Joy, Language, Senses, Spirits)
"I try to use all of my senses when describing a setting, and try to think of everything that would impact a character in any given scene."
- Mercedes Lackey
(Related: Character, Senses)
"Driving a motorcycle is like flying. All your senses are alive. When I ride through Beverly Hills in the early morning, and all the sprinklers have turned off, the scents that wash over me are just heavenly. Being House is like flying, too. You're free of the gravity of what people think."
- Hugh Laurie
(Related: People, Being, Driving, Flying, Gravity, Senses)
"Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor."
- John Lithgow
(Related: Humor, Senses)
"The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses."
- Ernst Mach
(Related: Experience, Blindness, Creation, Man, Senses, World)
"Without renouncing the support of physics, it is possible for the physiology of the senses, not only to pursue its own course of development, but also to afford to physical science itself powerful assistance."
- Ernst Mach
(Related: Science, Development, Physics, Senses, Support)
"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
- Charles Mackay
(Related: Men, Senses, Will)
"The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect."
- Carson McCullers
(Related: Design, Colors, Intellect, Mind, Senses)
"Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul."
- Michel de Montaigne
(Related: Soul, Senses)
"We cannot create observers by saying 'observe,' but by giving them the power and the means for this observation and these means are procured through education of the senses."
- Maria Montessori
(Related: Education, Power, Giving, Observation, Saying, Senses)
"Blake said that the body was the soul's prison unless the five senses are fully developed and open. He considered the senses the 'windows of the soul.' When sex involves all the senses intensely, it can be like a mystical experence."
- Jim Morrison
(Related: Sex, Soul, Body, Open, Prison, Senses)
"I believe in a long, prolonged, derangement of the senses in order to obtain the unknown."
- Jim Morrison
(Related: Order, Senses)
"The Negroes have little invention, but strong powers of imitation, so that they readily acquire mechanic arts. They have a great talent for music, and all their external senses are remarkably acute."
- Samuel George Morton
(Related: Music, Talent, Imitation, Invention, Senses)
"The essential attribute of a new sense is, not the perception of external objects or influences which ordinarily do not act upon the senses, but that external causes should excite in it a new and peculiar kind of sensation different from all the sensations of our five senses."
- Johannes P. Muller
(Related: Perception, Act, Causes, Sensations, Sense, Senses)
"This commitment to truth is something one senses more and more Americans yearning for, just as they are becoming more and more sophisticated at knowing when the truth is being obscured - an irony that seems to elude most of today's elected officials."
- Michael Musto
(Related: Truth, Americans, Being, Commitment, Irony, Senses, Today, Yearning)
"All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
(Related: Truth, Conscience, Credibility, Senses)
"My security comes from my senses, my sensing the direction I should go and suddenly I felt out of tune, out of step with what other people wanted or what other people expected of me."
- Kim Novak
(Related: People, Direction, Security, Senses)
"I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me."
- Sharon Olds
(Related: Artists, Senses)
"Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert."
- William Osler
(Related: Practice, Senses)
"I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses."
- Grace Paley
(Related: Civilization, Senses)
"Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them."
- Blaise Pascal
(Related: Faith, Senses)
"Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them."
- Blaise Pascal
(Related: Faith, Senses)
"A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to to be seen in them by the finest senses?"
- Walter Pater
(Related: Life, May, Senses)
"Each day I live in a glass room unless I break it with the thrusting of my senses and pass through the splintered walls to the great landscape."
- Mervyn Peake
(Related: Day, Senses)
"But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses."
- Steven Pinker
(Related: Information, Research, Senses)
"He whom the gods love dies young, while he is in health, has his senses and his judgments sound."
- Titus Maccius Plautus
(Related: Love, Health, Gods, Senses, Sound)
"Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'"
- Edgar Allan Poe
(Related: Nature, Art, Soul, Imitation, Man, Name, Senses)
"We think the whole world's going to change, and forget that human beings are still human beings; we have the same five senses, we still interact the same way, we still love and hate the same way, but marketers lose track of that. But then it comes down to earth."
- Michael K. Powell
(Related: Love, Change, Earth, Forget, Hate, Senses, World)
"The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits."
- Theodore Roosevelt
(Related: Time, Dreams, Old, Senses)
"Through art and science in their broadest senses it is possible to make a permanent contribution towards the improvement and enrichment of human life and it is these pursuits that we students are engaged in."
- Frederick Sanger
(Related: Art, Life, Science, Improvement, Senses, Students)
"The torrent of centuries rolling over the human race, has continually brought new perfections, the cause of which, ever active though unseen, is found in the demands made by our senses, which always in their turns demand to be occupied."
- Jean Anthelme Brillat Savarin
(Related: Cause, Race, Senses)
"The senses are the organs by which man places himself in connexion with exterior objects."
- Jean Anthelme Brillat Savarin
(Related: Man, Senses)
"Sight and touch, being thus increased in capacity, might belong to some species far superior to man; or rather the human species would be far different had all the senses been thus improved."
- Jean Anthelme Brillat Savarin
(Related: Being, Man, Senses, Sight)
"It's very easy to say that something is a shadow of itself, and it may be true in some senses."
- Sydney Schanberg
(Related: May, Senses, Shadow)
"Knowledge, the object of knowledge and the knower are the three factors which motivate action; the senses, the work and the doer comprise the threefold basis of action."
- Friedrich Schiller
(Related: Work, Knowledge, Action, Senses)
"Nothing can be found in the intellect if previously has not been found in the senses."
- Michael Servetus
(Related: Intellect, Nothing, Senses)
"Netanyahu is pressured easily, gets into a panic, and loses his senses... to run a country like Israel a leader needs to have reason and judgment and nerves of steel, two traits he does not have."
- Ariel Sharon
(Related: Leader, Country, Israel, Judgment, Needs, Nerves, Reason, Senses)
"When you start using senses you've neglected, your reward is to see the world with completely fresh eyes."
- Barbara Sher
(Related: Eyes, Reward, Senses, World)
"Taking it in its wider and generic application, I understand faith to be the supplement of sense; or, to change the phrase, all knowledge which comes not to us through our senses we gain by faith in others."
- Matthew Simpson
(Related: Change, Faith, Knowledge, Gain, Sense, Senses)
"If we look at the realm of knowledge, how exceedingly small and limited is that part acquired through our own senses; how wide is that we gain from other sources."
- Matthew Simpson
(Related: Knowledge, Gain, Senses)
"If you live for pleasure, your ability to enjoy it may pass away and your senses grow dim."
- Matthew Simpson
(Related: Ability, May, Pleasure, Senses)
"Terrible is the fight put up by the senses. Fight bravely! Conquer them you must."
- Swami Sivananda
(Related: Fight, Senses)
"In 1792, my Sister told me, I was growing out of my senses."
- Joanna Southcott
(Related: Sister, Senses)
"Every child senses, with all the horse sense that's in him, that any parent is angry inside when children misbehave and they dread more the anger that is rarely or never expressed openly, wondering how awful it might be."
- Benjamin Spock
(Related: Anger, Children, Sense, Senses)
"And when they encounter works of art which show that using new media can lead to new experiences and to new consciousness, and expand our senses, our perception, our intelligence, our sensibility, then they will become interested in this music."
- Karlheinz Stockhausen
(Related: Art, Music, Intelligence, Perception, Consciousness, Media, Senses, Sensibility, Will)
"I never knew whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses."
- William Makepeace Thackeray
(Related: Man, Pity, Senses)
"I shall always be consistent and never change my ways so long as I am in my senses; but for the sake of precedent the Senate should beware of binding itself to support the acts of any man, since he might through some mischance suffer a change."
- Tiberius
(Related: Change, Man, Senate, Senses, Support)
"Live with all of your senses."
- Sue Townsend
(Related: Senses)
"Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses."
- Lao Tzu
(Related: Love, Heart, Senses)
"Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses."
- Leonardo da Vinci
(Related: Common sense, Judges, Senses)
"These days, our senses are bombarded with aggression. We are constantly confronted with global images of unending, escalating war and violence."
- Margaret J. Wheatley
(Related: War, Aggression, Senses, Violence)
"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."
- Oscar Wilde
(Related: Soul, Cure, Nothing, Senses)
"Every gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression a symbolic utterance... Everything is of the blood, of the senses."
- Henry Williamson
(Related: Blood, Expression, Senses)
"These rare senses and powers of reasoning were given to be used freely, but not audaciously, to discover, not to pervert the truth."
- William John Wills
(Related: Truth, Senses)
"Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe."
- Virginia Woolf
(Related: Heart, Charity, Mind, Rest, Senses, Tolerance)
"When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly."
- Virginia Woolf
(Related: Meaning, Senses, Skin)
"All observers not laboring under hallucinations of the senses are agreed, or can be made to agree, about facts of sensible experience, through evidence toward which the intellect is merely passive, and over which the individual will and character have no control."
- Chauncey Wright
(Related: Experience, Character, Control, Facts, Intellect, Senses, Will)