Sensation Quotes

“Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in us. Everything that has been, if we saw it when it was, was taken from us when it went away.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I was overpowered by the mere sensation of that dream and it alone survived in my sorely wounded heart.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

“Wrapped in the deep fragrance of the forest, I listen to the flapping of the birds' wings, to the stirring of the ferns. I'm freed from gravity and float up--just a little--from the ground and drift in the air. Of course I can't stay there forever. It's just a momentary sensation--open my eyes and it's gone. Still, it's an overwhelming experience. Being able to float in the air.”
― Haruki Murakami

“We breathe too fast to be able to grasp things in themselves or to expose their fragility. Our panting postulates and distorts them, creates and disfigures them, and binds us to them. I bestir myself, therefore I emit a world as suspect as my speculation which justifies it; I espouse movement, which changes me into a generator of being, into an artisan of fictions, while my cosmogonic verve makes me forget that, led on by the whirlwind of acts, I am nothing but an acolyte of time, an agent of decrepit universes. (...)

If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.”
― Emil Cioran, The Temptation to Exist

“After all, color in itself has no color — it's simply a construction of the mind: a sensation, like the Humming Chorus from Madame Butterfly and the smell of honeysuckle.”
― Jasper Fforde, Shades of Grey

“A better-constituted boy would certainly have profited under my intelligent tutors, with their scientific apparatus; and would, doubtless, have found the phenomena of electricity and magnetism as fascinating as I was, every Thursday, assured they were. As it was, I could have paired off, for ignorance of whatever was taught me, with the worst Latin scholar that was ever turned out of a classical academy. I read Plutarch, and Shakespeare, and Don Quixote by the sly, and supplied myself in that way with wandering thoughts, while my tutor was assuring me that "an improved man, as distinguished from an ignorant one, was a man who knew the reason why water ran downhill." I had no desire to be this improved man; I was glad of the running water; I could watch it and listen to it gurgling among the pebbles and bathing the bright green water-plants, by the hour together. I did not want to know why it ran; I had perfect confidence that there were good reasons for what was so very beautiful. ("The Lifted Veil")”
― Mary Ann Evans, The Lifted Veil

“All that really matters is
to feel alive,
if only for a single moment –
to feel in Intense Sensation
that our existence is not an endless repetition
of sleeping, eating, drinking, and dressing.”
― Pietros Maneos

“What is this thing of intangible substance that wreaks consequential havoc on our lives? What is this sensitive thread that runs through heart and mind, and when given the slightest tremor grasps hold of all sanity, dragging the afflicted down to insufferable depths or flinging him weightless to euphoric heights? What is this magic we would deem imagination, fantasy, or pretend if not for the evidence of power manifest by human consequences? Effortlessly controlling us, it affects the infected in an instant. It takes but one word, one thought, one act to become immersed.
To stop it is hopeless.
To stifle it, demanding.
To think to master it is both improbable and pretentious.
What is this invisible hand that blinds our eyes and reigns hearts with a string? It is nature's drug and poison we call emotion.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year

“I should have looked into my own heart, and found this new growth springing up there, and plucked it out while it was young.”
― Wilkie Collins

“All of our thoughts – ideas – are traceable to a sensation, an encounter with the world that leaves an impression upon the mind.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“the sensations she was asking about were very pleasant; some of them were nothing short of delicious; but to know them one simply had to go barefoot. I could sense a mixture of envy and fearful reserve. It was time to tell her what another barefoot hiker had once told me, when I had stood, still shod, on the edge of wanting to go barefoot: "Take off your shoes.”
― Richard Keith Frazine, The Barefoot Hiker

“We were skin to skin.
Mouth over mouth.
Mingled breaths.
Tangled bodies.
Heartbeat against heartbeat.
We fit perfectly together.”
― L. Duarte, Fall Out Girl

“The whole bloated sensation of success is wiped clean when among family. There is no pressure of being looked upon as 'the brilliant one' but rather the comforts of always being the pupil.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“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.”
― Amy Rachel Peterson, Perpetua: A Bride, a Martyr, a Passion

“We do not perceive what is "out ther," rather we perceive what is "in here." Our senses can only inform us of their own status. They can inform us of the elesctrical status of neurons or the physical or the chemical status of the receptors. The outside world is never taken into our consciousness. The outside world is rather our own creation, psychologically synthesized from the mass of sensations that envelope us. In many respects, the ultimate question that perception must ask was stated by John Stuart Mill in 1865. He asked, "What is it we mean, or what is it which leads us to say, that the objects we perceive are external to us, and not a part of our own thoughts?" That remains, perhaps, the ultimate, unresolved perceptual puzzle.”
― Stanley Coren

“We do not perceive what is "out there," rather we perceive what is "in here." Our senses can only inform us of their own status. They can inform us of the electrical status of neurons or the physical or the chemical status of the receptors. The outside world is never taken into our consciousness. The outside world is rather our own creation, psychologically synthesized from the mass of sensations that envelope us. In many respects, the ultimate question that perception must ask was stated by John Stuart Mill in 1865. He asked, "What is it we mean, or what is it which leads us to say, that the objects we perceive are external to us, and not a part of our own thoughts?" That remains, perhaps, the ultimate, unresolved perceptual puzzle.”
― Stanley Coren, Sensation and Perception

“To reduce sensation to a science, to make psychological analysis into a microscopically precise method - that's the goal that occupies, like a steady thirst, the hub of my life's will.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The image is dead! Long live the sensation.”
― Kathleen Ossip, The Do-Over

“Il existait à Paris des zones intermédiaires, des no man's land où l'on était à la lisière de tout, en transit, ou même en suspens.”
― Patrick Modiano, Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue