Archive

Quotes

I’m at an age when my back goes out more than I do.

—Phyllis Diller, 1981

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, c. 1947

One’s body, hair, and skin are a gift from one’s parents—do not dare to allow them to be harmed.

—Classic of Filial Piety, c. 200 BC

The enlightened man says: I am body entirely and nothing beside.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883

As the saying goes, an old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb.

—Chinua Achebe, 1958

Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented.

—Willem de Kooning, 1949

It hurts to watch the fluency of a body acclimated to its shackling.

—Leslie Jamison, 2014

My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.

—W.H. Auden, c. 1967

What are men anyway but balloons on legs, a lot of blown-up bladders?

—Gaius Petronius Arbiter, c. 64

The world is made of the very stuff of the body.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1961

I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.

—Elizabeth I, 1588

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit has made permanent.

—Marcel Proust, 1919

Very shy people don’t even want to take up the space that their body actually takes up.

—Andy Warhol, 1975