Sensations Quotes - Page 21

• As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth - whatever the truth may be - that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.

  June Jordan

  Children, May, Taught

  June Jordan (2009). “Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays”, p.133, Basic Books

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• Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground - situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Favors, Obscenity, Figures

  "Letters of Marshall McLuhan" by Marshall McLuhan, (p. 514), 1987.

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• There is a popular superstition that "realism" asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. But is not realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme?

  Willa Cather

  Attitude, Numbers, Mind

  Willa Cather (1988). “Not Under Forty”, p.45, U of Nebraska Press

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• Words are acoustical signs for concepts; concepts, however, are more or less definite image signs for often recurring and associated sensations, for groups of sensations. To understand one another, it is not enough that one use the same words; one also has to use the same words for the same species of inner experiences; in the end one has to have one's experiences in common.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Groups, Use, Common

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2009). “Basic Writings of Nietzsche”, p.406, Modern Library

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• He who wills believes with a fair amount of certainty that will and action are somehow one; he ascribes the success, the carrying out of the willing, to the will itself, and thereby enjoys an increase of the sensation of power which accompanies all success.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Believe, Action, Willpower

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2013). “The Selected Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche”, p.549, Simon and Schuster

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• Whoso shrinks from ideas ends by having nothing but sensations.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Ideas, Ends, Shrinks

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2015). “Maxims and Reflections”, p.70, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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• Back at the Rash [a Florida nightclub], a waif in a lime latex body tube went into the rest room to snort the newest designer drug, XGB5, which gave people the uncanny sensation of throwing money away while chewing their own lips off. It was hard to come by and everyone had to have it.

  Tim Dorsey

  Florida, People, Drug

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• I am unable, when I turn to myself, to recognize any of my faculties or my capacities. The inner sensation which I have of myself informs me that I am, that I think, that I will, that I have sensory awareness, that I suffer, and so on; but it provides me with no knowledge whatever of what I am - of the nature of my thought, my sensations, my passions, or my pain - or the mutual relations that obtain between all these things ... I have no idea whatever of my soul.

  Nicolas Malebranche

  Pain, Passion, Thinking

  "Dialogues on Metaphysics". Book by Nicolas Malebranche, Dialogue III, 1688.

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• If happiness is a state of the inward life, we have to look for its chief obstructions not in outward conditions but in deeper places. Happiness depends in the last issue, as we saw, on the essential view of life. It is not a matter of distractions, nor even of mere pleasurable sensations. There may be an appearance of great prosperity with incurable sadness hidden at the heart, as there is an outward peace which is only a well-masked despair. The way to happiness is indeed harder than the way to success; for its chief enemies entrench themselves within the soul.

  Hugh Black

  Happiness, Heart, Sadness

  Hugh Black (1911). “Happiness”

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• Everything is good in due measure and strong sensations know not measure.

  Anton Chekhov

  Strong, Knows, Dues

  Anton Chekhov's letter to N.M. Lintvareva, February 11, 1889.

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• The word "Blue" does not mean the sensation caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the power of producing that sensation: and this power is always there, in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not, and would remain there though there were not a man left on the face of the earth.

  John Ruskin

  Mean, Eye, Men

  John Ruskin, Frederick William Roe (2013). “Selections and Essays”, p.115, Courier Corporation

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• All appearances are real and negatio; sophistical: All reality must be sensation.

  Immanuel Kant

  Real, Reality, Appearance

  Immanuel Kant (2005). “Notes and Fragments”, p.191, Cambridge University Press

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• Flaubert spoke true: to succeed a great artist must have both character and fanaticism and few in this country are willing to pay the price. Our writers have either no personality and therefore no style or a false personality and therefore a bad style; they mistake prejudice for energy and accept the sensation of material well-being as a system of thought.

  Cyril Connolly

  Country, Mistake, Character

  "The Unquiet Grave". Book by Cyril Connolly, 1944.

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• To paint from nature is to realize one's sensations, not to copy what is before one.

  J. E. H. MacDonald

  Realizing, Paint, Copies

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• He who fears death either fears to lose all sensation or fears new sensations. In reality, you will either feel nothing at all, and therefore nothing evil, or else, if you can feel any sensations, you will be a new creature, and so will not have ceased to have life.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Reality, Evil, Fear Of Death

  "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius, Book VIII, (58), (c. 161 - 180 AD).

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• [Peake's books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.

  Mervyn Peake

  Dream, Book, Giving

  Mervyn Peake (2011). “The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy”, Random House

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• Zen is really extraordinarily simple as long as one doesn't try to be cute about it or beat around the bush! Zen is simply the sensation and the clear understanding ... that there is behind the multiplicity of events and creatures in this universe simply one energy -- and it appears as you, and everything is it. The practice of Zen is to understand that one energy so as to "feel it in your bones.

  Alan Watts

  Cute, Simple, Practice

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• These are the sensations and feelings that are gradually blunted by education, staled by custom, rejected in favor of social conformity.

  Herbert Read

  Feelings, Favors, Conformity

  "Collected Poems". Book by Herbert Read, 1926.

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• It seems as though the goal of my work has always been to dissolve myself completely into the sensations of the surroundings in order to then integrate this into a coherent painterly form.

  Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

  Order, Goal, Integrating

  "Kirchner and the Berlin street" edited by Deborah Wye, Moma, New York, (p. 36), 2008.

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• On Earth, much of the wrenching discomfort of emesis, apart from the sensation of nausea itself, is from the coordination of many muscles it takes to counter gravity.

  Vanna Bonta

  Nausea, Earth, Gravity

  Zero Gravity Interview (2006), as quoted in Laura S. Woodmansee "Sex in Space" (p. 31), August 1, 2006.

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• A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true.

  Maya Angelou

  Bizarre, Innuendo, Niceties

  Maya Angelou (2012). “The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou”, p.423, Modern Library

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• Not the least of the hardships to which the dying are subject is the visitation of their loved ones. The poor darlings, God bless them, may feel every impulse to condole and console, but their primary sensation is nonetheless one of embarrassment in the presence of the unspeakable and a guilty gratitude that it is not yet their fate.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Gratitude, Fate, Dying

  Louis Auchincloss (2004). “East Side Story: A Novel”, p.87, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Oh, love is very much a physical thing.... I realize that it's very complicated, and I'm sure it can't be traced to individual neurons and hormones, but I think it's very much a physiological sensation that takes place in the brain.

  Alan Lightman

  Love Is, Thinking, Brain

  Alan Lightman (2007). “Ghost: A Novel”, p.181, Vintage

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• It is very pleasant to scratch an itching ring-worm, but the sensation one gets afterwards is very painful and intolerable. In the same way the pleasures of this world are very attractive in the beginning, but their consequences are terrible to contemplate and hard to endure.

  Ramakrishna

  World, Way, Scratches

  "Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna". Book by Ramakrishna, p. 548, 1960.

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• And yet, I wake up every day to a sensation of pervading disgust and annoyance. I probably ought to carry around some kind of thermometer or other instrument, to keep checking that I am not falling prey to premature curmudgeonhood.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Fall, Wake Up, Kind

  Christopher Hitchens (2012). “Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays”, p.9, Atlantic Books Ltd

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