52 Senses Quotes

The two principles of truth, reason and senses, are not only both not genuine, but are engaged in mutual deception. The senses deceive reason through false appearances, and the senses are disturbed by passions, which produce false impressions.

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.

But by far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and deceptions of the senses; in that things which strike the sense outweigh things which do not immediately strike it, though they be more important. Hence it is that speculation commonly ceases where sight ceases; insomuch that of things invisible there is little or no observation.

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 experience.

Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And not our acceptance of it is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments.

Taste is the intermediate faculty which connects the active with the passive powers of our nature, the intellect with the senses; and its appointed function is to elevate the images of the latter, while it realizes the ideas of the former.

I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether.

how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any - lifted from the no of all nothing - human merely being doubt unimaginable You?

The damned are in the abyss of Hell, as within a woeful city, where they suffer unspeakable torments, in all their senses and members, because as they have employed all their senses and their members in sinning, so shall they suffer in each of them the punishment due to sin.

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.

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical, it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

'Innate sensuousness rarely has any desire for accuracy, no desire for precise information. It basks in sunshine, bathes in color, dwells in a sense of the impressive and the gorgeous, and rests there. Accuracy is not necessary except in the case of aggressive, acquisitive natures, when it manifests itself in a desire to seize. True controlling sensuousness cannot be manifested in the most active dispositions, nor again in the most accurate.'

The eye- it cannot choose but see; we cannot bid the ear be still; our bodies feel, where'er they be, against or with our will.

All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer sight to almost everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things.

I saw clearly only when I saw with love. Or can one ever remember love? It's like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume. And that's the truth of roses, isn't it? - The perfume?

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before.

Of all God's gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.

If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time.

Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the self-same sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound; And thus it is that what I feel, Here in this room, desiring you, Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, Is music.

There is in souls a sympathy with sounds; And as the mind is pitched the ear is pleased With melting airs or martial, brisk, or grave: Some chord in unison with what we hear Is touched within us, and the heart replies.

And all the world is football shaped, It's just for me to kick in space, And I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste, And I've got one, two, three, four, five Senses working overtime, Trying to take this all in, I've got one, two, three, four, five Senses working overtime, Trying to taste the difference, 'Tween the lemons and limes, The pain and the pleasure, And the church bells softly chime.

Je dis qu'il faut etre voyant, se faire voyant. Le poete se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonne dereglement de tous les sens.

My veins are afire with music, Her eyes have kissed me, my body is turned to light; I shall dream to her secret heart tonight...

You imagine that what you can't understand is either spiritual or does not exist. The conclusion is quite wrong; rather there are obviously a million things in the universe that we would need a million quite different organs to understand. For example, I perceive by my senses what makes a magnet point north, what makes tides rise and fall, and what becomes of an animal after death. Your people are not proportioned to perceive such miracles, just as someone blind from birth cannot imagine the beauty of a landscape, the colors of a painting or the shadings of an iris. He will imagine them as something palpable, edible, audible or olfactory. Likewise, if I were to explain to you what I perceive by the senses you do not have, you would interpret it as something that could be heard, seen, touched, smelled or tasted; but it is not like that.

The Blessing of my later years Was with me when a boy: She gave me eyes, she gave me ears; And humble cares, and delicate fears; A heart, the fountain of sweet tears; And love, and thought, and joy.

Sounds cool. Looks cool. Feels cool.

The geometry of Tlon comprises two somewhat different disciplines: the visual and the tactile. The latter corresponds to our own geometry and is subordinated to the first.

He said I was a flower of the mountain, yes, But now I've powers o'er a woman's body, yes. Stepping out of the page into the sensual world. Stepping out... To where the water and the earth caress And the down on a peach says mmh, Yes...

Nequeunt oculis rerum primordia cerni.

Man the tool-making animal, whether in speech or in writing or in radio, has long been engaged in extending one or another of his sense organs in such a manner as to disturb all of his other senses and faculties. (1962)

La peinture est le plus beau de tous les arts; en lui se resument toutes les sensations, a son aspect chacun peut, au gre de son imagination, creer le roman, d'un seul coup d'?il avoir l'ame envahie par les plus profonds souvenirs; point d'effort de memoire, tout resume en un seul instant. - Art complet qui resume tous les autres et les complete. - Comme la musique, il agit sur l'ame par l'intermediaire des sens, les tons harmonieux correspondant aux harmonies des sons; mais en peinture on obtient une unite impossible en musique ou les accords viennent les uns apres les autres, et le jugement eprouve alors une fatigue incessante s'il veut reunir la fin au commencement. En somme, l'oreille est un sens inferieur a celui de l'?il. L'ouie ne peut servir qu'a un seul son a la fois, tandis que la vue embrasse tout, en meme temps qu'a son gre elle simplifie.

I like listening to it just as I like looking at a fuschia drenched with rain.

Extinguish my sight, and I can still see you; plug up my ears, and I can still hear; even without feet I can walk toward you, and without mouth I can still implore. Break off my arms, and I will hold you with my heart as if it were a hand; strangle my heart, and my brain will still throb; and should you set fire to my brain, I still can carry you with my blood.

Oh, could you view the melody Of every grace And music of her face, You'd drop a tear; Seeing more harmony In her bright eye Than now you hear.

But the Quincunx of Heaven runs low, and 'tis time to close the five ports of knowledge.

Shivering in fever, weak, and parched to sand, My ears, those entrances of word-dressed thoughts, My pictured eyes, and my assuring touch, Fell from me, and my body turned me forth From its beloved abode: then I was dead; And in my grave beside my corpse I sat, In vain attempting to return

Up to the twentieth century, 'reality' was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear. Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum ... humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality. Ninety-nine percent of all that is going to affect our tomorrows is being developed by humans using instruments and working in ranges of reality that are nonhumanly sensible.

The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.

Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

Dull sublunary lovers' love (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it.

'How many of us are able to distinguish between the odors of noon and midnight, or of winter and summer, or of a windy spell and a still one? If man is so generally less happy in the cities than in the country, it is because all these variations and nuances of sight and smell and sound are less clearly marked and lost in the general monotony of gray walls and cement pavements.' (p. 129)

Beauty is the highest of all these occult influences, the quality of appearances that thru' the sense wakeneth spiritual emotion in the mind of man.

I know that if odour were visible as colour is, I'd see the summer garden aureoled in rainbow clouds.