65 Sensory Quotes

It has long been known for sure that the sight of tasty food makes a hungry man's mouth water; also lack of appetite has always been regarded as an undesirable phenomenon, from which one might conclude that appetite is essentially linked with the process of digestion.

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.

Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air - moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh - felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing.

There's the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that, I would gladly live for ever.

Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud - We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice, All colours a suffusion from that light.

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.

But surely, speaking carefully, we do not sense 'red' and 'blue' any more than 'resemblance' (or 'qualities' any more than 'relations'): we sense something of which we might say, if we wished to talk about it, that 'this is red.' --Austin, Papers 49.

Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory - Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken. Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heaped for the beloved's bed; And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Love itself shall slumber on.

The smell of the library was always the same - the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the chief librarian had once described as 'the steam of the social soup'.

The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye.

How infinitely superior to our physical senses are those of the mind! The spiritual eye sees not only rivers of water but of air. It sees the crystals of the rock in rapid sympathetic motion, giving enthusiastic obedience to the sun's rays, then sinking back to rest in the night. The whole world is in motion to the center. So also sounds. We hear only woodpeckers and squirrels and the rush of turbulent streams. But imagination gives us the sweet music of tiniest insect wings, enables us to hear, all around the world, the vibration of every needle, the waving of every bole and branch, the sound of stars in circulation like particles in the blood. The Sierra canyons are full of avalanche debris- we hear them boom again, and we read the past sounds from present conditions. Again we hear the earthquake rock-falls. Imagination is usually regarded as a synonym for the unreal. Yet is true imagination healthful and real, no more likely to mislead than the coarse senses. Indeed, the power of imagination makes us infinite.

Sing the rapturous love-song unto me! Burn to me perfumes! Wear to me jewels! Drink to me, for I love you! I love you!

There is sweet music here that softer falls Than petals from blown roses on the grass, Or night-dews on still waters between walls Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass; Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes.

(takes a deep breath) Can you smell it? Can you smell Kitchen Stadium? Awww, of course not--you're watching television. But hey, at least you get to watch!

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.

Plus douce qu'aux enfants la chair des pommes sures, L'eau verte penetra ma coque de sapin.

Je me suis baigne dans le Poeme De la Mer... Devorant les azurs verts.

Oh the harsh snarl of guitar strings roaring! Heavenly distensions of our throats! Trousers stiff with dirt and love! Such whoring! Long green slimy nights: we were like stoats.

'Teddy - I suppose Mummy and Daddy are real, aren't they?' Teddy said, 'You ask such silly questions, David. Nobody knows what 'real' really means. Let's go indoors.' 'First I'm going to have another rose!' Plucking a bright pink flower, he carried it with him into the house. It could lie on the pillow as he went to sleep. Its beauty and softness reminded him of Mummy.

Arsenio Hall: This is some good ass cheese!

All day the head had been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the West, blowing from the heart of the setting sun and from the ocean, which lay unseen, unheard behind the scrubby foothills. It shook the rusty fringes of palm-leaf and swelled the dry sounds of summer, the frog-voices, the grating cicadas, and the ever present pulse of music from the neighbouring native huts.

The sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

There'd been the biggest motorcade from the airport. Hot. Wild. Like Mexico and Vienna. The sun was so strong in our faces. I couldn't put on sunglasses... Then we saw this tunnel ahead, I thought it would be cool in the tunnel, I thought if you were on the left the sun wouldn't get into your eyes...

'..for the dead fish was striped like a cat and the sky was striped like the fish and the conch was whorled like an ear and the beach was ribbed like a dog's mouth and the movables in the surf splintered and crashed like the walls of Jericho.'

I hear noises which others don't hear and which disturb for me the music of the spheres, which others don't hear either.

Put your hand over the side of the boat What do you feel?

'The only way to feel the noise is when it's good and loud.' - From 'Overkill'.

She turned again, and this time she was closer. Her head nestled against my shoulder and she moved my hand up her body until I knew there was no marvel of engineering connected to the bra because there was no bra. And the studded belt she wore was the keystone to the whole ensemble, and when it was unsnapped the whole affair came apart in a whisper of black satin that folded back against the sand until all of her reflected the moonlight from above until I eclipsed the pale brilliance, and there was no sound except that of the waves and our breathing. Then soon even the waves were gone, and there was only the warmth of white skin and little muscles that played under my hand and the fragrance that was her mouth. The redhead had been right.

She begged me to say something, but I let her squeeze it out herself. ' The police came again, but Berga wouldn't tell them anything.' The tongue moistened the lips again. The scarlet was starting to wash away and I could see the natural tones of of wet flesh. ' The other men came... they were different from the police. Federal men, I think. They took her away. Before she came back...Those men came.' She put something into the last three words that wasn't in the others, some breathless, nameless fear. Her hands were tight balls with the nails biting into the palms. A glassiness had passed over her eyes while she thought about it, then vanished as if afraid it had been seen.

I sat there as if I were paralyzed; for a second totally immobilized, a suddenly frozen mind and body that had solidified into one great silent scream at the mention of a name I had long ago consigned to a grave somewhere. Then the terrible cold was drenched with an even more terrible wash of heat and I sat there with my hands bunched into fists to keep them from shaking.

The silky hush of intimate things, fragrant with my fragrance, steal softly down, so loth to rob me of my last dear concealment.

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

A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system. ... The craving for opium can be endured in a car.

Take of London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts, gas leaks 20 parts, dewdrops gathered in a brickyard at sunrise 25 parts; odor of honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix. The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville drizzle.

The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.

The constellated sounds ran sprinkling on earth's floor As the dark vault above with stars was spangled o'er.

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!