Archive

Quotes

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

The body says what words cannot.

—Martha Graham, 1985

O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified!

—William Shakespeare, c. 1596

To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.

—George Eliot, 1872

Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920

Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented.

—Willem de Kooning, 1949

Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.

—Kate Moss, 2009

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

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, c. 1947

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

—Walt Whitman, 1855

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

To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.

—Simone de Beauvoir, 1949

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

—Leslie Jamison, 2014