Sensations Quotes - Page 16

• As for fame, fame felt like nothing. Fame was not a sensation like love or hunger or loneliness, welling from within and invisible to the outside eye. It was rather entirely external, coming from the minds of others. It existed in the way people looked at him or behaved towards him. In that, being famous was no different from being gay, or Jewish, or from a visible minority: you are who you are, and then people project onto you some notion they have.

  Yann Martel

  Loneliness, Eye, Gay

  Yann Martel (2010). “Beatrice & Virgil”, p.5, Knopf Canada

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so exquisite.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Believe, Sleep, Greek

  6 Copy quote

• There's something so universal about that sensation, the way running unites our two most primal impulses: fear and pleasure. We run when we're scared, we run when we're ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time.

  Christopher McDougall

  Running, Two, Way

  FaceBook post by Christopher McDougall from Jul 13, 2011

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.

  John Fowles

  Love, Memories, War

  John Fowles (1965). “The Magus”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Eye, Personality

  Oscar Wilde (2005). “Picture of Dorian Gray”, p.17, Prestwick House Inc

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• ..bear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation-to make a point-than to further the cause of truth." Dupin in "The Mystery of Marie Roget

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Mind, Causes, Bears

  9 Copy quote

• In the morning I awoke early and experienced that sinking sensation that overcomes you when you first open your eyes and realize that instead of a normal day ahead of you, with its scatterings of simple gratifications, you are going to have a day without even the tiniest of pleasures; you are going to drive across Ohio.

  Bill Bryson

  Morning, Eye, Simple

  5 Copy quote

• Joan was nothing more than a friend. He was not in love with her. One does not fall in love with a girl whom one has met only three times. One is attracted, yes; but one does not fall in love. A moment's reflection enabled him to diagnose his sensations correctly. This odd impulse to leap across the compartment and kiss Joan was not love. It was merely the natural desire of a good-hearted young man to be decently chummy with his species.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Girl, Falling In Love, Kissing

  P. G. Wodehouse (2012). “Something New: Or, Something Fresh”, p.107, The Floating Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every time I caught a fish, I wondered how something so small could have such clear, pure strength. It kept reminding me of another sensation, from another realm. The fish on the line, I eventually realized, felt like the baby, kicking inside you. Or the shocking, life-hungry pull of the baby on the breast. Perhaps fishing is like quickening for men, a long and patient wait for a few electric moments when they feel connected to another life.

  Marni Jackson

  Baby, Men, Fishing

  4 Copy quote

• Modernism had two great wishes. It wanted its audience to be led toward a recognition of the social reality of the sign (away from the comforts of narrative and illusionism, was the claim); but equally it dreamed of turning the sign back to a bedrock of World/Nature/Sensation/Subjectivity which the to and fro of capitalism had all but destroyed.

  T. J. Clark

  Reality, Two, Wish

  6 Copy quote

• Cut off from direct experience, cut off from our own feelings and sometimes our own sensations, we are only too ready to adopt a viewpoint or perspective that is handed to us, and is not our own.

  Michael Crichton

  Cutting, Perspective, Feelings

  Michael Crichton (2012). “Travels”, p.504, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• All my life I have arrived early only to find myself standing self-consciously on a corner, outside a door, in an empty room, but the closer I get to death the earlier I arrive, the longer I am content to wait, perhaps to give myself the false sensation that there is too much time rather than not enough.

  Nicole Krauss

  Empty Rooms, Doors, Self

  Nicole Krauss (2011). “Great House: A Novel”, p.259, W. W. Norton & Company

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I take up one of Jane Austen's books ... I feel like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so.

  Mark Twain

  Book, Heaven, Would Be

  Mark Twain (1972). “Everyone's Mark Twain”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a seperate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body-a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange.

  Alan Watts

  People, Feelings, Suffering

  Alan Watts (2011). “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, p.8, Souvenir Press

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them.

  Paul Gauguin

  Beautiful, Art, Memories

  8 Copy quote

• Alas! Your dear friend and servant Galileo has been for the last month hopelessly blind; so that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which I by my marvelous discoveries and clear demonstrations had enlarged a hundred thousand times beyond the belief of the wise men of bygone ages, henceforward for me is shrunk into such a small space as is filled by my own bodily sensations.

  Galileo Galilei

  Wise, Men, Discovery

  Letter to Élie Diodati (p. 279), January 2, 1638.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The sensation of dying is sweet, sensuous, placid. It is the easiest thing in the world to die. The hardest is to live.

  Eddie Rickenbacker

  Sweet, Dying, World

  23 Copy quote

• I started doing drag in Seattle because I started doing my column before I moved here, and then moved here and wanted to be able to go out and do things as Dan Savage without being recognized the next day, because the column was just in Seattle and it was kind of a sensation and I was beating people up. I was really worried and I didn't want to beat somebody up in a column and have that person know what I look like when I didn't know what they looked like.

  Dan Savage

  Next Day, People, Savages

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Movement is the unifying bond between the mind and the body, and sensations are the substance of that bond.

  Deane Juhan

  Mind, Substance, Movement

  6 Copy quote

• The word itself creates an empty sensation. Try saying it now. "Why?" Notice how your tongue touches nothing when you form the word with your mouth. Feel the gap, the space inside your mouth, that it creates. The air. It is a place that needs filling. It is missing an answer.

  Arlene J. Chai

  Air, Space, Missing

  Arlene J. Chai (2010). “The Last Time I Saw Mother”, p.56, Ballantine Books

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• An observation, strictly, is only a sensation. Nobody means that we should reject everything but sensations. But as soon as we go beyond sensations we are making inferences.

  Harold Jeffreys

  Mean, Inference, Should

  Harold Jeffreys (1998). “The Theory of Probability”, p.412, OUP Oxford

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Man has no individual 'I'. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small 'I's, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking, 'I'. And each time his 'I' is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man's name is legion.

  G. I. Gurdjieff

  Men, Thinking, Names

  "In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching". Book by Pyotr Ouspensky, 1949.

  49 Copy quote

  Show source

• Time is measured by the quality and not the quanity of sensations it contains.

  Algernon Blackwood

  Quality

  15 Copy quote

• Paper money is like dram-drinking, it relieves for a moment by deceitful sensation, but gradually diminishes the natural heat, and leaves the body worse than it found it. Were not this the case, and could money be made of paper at pleasure, every sovereign in Europe would be as rich as he pleased. But the truth is, that it is a bubble and the attempt vanity. Nature has provided the proper materials for money: gold and silver, and any attempt of ours to rival her is ridiculous.

  Thomas Paine

  Drinking, Europe, Vanity

  Thomas Paine (1824). “The Political Writings of Thomas Paine: Secretary to the Committee of Foreign Affairs in the American Revolution : to which is Prefixed a Brief Sketch of the Author's Life”, p.410

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Wyndham's is a beautiful old theatre. The sensation on the stage isn't as different as you might think from the Royal Court.

  Sophie Thompson

  Beautiful, Thinking, Theatre

  4 Copy quote