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Senses Quotes

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Senses Quotes

“It is no accident that the psalmist enjoins us to taste and see that the Lord is good—not simply to reason or confess that God is good, but to taste it. My body, this tea, and the quiet twilight are teaching me God's goodness through my senses. I'm tasting, hearing, feeling, seeing, and smelling that God is good.”

“Now through her aching, Helen felt a flicker of peace as though Mum was there, placing a hand on Helen’s shoulder and saying, “Come now. The world is always a brighter place on a full stomach. Help me—it will go faster that way.” In the stillness of the kitchen they used to work, Helen’s light hair and Mum’s dark bent over the bowl. Mum would not prod or fill the silence with chatter, but used the recipe to call Helen back to herself. She would pop a currant into her daughter’s mouth, or gently instruct her to smell the cinnamon, and for Helen, the world would come into focus.”

“The experience of tasting food is far more multi-sensory than is the case with hearing, sight or touch, which is why it requires the most sophisticated part of our brain to process it. In fact, eating is influenced by hearing, sight or touch, as well as flavour: we prefer apples that crunch loudly, steaks that look blood-red, sauces so smooth they seem to caress the inside of our throats.”

“At the fairgrounds we saw them in the parking lot inhaling the effluvium of carnival, the smells of fried dough, caramel and cinnamon, the flap-flapping of tents, a carousel plinking out music-box songs, voluptuous sounds bouncing down tent ropes and along the trampled dust of the midway. Wind-curled handbills staple-gunned to telephone poles, the hum of gas-powered generators and the gyro truck, the lemonade truck, pretzels and popcorn, baked potatoes, the American flag, the rumblings of rides and the disconnected screams of riders -- all of it shimmered before them like a mirage, something not quite real.”

“Physical engagement is not simply physical contact but the experience of the world through the manifold sensibility of the body. That sensibility is sharpened and strengthened in skill. Skill is intensive and refined world engagement. Skill, in turn, is bound up with social engagement. It molds the person and gives the person character.”

“It is true that our everyday view of the world is not quite naively realistic, but that is what it would like to be. Common-sense is naively realistic wherever it does not think that there is some positive reason why it should cease to be so. And this is so in the vast majority of its perceptions. When we see a tree we think that it is really green and really waving about in precisely the same way as it appears to be. We do not think of our object of perception being 'like' the real tree, we think that what we perceive is the tree, and that it is just the same at a given moment whether it be perceived or not, except that what we perceive may be only a part of the real tree.”

“It’s not Love. But what fault is it of mine if my affections do not become Love? Very much my fault, I would say, when I can live from day to day on mad purity, blind pity… Make a scandal of meekness. But the violence of the senses and intellect that has confounded me for years was the only way.”

“She closed her eyes, trying to remember the photos that had hung on the walls. She had passed these pictures every day, but now she only remembered them vaguely--her parents on their wedding day, her mother in a garden, her family at Knott's Berry Farm. How had she not memorized them? Or maybe she had once but she was beginning to forget. Did the house smell different because her mother's scent was gone? Or had she just forgotten how her mother smelled?”

“She understood now why so many members of her kind died so young. It was possible to squeeze an entire lifetime of living into a single day: to live more, to feel more, in the span of twenty-four hours than most did in eighty years. Shape-shifters lived in a world of color and brightness, of heightened senses. They felt everything more intensely, and so they lived their lives more intensely—anything to make their hearts pound harder. Life could be like a drug. But how does one wean oneself off life?”

“Above and about me all was space. The sky was hazy blue, and from this vantage point, I could see all the way down the Via Roma, at the far end of the forum, to the bay. Its waters sparkled invitingly and I slowed, feeling my amictus fluid with my motion and the moving air. Even the cobbled ground seems happy to bounce its sound of hurrying feet to the buildings ringing us, and hear it back again.”

“What', said he, ' makes the difference between man and all the rest of the animal creation? Every beast that strays beside me has the same corporeal necessities with myself; he is hungry and crops the grass, he is thirsty and drinks the stream, his thirst and hunger are appeased, he is satisfied and sleeps; he rises again and is hungry, he is again fed and is at rest. I am hungry and thirsty like him, but when thirst and hunger cease I am not at rest; I am, like him, pained with want, but am not, like him, satisfied with fullness. The intermediate hours are tedious and gloomy; I long again to be hungry that I may again quicken my attention. The birds peck the berries or the corn, and fly away to the groves where they sit in seeming happiness on the branches, and waste their lives in tuning one unvaried series of sounds. I likewise can call the lutanist and the singer, but the sounds that pleased me yesterday weary me today, and will grow yet more wearisome tomorrow. I can discover within me no power of perception which is not glutted with its proper pleasure, yet I do not feel myself delighted. Man has surely some latent sense for which this place affords no gratification, or he has some desires distinct from sense which must be satisfied before he can be happy.”

“Empirical evidence is not what counts. Rational proof is the only acceptable criterion of truth. If you cannot provide a sufficient reason for an argument you make, you do not have an argument. Sensory evidence is not a sufficient reason. It is not an argument. Sensory evidence is simply raw data. A million people could provide a million different ways of interpreting it, hence it’s meaningless. It has nothing to do with proof. “Evidence” concerns an appearance from which inferences may be drawn. It concerns that which is obvious to the eye. Yet what does “obvious” mean? What is obvious about sensory data? Color blind people don’t know what “blue” is. Tetrachromats, with four cone types in the eye (cone cells are responsible for color vision, while rod cells code for monochromatic vision) see color radically differently from normal people (i.e. trichromats with three cone types). People with synesthesia have drastically different sensory experiences from normal people. So, everything about the senses is mired in ambiguity, uncertainty and subjectivity. These are no organs for truth, i.e. organs that show us the truth of a thing, exactly what it is and everything about it. We see things in our dreams even though our eyes are closed. How can we see without eyes, how can we sense without sense organs? What’s for sure is that scientific empiricism and materialism won’t be furnishing any answers.”

“It’s time to blow scientism out of the water. It’s time for judging to replace perceiving. Every time a worshiper of scientism says, “Where is your sensory evidence?” (a perceiving requirement), they should be met with, “Where is your sufficient reason?” (a judging requirement). That will create cognitive dissonance in them. They will go into meltdown. Where is the sufficient reason that scientific matter exists? According to Big Bang theory, it did not exist prior to the Big Bang, and neither did space and time. In other words, we know that there was an epoch when all the stuff of perceiving – matter, space, time and the physical senses –did not exist. However, all of the stuff of judgment – mathematics – did exist. This is why judging is primary and perceiving secondary, rather than the other way around. Get with the program. Scientism is an entirely false worldview. That’s a fact. The sole thing it gets right is that uses mathematics, which is the true basis of reality.”

“There is nothing in which mankind have been more unanimous [founding nations upon superstition]; yet nothing can be inferred from it more than this, that the multitude have always been credulous, and the few artful. The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature: and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history... [T]he detail of the formation of the American governments... may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had any interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven... it will for ever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses... Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind. [A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America, 1787]”

“Put out my eyes: and I shall see you, too, seal up my ears: and I shall hear you still, and without feet I yet can go to you, and with no mouth, adjure you and I will. Break off my arms, and I shall hold you fast even with my heart, as though it were a hand; arrest my heart, my brain to throb is sworn, and if into my brain you fling a brand, yet on my very blood you will be borne.”

“La nuit, il n’y avait presque aucun signe du Grand Désert d’Harmat qui l’environnait, car tout était très noir. Aux limites de sa perception il ressentait une absence, dans l’espace qui happait les mouvements pour les renvoyer, indécis : l’Obscurité ! Elle était là, dans le Grand Désert d’Harmat, patiente et vigilante ; le jeune Sorcelier, par anticipation, frissonna. Seuls témoins tangibles, les plis de ses vêtements où le sable s’était infiltré, comme partout sur sa personne, dans sa bouche, son nez, au coin des yeux, sur ses oreilles, sa peau... Par ces particules granulaires, ces simples grains à la rondeur naturelle, infimes et innombrables, il retrouva son affirmation au Grand Désert et repoussa plus loin la menace de l’Obscur. Vaincu par une saine fatigue et noyé de sérénité, Célian alla se coucher sous l’œil bienveillant de son mentor.”

“We were created with more than five senses. Apart from the basic five, we also have the gut and the third eye. The gut being the seat of all feeling, and the third eye being the seat of intuition (foresight).”

“At the edge you will always remember me, at the edge you will last be remembered, where sanity and insanity come together, for the time, then separates. Like leaves on October trees, that color the world, but for a moment, then leave. At the edge, where life losses its edginess, and thoughts we will become one, someday. At the edge the sun drops, the ring falls, and senses of raindrops climb upwards to the gray sky.”

“The true reason, therefore, why tragedy need not shun even the harshest subject is, that a spiritual and invisible power can only be measured by the opposition which it encounters from some external force capable of being appreciated by the senses. The moral freedom of man, therefore, can only be displayed in a conflict with his sensuous impulses: so long as no higher call summons it to action, it is either actually dormant within him, or appears to slumber, since otherwise it does but mechanically fulfil its part as a mere power of nature. It is only amidst difficulties and struggles that the moral part of man's nature avouches itself.”