Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented.
—Willem de Kooning, 1949Quotes
There is only one antidote to mental suffering and that is physical pain.
—Karl Marx, 1860Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1910The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit has made permanent.
—Marcel Proust, 1919All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable.
—Fran Lebowitz, 1978As the saying goes, an old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb.
—Chinua Achebe, 1958The world is made of the very stuff of the body.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1961The body says what words cannot.
—Martha Graham, 1985To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.
—George Eliot, 1872Your body is the church where nature asks to be reverenced.
—Marquis de Sade, 1797I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.
—Elizabeth I, 1588What are men anyway but balloons on legs, a lot of blown-up bladders?
—Gaius Petronius Arbiter, c. 64The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, c. 1947