We have so many words for states of mind, and so few for the states of the body.
Fear has a smell, as love does.
Our body is precious. It is a vehicle for awakening. Treat it with care.
We have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing.
The sick do not ask if the hand that smoothes their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin.
Passionate love is not peculiar to the human species, for it penetrates through all existing things — celestial, elemental, vegetable, and mineral.
If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred.
When he urinated, it sounded like night prayer.
It is so much more difficult to live with one’s body than with one’s soul. One’s body is so much more exacting: what it won’t have, it won’t have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.
I honor shit for saying: We go on.
The body has its own way of knowing, a knowing that has little to do with logic, and much to do with truth; little to do with control, and much to do with acceptance; little to do with division and analysis, and much to do with union.
I had to face the facts; I was pear-shaped. I was a bit depressed because I hate pears. Especially their shape.
Everything on earth [is] beautiful, everything, except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.
It is my opinion that humans are largely what they make of themselves; in other words, “human nature” is not so much an empirical reality as a process of self-construction. This means that if people become what they think they are, what they think they are is exceedingly important.
We saw men haying far in the meadow, their heads swaying like the grass they cut. In the distance, the wind seemed to bend all alike.
The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system . . . which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new.
To strengthen the mind you must harden the muscles.
There are so many things that can provide us with peace. Next time you take a shower or a bath, I suggest you hold your big toes in mindfulness. . . . When we hold our toes in mindfulness . . . we will find that our bodies have been very kind to us. We know that any cell in our toes can turn cancerous, but our toes have been behaving very well, avoiding that kind of problem. Yet we have not been nice to them at all. These kinds of practices can bring us happiness.
Happiness is always a byproduct. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy, you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
