Quotations
Intuition
The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.
- Emily Dickinson
Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.
– Lucille Clifton
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
– T.S. Eliot
You must know for yourself, directly, the truth of yourself and you cannot realize it through another, however great. There is no authority that can reveal it.
– J. Krishnamurtiå
Energy is eternal delight.
– William Blake
Seeing
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.
– Paul Klee
The eye is the most refined of our senses, the one which communicates most directly with our mind, our consciousness.
– Robert Delaunay
We are a landscape of all we have seen.
– Isamu Noguchi
The whole of life lies in the verb seeing.
– Teilhard De Chardin
Learn to see, and then you’ll know that there is no end to the new worlds of our vision.
– Carlos Castaneda
Hearing
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
– Hermann Hesse
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
– Anne Sexton
Silence is more musical than any song.
– Christina Rossetti
Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
– Berthold Auerbach
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listened to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
– Karl Menninger
There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it.
– Minnie Aumonier
Smelling
Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.
– Helen Keller
O the green things growing, the green things growing,
The faint sweet smell of the green things growing!
– Dinah Mulock Craik
The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of recognition, for old memories and old connection.
– Lewis Thomas
The lime trees were in bloom. But in the early morning only a faint fragrance drifted through the garden, an airy message, an aromatic echo of the dreams during the short summer night.
– Isak Dinesen
Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air.
– Charles Baudelaire
Tasting
One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks, I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour.
– William H. Gass
The secret of food lies in memory – of thinking and then knowing what the taste of cinnamon or steak is.
– Jerry Saltz
Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.
– Stephen Fry
Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of all smells, bread; of all tastes, salt.
– George Herbert
Touching
Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.
– Margaret Atwood
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellåect has struggled with in vain.
– Carl G. Jung
The mind’s first step to self-awareness must be through the body.
– George Sheehan
The experience of touch is basic to discovering who we are and who is other and how we dance this life together.
– B. B. Cohyen
Touch has a memory.
– John Keats
Movement is a medicine for creating change in a person’s physical, emotional, and mental states.
– Carol Welch
We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye… The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
– Jacob Bronowski
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