Body Quotes

A human being is an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing. ~Christopher Morley


The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity. ~Maria Montessori


The mind can cook up very subtle syndromes to throw at our bodies. ~Terri Guillemets


The body is sensitive. It registers every thought and feeling. Be tender with it. ~Brendan O'Regan


We don't stop at our skin. ~Dolores Krieger, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine


The most of life is medullary. That's where we breathe and swallow. ~Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)


Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature! — ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability that is indecent. There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent. Perhaps indeed he or she to whom the free exhilarating ecstasy of nakedness in Nature has never been eligible (and how many thousands there are!) has not really known what purity is — nor what faith or art or health really is. ~Walt Whitman


Skin does not equal sin. ~Author Unknown


Body and mind, like man and wife, do not always agree to die together. ~Charles Caleb Colton


First up, there's the throat chop.... Adams apple's like the balls of the throat. If that fails, always go for the groin, that's like the balls of the balls. ~Peter Saji, Lisa McQuillan, & Njeri Brown, `black·ish, "The Dozens" (season 1, episode 15), original airdate 2015 February 25th, Dre to son Andre Johnson, Jr


My entire approach to my body and to fitness in general had been based on the concept of deficit. I thought of aerobics classes and how I had panted my way through movements just to give myself smaller thighs, pumping iron to shape my narrow back, dieting to lower my fat level. I had always approached my body as if it were a problem needing to be solved.... This attitude was not really different from the notion of original sin, forever reaching for an ideal we are constitutionally incapable of attaining. But here I was, truly broken now, weak, emaciated, yet in front of me this teacher was saying that just by the virtue of my being, I was complete. I always had been. The only thing I needed to do was honor that. ~Samantha Dunn, "Brick by Brick"


My body is a bulletin board, transmitting my condition. ~Terri Guillemets

 



 
So Shakespeare (or Bacon?) is totally wrong
In talking of Man's Seven Ages,
And Burns is at sea in his topical song
On the fellow who sweats for his wages.
For when a poor beggar is nearing his end,
And with Death and the Devil he wrestles,
His looks or his feelings no succour can lend,
But only the state of his vessels.
So now you are told
What pathologists hold,
That a man is as old
As his arteries.
~Easton Weston, "The True Age of Man," in Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, c.1899


Why do we pay for psychotherapy when massages cost half as much? ~Jason Love


No man has imagined what private discourse his members have with surrounding nature, or how much the tenor of that intercourse affects his own health and sickness. While the head goes star-gazing, the legs are not necessarily astronomers, too, but are acquiring independent experience in lower strata of nature. How much do they feel which they do not impart! How much rumor dies between the knees and the ears! Surely instinct was this experience. I am no more a freeman of my members than of universal nature. After all, the body takes care of itself. It eats, drinks, sleeps, digests, grows, dies, and the best economy is to let it alone in all these. ~Henry David Thoreau, Oct. 3, 1840

We are so curiously made that one atom put in the wrong place in our original structure will often make us unhappy for life. ~William Godwin


The ability to move disappears earlier than the ability to hear. Wherefore, beside the comatose and in the operating room, keep your mouth shut. ~Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)


This body, full of faults,
Has yet one great quality:
Whatever it encounters in this temporal life
Depends upon one's actions.
~Siddha Nagarjuna


If there is any true temple, true gurdwara, true mosque or true church, it is our own body. This place God has designed for Himself, and He sits within it. ~Maharaj Charan Singh Ji


A girl without freckles is like a night without stars. ~Author Unknown


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


I am a private person, but I will reveal this about myself: if you start massaging my shoulders, don't expect me to tell you to stop. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com


Full nakedness! All joyes are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth'd must be,
To taste whole joyes.
~John Donne

 



 

My soul-bird loves my body-cage
Only when it is kept fit,
Pure and absolutely immaculate.
~Sri Chinmoy, Ten Thousand Flower-Flames


The stronger the body, the more it obeys; the weaker the body, the more it commands. ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)


Attention to the human body brings healing and regeneration. Through awareness of the body we remember who we really are. ~Jack Kornfield


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."


The body is a sacred garment. ~Martha Graham


Your cells are as depressed as you are, and your cells are as happy and frisky as you are. ~Abraham–Hicks


Many people can listen to their cat more intelligently than they can listen to their own despised body. Because they attend to their pet in a cherishing way, it returns their love. Their body, however, may have to let out an earth-shattering scream in order to be heard at all. ~Marion Woodman


I love the body. Flesh is so honest, and organs do not lie. ~Terri Guillemets


Don't worry too much about your heart, as so many healthy people seem to be doing nowadays; rejoice, rather, that Nature has placed in your breast one of her most delicate yet durable marvels, an organ of surpassing patience, flexibility and strength. ~Henry Morton Robinson, "The Heart—Wondrous and Courageous Organ," Reader's Digest, February 1948


I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me. ~Herman Hesse


Abdicate, v.: to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach. ~Author Unknown


A person who doesn't breathe deeply reduces the life of his body. If he doesn't move freely, he restricts the life of his body. If he doesn't feel fully, he narrows the life of his body. And if his self-expression is constricted, he limits the life of his body. ~Alexander Lowen


Destroy the roots of the healthiest plants, their heads will droop and die. Many excellent qualities of the mind have their roots, in fact, in the body: their summits, which adorn the spiritual being, the mind, will wither, if we neglect the soil of these valuable plants... ~C.G. Salzmann, Gymnastics for Youth: or, A Practical Guide to Healthful and Amusing Exercises for the Use of Schools. An Essay Toward the Necessary Improvement of Education, Chiefly as It Relates to the Body, 1793, translated from the German, 1799  [Translator name not provided in publication. —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]


Skin is a covering for our immortality. ~Terri Guillemets

 



 
There is a wisdom in the body that is older and more reliable than clocks and calendars. ~John Harold Johnson


The trouble with having a body is that people know it's where you hang out and you don't get any privacy. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com


There is but one temple in this Universe: The Body. We speak to God whenever we lay our hands upon it. ~Thomas Carlyle


Your body is a flower that life let bloom.... ~Ilchi Lee


Your body is a beautiful manifestation powered by spirit. ~Mike Dolan, @HawaiianLife


The Church says: The body is a sin.
Science says: The body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The body says: I am a fiesta.
~Eduardo Galeano


It's your body. Tell it what to do. ~Chris Powell


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


Our feet are our body's connection to the earth. ~Andrew Weil


Be strong then, and enter into your own body; there you have a solid place for your feet. ~Kabir


Sometimes your body is smarter than you are. ~Author Unknown


[T]he way he treats his body, you’d think he was renting. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com


If you don't take care of your body, where will you live? ~Author Unknown


What the mind has forgotten, the body remembers long after. ~Lilias Folan

 



 

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


Take care of your body. It's the only place you have to live. ~Jim Rohn


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


There is an Indian proverb or axiom that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but, unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person. ~Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms


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


To keep the body in good health is a duty... otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear. ~Buddha


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


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, 2002 June 3rd


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

 



You know the Model of your Car.
You know just what its powers are.
You treat it with a deal of care,
Nor tax it more than it will bear.
But as to self — that's different.
Your mechanism may be bent,
Your carbureter gone to grass,
Your engine just a rusty mass.
Your wheels may wobble and your cogs
Be handed over to the dogs,
And on you skip, and skid, and slide,
Without a thought of things inside.
What fools indeed we mortals are
To lavish care upon a Car,
With ne'er a bit of time to see
About our own machinery!
~John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922), "Motors" (September Eighteenth), The Cheery Way: A Bit of Verse For Every Day, 1920


Sweat your prayers, dance your pain, and move on. ~Gabrielle Roth


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


The human body is the only machine for which there are no spare parts. ~Hermann M. Biggs


The lungs have been usually regarded as the great fire-place of the human system; but whether or not this is so, the stronger the lungs are the better, without a doubt. ~William Andrus Alcott (1798–1859), The Physiology of Marriage, 1855  [On original publication, author was cited simply as "An Old Physician." —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]


In vain we shall penetrate more and more deeply the secrets of the structure of the human body, we shall not dupe nature; we shall die as usual. ~Bernard Le Bovier de Fontanelle


Skin symptoms like other symptoms are often well-intentioned but doomed attempts to make our lives better.... They are doomed because we're trying to use our skin to do things the skin is not designed for. I tell my patients, "try to feel your emotions in your heart, not in your skin." ~Ted A. Grossbart


The body is a bundle of careful compromises. ~Randolph Nesse and George Williams, Why We Get Sick


Massage is the only form of physical pleasure to which nature forgot to attach consequences. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com



I am beautiful as I am. I am the shape that was gifted. My breasts are no longer perky and upright like when I was a teenager. My hips are wider than that of a fashion model's. For this I am glad, for these are the signs of a life lived. ~Cindy Olsen, co-owner of The Body Objective website, 1999


The beauty of my body is not measured by the size of the clothes it can fit into, but by the stories that it tells. I have a belly and hips that say, "We grew a child in here," and breasts that say, "We nourished life." My hands, with bitten nails and a writer's callus, say, "We create amazing things." ~Sarah, from I Am Beautiful


Keeping your body healthy is an expression of gratitude to the whole cosmos—the trees, the clouds, everything. ~Thích Nhất Hạnh


It's all in the mind and a bit in the heart but it goes in the body and that's where all the trouble comes in. ~Terri Guillemets


The brain forgets much, but the lower back remembers everything. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com

 



 
What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful that the garment with which it is clothed? ~Michelangelo


Most psychologists treat the mind as disembodied, a phenomenon with little or no connection to the physical body. Conversely physicians treat the body with no regard to the mind or the emotions. But the body and mind are not separate, and we cannot treat one without the other. ~Candace Pert


Exercise, play, move.
Stretch, feel, reach, sweat.
Skip, dance, hug!
Use the body God gave you,
don't let it rot.
~Terri Guillemets


Let the body receive an injury less than mortal, and what follows? Before the swiftest foot can bring the physician, Nature has begun her healing work. The physician is at best only her humble assistant. Medical science is learning more and more to trust to the vis medicatrix Naturæ—the healing power of Nature. It is she, whom we call stern and merciless, that knits together the broken bone that no artificer on earth could mend. It is she that deftly works out of the system the injurious matter which we in our ignorance have forced upon it. She is not only kind when we obey her: she repairs our mistakes and heals the hurts we have done ourselves. Is not this the very counterpart of what the Divine Physician does for our spirits? ~George S. Merriam


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


Mindfulness of the body is awareness of... the taste and smell of this moment. ~Steve Hagen


The teeth are renewed at the 7th year.
Puberty arrives at twice seven — 14.
Full stature at three times seven — 21.
The perfection of growth at four times seven — 28.
The greatest vigour of body and mind at five times seven — 35.
The commencement of partial decay at six times seven — 42.
General decay and decrease of energy, at seven times seven — 49.
Arrival of old age at eight times seven — 56.
And the grand climacteric of the ancients at nine times seven — 63.
~Thomas Jameson, M.D., "Coincidence of the epochs with the changes of the body," Essays on the Changes of the Human Body, at its Different Ages; the Diseases to Which It is Predisposed in Each Period of Life; and the Physiological Principles of Its Longevity, 1811  [Note: Formatting has been changed for ease of reading, as well as a few words added or slightly restated, but ages and principles remain intact. Jameson referred to this coincidence with the number seven relating to the body as "the septennial evolutions of the machine" and his observations were based on long-time London dwellers. Format source: "The Art of Invigorating and Prolonging Life," The Medical Adviser, and Guide to Health and Long Life, edited by Alex. Burnett, M.D., 1824 July 24th —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]


If we were meant to be nude, we would have been born that way. ~Author Unknown


Ah me! the red is yet upon my cheek,
And in my veins life's vigorous currents play...
~Elizabeth Chase Akers Allen (1832–1911), "Consolation," c.1866


I use the word "fat." I use that word because that's what people are: they're fat. They're not bulky; they're not large, chunky, hefty or plump. And they're not big-boned. Dinosaurs were big-boned. These people are not overweight: this term somehow implies there is some correct weight. There is no correct weight. Heavy is also a misleading term. An aircraft carrier is heavy; it's not fat. Only people are fat, and that's what fat people are! They're fat! ~George Carlin


So long as we are in conflict with our body, we cannot find peace of mind. ~Georg Feuerstein


No Senses stronger than his brain can bear.
Why has not Man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly:
What the advantage, if his finer eyes
Study a Mite, not comprehend the Skies?...
Or quick Effluvia darting thro' his brain,
Die of a Rose, in Aromatic pain?
If Nature thunder'd in his opening ears,
And stunn'd him with the music of the Spheres...
Who finds not Providence all-good and wise,
Alike in what it gives, and what denies?
~Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man


It is true of most human beings that if they had no physical body, they would still have an identifying scar. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com


...of enormous rotundity of paunch... ~A New Edition of the Old Joe Miller; or, Universal Jester: Being a Collection of Wit and Humour, Calculated at Once to Banish Care and Inspire Mirth and Delight1810

 



 


The body is your temple. Keep it pure and clean for the soul to reside in. ~B.K.S. Iyengar, Yoga: The Path To Holistic Health


He felt it, he said, an honor to wash his face, being, as it was, the temple of the Spirit. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838 journal, about Jones Very


'Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.
Our bodies are our gardens to which our wills are gardeners.
~William Shakespeare, Othello


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


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


The body never lies. ~Martha Graham


Varicose veins are the result of an improper selection of grandparents. ~William Osler


Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies. ~Frank Gillette Burgess


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


The body is but a pair of pincers set over a bellows and a stew pan and the whole fixed upon stilts. ~Samuel Butler, Notebooks


The body too has its rights; and it will have them: they cannot be trampled on without peril. The body ought to be the soul's best friend. Many good men however have neglected to make it such: so it has become a fiend and has plagued them. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827



If the body be feeble, the mind will not be strong. ~Thomas Jefferson


Hormones, vitamines, stimulants and depressives are oils upon the creaky machinery of life. Principal item, however, is the machinery. ~Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)


Make your feet your friend. ~J.M. Barrie


The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. ~Anaïs Nin


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


A woman is as young as her knees. ~Mary Quant


'Tis better than riches
To scratch when it itches.
~Author Unknown


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


The body is not a permanent dwelling, but a sort of inn which is to be left behind when one perceives that one is a burden to the host. ~Seneca


The fact that the mind rules the body is, in spite of its neglect by biology and medicine, the most fundamental fact which we know about the process of life. ~Franz Alexander


Our body is a machine for living. It is geared towards it; it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself; it will be more effective than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies. ~Leo Tolstoy



We use our brains very little, and when we do, it is only to make excuses for our reflexes and our instincts — only to make our acts appear more studied. ~Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)


Most of us have become deaf to our own bodies, which is why we are out of tune. ~Terri Guillemets


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


Once admitted that human nature resembles a machine, I may ask: What will become of the machine which is not frequently oiled, which in its working daily accumulates much dust and dirt and is never thoroughly cleansed? Will it not one day, perhaps when in full activity, suddenly stop or collapse and refuse further service? So it will happen to many who do not keep up the needful bodily activity.... And when any part of the body loses its vitality, disorganisation of the system sets in, spreading more every day, until at last the whole body becomes incapable of sustaining life. ~Sebastian Kneipp, Thus Shalt Thou Live: Hints and Advice for the Healthy and the Sick on a Simple and Rational Mode of Life and a Natural Method of Cure, 1889, translated from the 19th German edition



Hate and fear can poison the body as surely as any toxic chemicals. ~Joseph Krimsky


X-rays amuse God: all the things he can see that a machine can't. ~Terri Guillemets


Most men carry their souls in the medulla. ~Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)


A proverb there is with the popular seal
(You hear it in various places),
That a man is as old as he happens to feel,
A woman as old as her face is,
But Science, advancing with seven league boots,
Arousing the vulgar from coma,
The truth of the proverb most boldly disputes
If one's arteries show atheroma.
For we need to be told
(So pathologists hold)
That a man is as old
As his arteries.
~Easton Weston, "The True Age of Man," in Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, c.1899




Your body is a temple but only if you treat it as one. ~Terri Guillemets


For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities. ~John Updike


The poor body has had very hard lines. Poets, philosophers and preachers have covered it with ridicule, abuse, and lamentation. Shakespeare calls it a muddy vesture of decay; Plato described it as a jibbing horse; Jeremy Taylor treats it almost as if it were the Devil himself. But if the poor thing had wit enough to speak for itself, it would say, Whence comes envy? Is it not a vice of the mind? Whence pride?— the mind again. Whence ambition?—the mind again. Whence covetousness—robbery—murder? If the mind has not all to do with these, at any rate she has the largest part of the guilt. Why, give the poor body a beefsteak and a glass of beer, and it is content. 'Tis the mind that leads it such a dance after the vain glories of the world, and makes it work all kinds of wickedness in the struggle to gain them. Did Robespierre slay his thousands to please his body? What could his body get by it? No. He wanted to please the fancies of his villainous mind. ~Charles Buxton


If your body's not right, the rest of your day will go all wrong. Take care of yourself. ~Terri Guillemets


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





My eyes are south windows, and out of these I command a southern prospect. The eye does the least drudgery of any of the senses. It oftenest escapes to a higher employment. The rest serve and escort and defend it. I attach some superiority, even priority, to this sense. It is the oldest servant in the soul's household; it images what it imagines, it ideates what it idealizes. Through it idolatry crept in, which is a kind of religion. If any joy or grief is to be expressed, the eye is the swift runner that carries the news. Of five castes, it is the Brahmin. It converses with the heavens. How man serves this sense more than any other! When he builds a house, he does not forget to put a window in the wall. We see truth. We are children of light. Our destiny is dark. No other sense has so much to do with the future. ~Henry David Thoreau, Oct. 3, 1840


We have a pharmacy inside us that is absolutely exquisite. It makes the right medicine, for the precise time, for the right target organ—with no side effects. ~Deepak Chopra


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