Henry David Thoreau

“Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. The very simplicity and nakedness of man’s life in the primitive ages imply this advantage, at least, that they left him still but a sojourner in nature. To be awake is to be alive. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. Every man is a builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them. Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”


Thirumoolar

“Time was when I despised the body:
But then I saw the God within.
The Body I relaised is the Lord’s temple;
And so I began preserving it with care infinite.”


Robert Louis Stevenson

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.


George Santayana

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.


Marcel Proust

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.


Novalis

There is but one temple in the universe and that is the body of man.


Charles LeBaron

“What economy of colors there, compared to a tropical fish or a sunrise or even a pigeon’s neck — dull red, indistinct gray buff, some splotches of green. But what opulence of forms — serpents, goblets, tapestries, coils, pouches, conch shells, washboards, sheets, waves, curls, fountains of translucent tissue.”


Robert Herrick

The body is the soul’s poor house or home, whose ribs the laths are and whose flesh the loam.


Kahlil Gibran

“Hallow the body as a temple to comeliness and sanctify the heart as a sacrifice to love; love recompenses the adorers.”


Cyril Connolly

If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given us to be denied at every turn, if our nature is always wrong and wicked, how ineffectual we are - like fishes not meant to swim.