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The senses are our faculties of sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch

• The senses: A faculty by which the body perceives an external stimulus; one of the faculties of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. The Oxford Dictionary
• The senses: Any of the faculties, as sight, hearing, smell, taste, or touch, by which humans and animals perceive stimuli originating from outside or inside the body. Dictionary.com
• Perception,  Mindfulness,  Presence,  The body

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The senses are the only way we can know the world

• The senses are fundamentally the only way we can know the world. Jon Kabat-Zinn
• . . . there is no perfect knowledge which can be entitled ours, that is innate; none but what has been obtained from experience, or derived in some way from our senses. William Harvey
• All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason. Immanuel Kant
• If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. Rachel Carson
• When our knowing exceeds our sensing, we will no longer be deceived by the illusions of our senses. Walter Russell
• Through seven figures come sensations for a man; there is hearing for sounds, sight for the visible, nostril for smell, tongue for pleasant or unpleasant tastes, mouth for speech, body for touch, passages outwards and inwards for hot or cold breath. Through these come knowledge or lack of it.  Hippocrates
• The senses are a kind of reason. Taste, touch and smell, hearing and seeing, are not merely a means to sensation, enjoyable or otherwise, but they are also a means to knowledge – and are, indeed, your only actual means to knowledge. St. Thomas Aquinas
• The nature of the world we experience

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The senses are our windows to the world

• Sometimes in a crowd we feel tired, cold, and lonely. We may wish to withdraw to be by ourselves and become warm again, as I did when I closed the windows and sat by the fire, protected from the damp, cold wind.  Our senses are our windows to the world, and sometimes the wind blows through them and disturbs everything within us.  Some of us leave our windows open all the time, allowing the sights and sounds of the world to invade us, penetrate us, and expose our sad, troubled selves.  We feel so cold, lonely, and afraid.  Thich Nhat Hanh
• Exploration

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The senses are the windows of the soul

• Blake said that the body was the soul’s prison unless the five senses are fully developed and open. He considered the senses the ‘windows of the soul.’ When sex involves all the senses intensely, it can be like a mystical experience. Jim Morrison
• The five senses are the ministers of the soul. Leonardo da Vinci
• The soul

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The senses are our window to beauty

• Beauty is that which delights the senses—including the “sixth sense” of the mind. Rick Hanson
• For every beauty there is an eye somewhere to see it. For every truth there is an ear somewhere to hear it. For every love there is a heart somewhere to receive it. Ivan Panin
• How intoxicating is the triumph of beauty, and how right it is to name it queen of the universe! How many courtiers, how many slaves, have submitted to it! But alas! Why must it be that what flatters our senses almost always deceives our souls? de Surin
• Beauty

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The senses provide us with some of life’s simplest joys

• Truly wise men called on each element alike to minister to their joy, and while the touch of sun-bathed air, the fragrance of garden soil, the ductible qualities of mud, and the spark-whirling rapture of playing with fire, had each their special charm, they did not overlook the bliss of getting their feet wet. Kenneth Grahame
• The fragrance of white tea is the feeling of existing in the mists that float over waters; the scent of peony is the scent of the absence of negativity: a lack of confusion, doubt, and darkness; to smell a rose is to teach your soul to skip; a nut and a wood together is a walk over fallen Autumn leaves; the touch of jasmine is a night’s dream under the nomad’s moon.   JoyBell C.
• Your body can be one of the greatest sources of pleasure when you open your five senses fully and experience the physical wonder of being alive. Pleasure can come in the form of sight, like when you see a magnificent sunset, or taste, like when you eat a favorite food. It can come as a glorious musical sound or the soft touch of a lover. The only secret to learning the lesson of pleasure is to make time and space for it in your life. Cherie Carter-Scott
• Savour life’s simple joys

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The senses can feed and heal the soul

• Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul. Oscar Wilde
• What the soul cries out for is the resurrection of the senses. Even in this life, matter would be nothing to us if it were not the source of sensations. S. Lewis
• William Blake says the body is “that portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses.” I live with that idea.  I sit and look out my window here in Canada and the autumn trees are golden against the blue sky.  I can feel their “food” coming into my eyes and going down, down, down, interacting inside, and I fill up with gold.  My soul is fed.  I see, I smell, I taste, I hear, I touch. Through the orifices of my body, I give and I receive.  I am not trying to capture what is absent.  It’s that interchange between the embodied soul and the outside world that is the dynamic process.  That’s how growth takes place.  That is life.  Marion Woodman
• Man has no body distinct from his soul; for that called body is a portion of the soul discern’d by the five senses, the chief inlets of the soul in this age. William Blake
• The sensory world is the school, without which the human being would never come to the spirit. (Rudolf Steiner).
• I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether. Socrates
• The soul

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The senses feed our dreams

• Our dreams drench us in senses, and senses steps us again in dreams. Amos Bronson Alcott
• Dreams

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The senses, if we awaken to them, make us more fully alive

• Your body can be one of the greatest sources of pleasure when you open your five senses fully and experience the physical wonder of being alive. Pleasure can come in the form of sight, like when you see a magnificent sunset, or taste, like when you eat a favorite food. It can come as a glorious musical sound or the soft touch of a lover. The only secret to learning the lesson of pleasure is to make time and space for it in your life. Cherie Carter-Scott
• I acknowledge the privilege of being alive in a human body at this moment, endowed with senses, memories, emotions, thoughts, and the space of mind in its wisdom aspect. Alex Grey
• When the wind blows and the warm sun strikes our cold bodies, do we actually feel it, or do we reason it into being? How many of us are actually alive? Actually living? Look around. Ian Factor
• What greater gift than being able to communicate and enable our fellow humans the sensations of being alive. Nicoletta Baumeister
• When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive. Jasper Johns
• To live is not merely to breathe: it is to act; it is to make use of our organs, senses, faculties-of all those parts of ourselves which give us the feeling of existence. Jacques Rousseau
• Being fully alive

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The senses are the seeds of our wisdom

• How does your experience of one sense affect all the others? In addition to being the conduits of pleasure and pain, your senses are the midwives of intelligence. Michael J. Gelb
• If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. Rachel Carson
• There is deep wisdom within our very flesh, if we can only come to our senses and feel it.  Elizabeth A. Behnke
• Wisdom

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The senses are the seeds of our understanding

• Nothing exists in the intellect that has not first gone through the senses. Plutarch
• Nothing is in the understanding, which was not first perceived by some of the senses. John Locke
• There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses. Diane Ackerman
• The senses are our bridge between the incomprehensible and the comprehensible. August Macke
• Understanding

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The senses are the seeds of intellect of the mind

• The mind’s capacity is limitless, and its manifestations are inexhaustible. Seeing forms with your eyes, hearing sounds with your ears, smelling odors with your nose, tasting flavors with your tongue, every movement or state is all your mind. Bodhidharma (c. 440 AD – 528 AD)
• The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect. Carson McCullers
• Nothing exists in the intellect that has not first gone through the senses. Plutarch

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There are those than revere reason over the senses …

• When the senses fail us, reason must step in. Galileo Galilei
• All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason. Immanuel Kant
• Reason

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… while others argue they are deeply interlinked

• The senses are a kind of reason. Taste, touch and smell, hearing and seeing, are not merely a means to sensation, enjoyable or otherwise, but they are also a means to knowledge – and are, indeed, your only actual means to knowledge. St. Thomas Aquinas
• Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. Fyodor Dostoevsky

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Be like a child and keep your senses alive

• I had proof that I had five senses, that I knew how to get myself to function! And then I lost my childhood… Yves Klein
• Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way all over again. Eudora Welty
• To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun.  At least they have a very superficial seeing.  The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child.  The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.  Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Nurture your inner child

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Cherish and revere your senses …

• Each sensation is precious, protect it, cherish it, keep it. Never give it away. You must develop that balance which allows all of the world to come in to you, and only that which you have expressed in your art to move back out again into the world. Robert Henri
• Revere your senses; don’t degrade them with drugs, with depression, with willful oblivion. Eustace Conway
• Appreciation

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… by appreciating the wonder of them

• How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god?  Alan Watts
• Wonder

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Be grateful for the great gift of your senses

• God, we thank you for this earth, our homes; for the wide sky and the blessed sun, for the salt sea and the running water, for the everlasting hills and the never resting winds, for trees and the common grass underfoot. We thank you for our senses by which we hear the songs of birds, and see the splendor of the summer fields, and taste of the autumn fruits, and rejoice in the feel of the snow, and smell the breath of the spring. Grant us a heart wide open to all this beauty; and save our souls from being so blind that we pass unseeing when even the common thorn bush is aflame with your glory.  Walter Rauschenbusch
• I acknowledge the privilege of being alive in a human body at this moment, endowed with senses, memories, emotions, thoughts, and the space of mind in its wisdom aspect. Alex Grey
• I am thrilled to be an artist! I am grateful for this opportunity to feel the wind with my eyes, to love the earth with my ears, and to taste the fire with my tongue.  Patricia D’Annunzio Mahoney
• Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses. Hannah Arendt
• To be able to feel the lightest touch really is a gift. Christopher Reeve
• Gratitude

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We only use a tiny percentage of our senses

• You must learn to heed your senses. Humans use but a tiny percentage of theirs. They barely look, they rarely listen, they never smell, and they think that they can only experience feelings through their skin. But they talk, oh, do they talk. Michael Scott, The Alchemyst

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Magic occurs when we use more of them

• Magic is really only the utilization of the entire spectrum of the senses. Humans have cut themselves off from their senses. Now they see only a tiny portion of the visible spectrum, hear only the loudest of sounds, their sense of smell is shockingly poor and they can only distinguish the sweetest and sourest of tastes. Michael Scott
• The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper. W.B. Yeats
• Magic

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Get into your senses and make active use of them

• You shall use all your senses to monitor very carefully all that goes on about you, inside and outside. Sandy Woodward
• Think with the whole body. Taisen Deshimaru
• Not the senses I have but what I do with them is my kingdom. Helen Keller

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Awaken your senses …

• What the soul cries out for is the resurrection of the senses. Even in this life, matter would be nothing to us if it were not the source of sensations. S. Lewis
• Wake up your senses, come to your senses and, in turn, you may fire up your passion in all areas of your life! Corrie Woods
• We do everything so automatically that we have forgotten the poignancy of smell, of physical anguish, of tactile sensations of all kinds. Lygia Clark
• Awakening,  Mindfulness

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… through spending time in nature for nothing both sooths and rouses the senses more…

• As evening approached, I came down from the heights of the island, and I liked then to go and sit on the shingle in some secluded spot by the lake; there the noise of the waves and the movement of the water, taking hold of my senses and driving all other agitation from my soul, would plunge me into delicious reverie in which night often stole upon me unawares. Jacques Rousseau
• I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order. John Burroughs
• Nature speaks to us through our senses in ways that are unique to each of us. Whether it’s through vision, feelings, inner impressions, insights or in other ways, we exchange energy with nature all the time. Our senses, both inner and outer provide pathways that help us to integrate and make use of it all. Leslie Montana
• The birds and animals, trees and grasses, rocks, water and wind are our allies. They waken our senses, rouse our passions, renew our spirits and fill us with vision, courage, and joy. David Gaines
• The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows… Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach. Henry Beston
• The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding. Francis Bacon
• Nature

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… through the power of play…

• Playology is about waking up our senses, infusing our organs of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting – and the higher cognitive senses as well, with the spirit of play. Play ignites creativity and spontaneity. Playing together leads to trust and cooperation. Ellie Katz
• Play

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… through developing a sense of marvel about life…

• So much of our life passes in a comfortable blur. Living on the senses requires an easily triggered sense of marvel, a little extra energy, and most people are still lazy about life.  Life is something that happens to them while they wait for death.  Diane Ackerman

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… through listening to beautiful music…

• When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses, then it has missed its point. Maria Callas
• Refine your senses through the great masters of music, painting, and poetry.  Ernst Haas
• Music

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… through writing…

• Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it’s raining, but the feel of being rained upon. E. L. Doctorow
• Write about it. The slower pace of writing and full engagement of your senses helps you travel down the path of the anxiety message to its source.  We don’t always know where our anxiety is coming from, so we have to take the time to dig and poke. Ariella Baston
• When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It’s like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.  Haruki Murakami
• Writing

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… through gardening

• A garden makes all our senses swim with pleasure. William Lawson
• Of all the ingredients we employ in the creation of a garden, scent is probably the most potent and the least understood. Its effects can be either direct and immediate, drowning our senses in a surge of sugary vapor, or they can be subtle and delayed, slowly wafting into our consciousness, stirring our emotions and coloring our thoughts. Stephen Lacey
• Working in the garden gives me something beyond the enjoyment of the senses. It gives me a profound feeling of inner peace. Ruth Stout
• The greatest gift of the garden is the restoration of the five senses. Hanna Rion
• Gardening

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… through savouring wine…

• Wine speaks to all the senses: the eyes behold the color, tone, and shade; the nose, the bouquet, the fingers and lips caress the cool crystal; the ears delight in the subtle swishing of the liquid; the tongue rejoices in the reward of a rich harvest. Mary Lou Posch
• Wine

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… through appreciating art …

• Art communicates through the senses – a chef through taste and smell, a musician through sound, and a visual artist through sight. But they all have one thing in common – they all lead directly to the heart. Andrew Hamilton
• Drawing is speaking to the eye; talking is painting to the ear. Joseph Joubert
• All the arts are based on the senses. What they do for the person who practices them, and also the persons interested in them, is make that particular sense more active and more acute.  Henry Moore
• Art that wants to be felt does not have the need to be admired. Darby Bannard
• My paintings can be smelled, looked at, touched, tasted. I want that sensuousness. Mark Schlesinger
• My task is to make you hear, feel and see. That and no more, and that is everything. Joseph Conrad
• The sound of wings beating as birds fly overhead, the splash of waterfowl as they gently land on a river, the sound of breezes as they whisper through the foliage, the ‘whoosh’ of wind going through tall grasses, crickets calling out on a warm summer day. It pleases me if I can portray an artwork that lets the viewer ‘hear’ the sounds I love. Shirley Harding
• Art

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… through appreciating colour…

• Colour, they say, is nothing but a sensation of the eye. Well, a ‘beautiful life’ is nothing else but a sensation of the mind. Sweta Killa
• Drawing is of the spirit; color is of the senses. Henri Matisse
• Colour

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Sharpen your senses…

• It’s great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses. John Updike
• Observe, record, tabulate, communicate. Use your five senses. . . . Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone you can become expert. William Osler

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Come to your senses

• You don’t make me feel like you used to. That’s why I’m leaving. That’s why people leave each other. They come to their senses and get selfish again. Henry Rollins
• Lose your mind and come to your senses. Fritz Perls

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Use your senses to respond to the needs of the living world

• There is an intimate reciprocity to the senses; as we touch the bark of a tree, we feel the tree touching us; as we lend our ears to the local sounds and ally our nose to the seasonal scents, the terrain gradually tunes us in turn. The senses, that is, are the primary way that the earth has of informing our thoughts and of guiding our actions. Huge centralized programs, global initiatives, and other ‘top down” solutions will never suffice to restore and protect the health of the animate earth. For it is only at the scale of our direct, sensorial interactions with the land around us that we can appropriately notice and respond to the immediate needs of the living world. Yet at the scale of our sensing bodies the earth is astonishingly, irreducibly diverse. It discloses itself to our senses not as a uniform planet inviting global principles, but as this forested realm embraced by water, or a windswept prairie, or a desert silence. We can know the needs of any particular region only by participating in its specificity – by becoming familiar with its cycles and styles, awake and attentive to its other inhabitants. David Abram
• Giving,  Service

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Get out of the attic of your mind and into the wonderful world of your senses …

• Get out of the attic of your mind and into the world of wonder and senses. Eckhart Tolle
• Lose your mind and come to your senses. Fritz Perls
• O for a life of sensations rather that of thoughts!  John Keats
• People have to go out of their mind before they can come to their senses. Timothy Leary
• Awareness,  Presence

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… through the practice of meditation and mindfulness

• And so, when you sit down to meditate, connect with your senses – connect with how you feel, what you hear, what you sense, what you smell. Your senses actually anchor you in the moment. When your mind wanders, anchor yourself in your senses. Start to listen. What are the sounds outside? Start to feel. How do you feel in your body? Adyashanti
• As you are sitting, what does it sound and smell like? Through your senses, open to the whole world within and around you. This grounds you in a deeper reality than your mind, and it also helps focus you in a place other than your mind. Adyashanti
• If you’re actually doing it correctly, you’ll find yourself vividly present to your five senses, vividly present to your body, vividly present to your experience. Adyashanti
• You can stop and pay attention to the present moment at least five different times during the day (not counting your meditation sessions). That way you can pay attention to a different sense every time. In other words, rotate through your senses all through the day. Rachel Rofe
• True Meditation is getting out of our minds and into our senses, actually feeling what it is we are feeling. We hear what is happening around us rather than just hearing our thoughts. We see what’s in front of us rather than being totally occupied by the little movies in our minds. Adyashanti
• Meditation,  Mindfulness

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Meditation also allows you to calm and quieten your senses …

• Before embarking on important undertakings, sit quietly, calm your senses and thoughts, and meditate deeply. You will then be guided by the great creative power of Spirit. Paramahansa Yogananda
• When you meditate, the silence of the senses illumines the presence of God within. Gurumayi Chidvilasananda
• Meditation

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… a way to cope in a world where our senses are continually overloaded

• Life has become a state of sensory overload. Joseph Curiale
• It’s like being a newborn, this sudden sensory overload of noise, color, smells and gravity after months of quietly floating, encased in relative calm and isolation. No wonder babies cry in protest when they’re born. Chris Hadfield, astronaut
• Survival in more primitive ages required constant alertness, but survival in today’s mechanized world almost demands that we turn off our senses. In urban life especially, there is too much to see, hear and smell. Carole Katchen
• The sanitary and mechanical age we are now entering makes up for the mercy it grants to our sense of smell by the ferocity with which it assails our sense of hearing.  Havelock Ellis

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Use your senses to become anchored in the present moment …

• Memories establish the past; Senses perceive the present; Imaginations shape the future. Toba Beta
• Use your senses fully. Be where you are. Look around. Just look, don’t interpret. See the light, shapes, colors, textures. Be aware of the silent presence of each thing. Be aware of the space that allows everything to be. Listen to the sounds; don’t judge them. Listen to the silence underneath the sounds. Touch something – anything – and feel and acknowledge its Being. Observe the rhythm of your breathing; feel the air flowing in and out, feel the life energy inside your body. Allow everything to be, within and without. Allow the “isness” of all things. Move deeply into the Now. Eckhart Tolle
• The more we go in the direction of Essence and away from the ego, the more pleasure we experience, because pleasure is largely dependent on how present we are to whatever we are doing. Anything can be pleasurable if we are present to it without the interference of the egoic mind. The simplest things are pleasurable when we are present to them, even things we generally don’t like. Being present is one of the secrets to happiness. The more we drop out of our egoic mind and into our senses, the more pleasure our senses deliver. Pleasure actually points the way Home. Gina Lake
• Sense perception is closer to who you are than thought.  Eckhart Tolle
• Sense perceptions are an entrance into presence. Be aware of two dimensions; that which you are perceiving (form) and that which is perceiving (formless).  Eckhart Tolle
• Presence,  Live in the present

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… becoming the space of awareness in which the sense perceptions happen

• You then no longer derive your identity, your sense of who you are, from the incessant stream of thinking that in the old consciousness you take to be yourself. What a liberation to realize that the “voice in my head” is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that. The awareness that is prior to thought, the space in which the thought — or the emotion or sense perception — happens. Eckhart Tolle
• Those who know this truth, whose consciousness is unified, think always, “I am not the doer” While seeing or hearing, touching or smelling; eating, moving about, or sleeping; breathing or speaking, letting go or holding on, even opening or closing the eyes, they understand that these are only the movements of the senses among sense objects. Bhagavad- Gita
• Perception

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Gaining “control” over your senses is a step towards spiritual liberation

• He who lives with his senses well controlled, moderate in his food and drink, he will not be overthrown, any more than the wind throws down a rocky mountain. Buddha
• Not to have control over the senses is like sailing in a rudderless ship, bound to break to pieces on coming in contact with the very first rock. Gandhi
• With senses, mind, and intellect under control; having liberation as the prime goal; free from lust, anger, and fear; such a sage is verily liberated. Bhagavad Gita
• Stop complaining. Take charge of your life. You need to control the mind and the senses – sharp, alert, awake. Focus your life on God by getting control of your senses. That loss of control of your senses means that you’re not going to God. You control your mind with intelligence. Use your brain for control. Hardly anybody is controlling their mind and their emotions, hardly anybody. And because of this, most people are in chaos in one way or another in their lives. Gourasana
• The person whose mind is always free from attachment, who has subdued the mind and senses, and who is free from desires, attains the supreme perfection of freedom from Karma through renunciation. Bhagavad Gita
• Spirituality

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By all means take great pleasure in the senses …

• How much pleasure will you allow yourself? Many people have an invisible quota in their minds for the amount of joy they will permit themselves to experience. They become so busy living life that they view pleasure as a luxury they simply do not have time for. Things like lovemaking or playing take a backseat to the everyday motions of living. However, your life simply will not work as well when you deny yourself pleasure. The old adage of all work and no play making you dull is quite true; you may find yourself living a rather colorless life if you do not pause every now and then to indulge your senses. Pleasure is like the oil that keeps the machine of your life running smoothly. Without it, the gears stick and you will most likely break down. Cherie Carter- Scott
• If something feels good once, it feels even better when there’s more. Mary Smart
• If we lose sight of pleasures and luxuries that intoxicate the senses in the most sensuous and beautiful and simplest of ways, then we`ve lost a lot. Savannah Page
• Your body can be one of the greatest sources of pleasure when you open your five senses fully and experience the physical wonder of being alive. Pleasure can come in the form of sight, like when you see a magnificent sunset, or taste, like when you eat a favorite food. It can come as a glorious musical sound or the soft touch of a lover. The only secret to learning the lesson of pleasure is to make time and space for it in your life. Cherie Carter-Scott
• Relish the pleasures of daily life, starting with your senses: What smells good? Tastes delicious?  Looks beautiful?  Sounds wonderful?  Feels good on your skin?  Next, include the mind: What do you like to think about or remember. Savor these pleasures. Sink into them, take your time with them, and let them fill your body and mind. Marinate in pleasure!  Rick Hanson
• Take pleasure in the senses. Focus on the sweetness of the ripe mango, the aroma of the bakery, or the warmth of the sun when you step out from the shade.  Sonja Lyubomirsky
• Pleasure,  Savouring

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… but realise that true happiness comes from within

• Pleasure comes from the senses, happiness from the soul
• If hedonic happiness is the happiness of the senses, then eudaemonic happiness is the happiness of the soul. It is found in activities that are aligned with our fundamental human needs for meaning, connection, and personal growth, and it brings a sense of engagement, contentment, and fulfillment. This is the happiness we feel when we spend time with loved ones and when we grow as people. Unlike with hedonic happiness, time spent in eudaemonic pursuits fundamentally changes us, allowing us to flourish and grow as individuals and as communities. Craig & Marc Kielburger
• Pleasure is great – but it doesn’t last. Pleasure comes from your five senses. From a great meal, a nice glass of wine and a new car. Nothing wrong with these things – they make the experience of life better. But they are fleeeting… Happiness is the DNA of pleasure. My point is simply this: Pleasure comes from something on the outside. Happiness comes from within. It’s a state you create by choice. It’s a decision. It’s an act of will. People can be happy while they are going through great pain and adversity. There’s no pleasure evident in their external lives yet they are content on the inside. And conversely, tons of people are surrounded by pleasure (fast cars, nice homes, great clothes) but there is no joy within. So choose to be happy.   Robin Sharma
• Let us treasure up in our soul some of those things which are permanent…, not of those which will forsake us and be destroyed, and which only tickle our senses for a little while… Gregory of Nazianzus
• A life of mere pleasure! A little while, in the spring-time of the senses, in the sunshine of prosperity, in the jubilee of health, it may seem well enough. But how insufficient, how mean, how terrible when age comes, and sorrow, and death! A life of pleasure! What does it look like when these great changes beat against it–when the realities of eternity stream in? It looks like the fragments of a feast, when the sun shines upon the withered garlands, and the tinsel, and the overturned tables, and the dead lees of wine. H. Chapin
• The treasure within

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Trust your senses for they tend to tell the truth …

• As a cook, gardener and painter, I trust my senses. Bunny Harvey
• Just because it’s on the radio doesn’t mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses. Don DeLillo
• These [the senses] we trust, first, last, and always. Lucretius
• All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses. Friedrich Nietzsche
• All we have to believe is our senses: the tools we use to perceive the world, our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. Neil Gaiman
• Truth

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… more so often than reason and logic …

• Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. Fyodor Dostoevsky
• When the wind blows and the warm sun strikes our cold bodies, do we actually feel it, or do we reason it into being? How many of us are actually alive? Actually living? Look around. Ian Factor
• Reason,  Logic

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… and more so than general opinion

• Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one. Charles MacKay
• Men in general judge more by the sense of sight than by the sense of touch, because everyone can see but few can test by feeling. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are; and those few do not dare take a stand against the general opinion. Niccolo Machiavelli
• Opinion

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However, also know the senses can deceive …

• One of the effects of fear is to disturb the senses and cause things to appear other than what they are. Miguel De Cervantes
• The sight of the eye, the hearing of the ear, the touch of the hand may each and all be deceived, but the instructions of the spirit are in all things correct. The combined senses may misguide or fail, but he who happily secures the companionship of the Holy Spirit, walks in the ways of life and neither fears, becomes weary nor faints by the wayside. Moses Thatcher
• Every one of the five senses can be twisted to deliver a completely different picture of the world. If by picture we mean sight, sound, smell, taste and texture of things, a troubling conclusion looms. Apart from the very unreliable picture running inside the brain, we have no proof that reality is anything like what we see. Deepak Chopra
• As a painter, I realized that what we see is just manifestation of unseen power. Since then [1958 Coup in Iraq], reality started to take another form in my mind. Hence, I was aware of deception of our senses. Ala Bashir
• Illusion

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… especially when we are afraid

• One of the effects of fear is to disturb the senses and cause things to appear other than what they are. Miguel De Cervantes
• Though fear is literally an evolutionary gift meant to sharpen your senses and energize you during times of great stress, it can nonetheless become a barrier that prevents you from fulfilling your potential by causing you to miss out on rewarding, life-changing experiences. Madisyn Taylor
• Fear

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Appreciate the senses are limited

• Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world. Nikola Tesla

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Integrate your senses with your thoughts and feelings

• Living a life of integrity starts with making and keeping promises, until the whole human personality, the senses, the thinking, the feeling, and the intuition, are ultimately integrated and harmonized. Stephen Covey
• Emotions,  Thinking

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Don’t numb your senses

• Numbing the senses by monotonously repeating an assertion is a key element in utilizing mind control techniques. Joost Meerloo
• Revere your senses; don’t degrade them with drugs, with depression, with willful oblivion. Eustace Conway

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There are more than five senses

• I am almost frightened out of my seven senses. Cervantes (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra)
• I have a sixth sense, but not the other five. If I wasn’t making money, they’d put me away. Red Skelton
• Those who know God know that it is quite a mistake to suppose that there are only five senses. Coventry Patmore

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Imagination is a kind of sense

• In the realist you have the sorry sight of the five senses deprived of their imagination. Robert Brault
• The faculty of imagination is both the rudder and the bridle of the senses. Leonardo da Vinci
• The first of our senses which we should take care never to let rust through disuse is that sixth sense, the imagination. I mean the wide-open eye which leads us to see truth more vividly, to apprehend more broadly, to concern ourselves more deeply, to be, all our life long, sensitive and awake to the powers and responsibilities given to us as human beings. Christopher Fry
• The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The source of genius is imagination alone, . . . the refinement of the senses that sees what others do not see, or sees them differently. Eugene Delacroix
• Imagination

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Healing is a kind of sense

• Our Creator has given us five senses to help us survive threats from the external world, and a sixth sense, our healing system, to help us survive internal threats. Bernie Siegel
• Healing

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There are also the senses of the soul …

• Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and spiritual worlds are opened to him. For those who do not have such higher senses, these worlds are dark and silent, just as the bodily world is dark and silent for a being without eyes and ears. Rudolf Steiner
• The soul

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… like intuition, trust, empathy and compassion

• Our bodies have five senses: touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing. But not to be overlooked are the senses of our souls: intuition, peace, foresight, trust, empathy. The differences between people lie in their use of these senses; most people don’t know anything about the inner senses while a few people rely on them just as they rely on their physical senses, and in fact probably even more. JoyBell C.
• Instinct is the nose of the mind.  Delphine de Girardin
• I think people believe empathy to be compassion, that compassion is an inner sense (a sense of the soul). But empathy is a sense, while compassion isn’t a sense. Empathy is an affinity, a communion, a comprehension. They say that empathy is compassion, but I think that the two are independent of each other. You see, through empathy you will feel what another is feeling, including all those plans for manipulation and persuasion. You will feel everything, not just the parts that make you take compassion for the person, but also all the red flags! You see, empathy is a sense that works with the other senses such as foresight and intuition. So, we can feel compassion but we have to move with empathy. C. JoyBell C.
• Intuition,  Empathy,  Trust.  Compassion

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God has to be experienced beyond the five senses

• God is an intelligible sphere—a sphere known to mind, not to the senses—whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere. Joseph Campbell
• I don’t try to imagine a God; it suffices to stand in awe of the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it. Albert Einstein
• Look, it cannot be seen – it is beyond form. Listen, it cannot be heard – it is beyond sound. Grasp, it cannot be held – it is intangible.  Zen
• We stand, every day and every night, in the very presence of a power so incomparable as to make the senses reel. And yet, happily, this power–the intelligence behind all the marvels of the summer sky– is a benevolent one.  The person who pays atention will hear, deep within his or her soul, a quiet and friendly voice saying:  “This, and so much more also, is yours to share.  Vernon R. Harris
• The Creator has to be experienced beyond the five senses and the only instrument that can experience in this way, for you, is yourself – in the state of thoughtless awareness in which you declare ‘I am’ and hold it. Barry Long
• Today, Creator of the Universe, we ask that you open our heart and open our eyes so we can enjoy all of your creations and live in eternal love with you. Help us to see you in everything we perceive with our eyes,with our ears, with our heart, with all our senses. Let us perceive with eyes of love so that we find you wherever we go and see you in everything you create. Let us see you in every cell of our body, in every emotion of our mind, in every dream, in every flower, in every person we meet. You cannot hide from us because you are everywhere, and we are one with you. Don Miguel Ruiz
• God

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Great art uses all the senses

• All the arts are based on the senses. What they do for the person who practices them, and also the persons interested in them, is make that particular sense more active and more acute.  Henry Moore
• A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.  Gertrude Stein
• Body experience…is the centre of creation. I rarely draw what I see. I draw what I feel in my body. Barbara Hepworth
• Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way all over again. Eudora Welty
• I am thrilled to be an artist! I am grateful for this opportunity to feel the wind with my eyes, to love the earth with my ears, and to taste the fire with my tongue.  Patricia D’Annunzio Mahoney
• I expose my senses to other artists’ work, to stimulate things I desire to try and integrate into my own process. Keith Montgomery
• I like the sense of a slab of paint.  Jonathan Forrest
• I want to reach that state of condensation of sensations which constitutes a picture. Henri Matisse
• Inspiration in Science may have to do with ideas, but not in Art. In art it is in the senses that are instinctively responsive to the medium of expression. Arthur Erickson
• Merely to see… is not enough. It is necessary to have a fresh, vivid, physical contact with the object you draw through as many of the senses as possible – and especially through the sense of touch. Kimon Nicolaides
• Sensitivity to touch is one of the key distinctions between an artist and a person who is just using paint. Van Waldron
• Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one’s sensations. Paul Cezanne
• You get to the point where you can feel a certain sensation of light. Arthur Dove
• Sensation is an element of what I do, and why not? It’s not sensational for the sake of being sensational, but it’s sensational art… It’s like touching skin. Damien Hirst

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• Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through. George Eliot
• The other senses may be enjoyed in all their beauty when one is alone, but taste is largely social. Diane Ackerman, Natural History of the Senses.  Diane Ackerman

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• Men in general judge more by the sense of sight than by the sense of touch, because everyone can see but few can test by feeling. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are; and those few do not dare take a stand against the general opinion. Niccolo Machiavelli
• Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses. It fills the mind with the largest variety of ideas, converses with its objects at the greatest distance, and continues the longest in action without being tired or satiated. Joseph Addison
• Seeing is polysensory, combining the visual, tactile, and kinesthetic senses. Robert McKim
• The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears. Heraclitus
• The seeing of objects involves many sources of information beyond those meeting the eye when we look at an object. It generally involves knowledge of the object derived from previous experience, and this experience is not limited to vision but may include the other senses: touch, taste, smell, hearing, and perhaps also temperature or pain.   L. Gregory

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Smell makes the past come alive

• For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it is a pity that we use it so little.  Rachel Carson
• Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.  Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it. Vladimir Nabokov
• Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived. Helen Keller
• The sense of smell can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back pictures as sharp as photographs of scenes that had left the conscious mind.  Thalassa Cruso
• The olfactory system, anatomically, is right in the middle of the part of the brain that’s very important for memory. There are strong neural connections between the two.  Donald Wilson

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There is nothing like the smell of those you love

• When a baby comes you can smell two things: the smell of flesh, which smells like chicken soup, and the smell of lilies, the flower of another garden, the spiritual garden. Carlos Santana
• The best smell in the world is that man that you love. Jennifer Aniston

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More thoughts on smell

• The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of recognition, for old memories and old connection.   Lewis Thomas
• A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.  Eugene Ionesco
• A painting is not made to be sniffed.  Rembrandt
• If I were a maker of perfumes, I would make one and call it ‘Spring,’ and it would smell like this cool, sweet, early- morning air. Ann Petry
• You’re only here for a short visit. Don’t hurry, don’t worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way. Walter Hagen
• The sense of smell, like a faithful counsellor, foretells its character.  Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

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• Every other sense has an organ you can focus on, but touch is everywhere. Touch is the oldest sense, and the most urgent.  If a saber-toothed tiger is touching a paw to your shoulder, you need to know right away.  Any first-time touch, or change in touch, sends the brain into a flurry of activity.  Any continuous low-level touch becomes background.  Diane Ackerman, Natural History of the Senses
• Men in general judge more by the sense of sight than by the sense of touch, because everyone can see but few can test by feeling. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are; and those few do not dare take a stand against the general opinion. Niccolo Machiavelli
• Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth. Margaret Atwood
• To be able to feel the lightest touch really is a gift. Christopher Reeve
• Touch has a memory. John Keats
• It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others … an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands … hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact. Wallace Stegner
• We are not people who touch each other carelessly; every point of contact between us feels important, a rush of energy and relief. Veronica Roth
• Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. Leo Buscaglia
• That’s what it feels like when you touch me. Like millions of tiny universes being born and then dying in the space between your finger and my skin. Sometimes I forget. Iain Thomas, I Wrote This For You
• I feel the healing hands of God touch my heart and kiss my soul. Harley King
• Touch is a freaky thing when you’re not used to it. It makes you feel all kinds of things. Neal Shusterman
• our body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body’s deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body’s superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity. Henri Nouwen
• It’s often just enough to be with someone. I don’t need to touch them. Not even talk. A feeling passes between you both. You’re not alone. Marilyn Monroe
• The way towards each other is through our bodies. Words are the longest distance you can travel so complex and hazardous you lose your direction. Jeni Couzyn
• There is a place you can touch a woman that will drive her crazy. Her heart.
• Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. Rainer Maria Rilke

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Hearing is a sense but listening is an art

• Hearing is one of the body’s five senses. But listening is an art. Frank Tyger
• Relating to another on an intimate level means really listening with all one’s senses. Only in this way can one know the other person as he is. Jerry Greenwald
• Listening

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More thoughts on hearing

• Have you ever noticed that when you must struggle to hear something, you close your eyes?  Marilyn vos Savant
• The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard. William Hazlitt
• What is important is not what you hear said, it’s what you observe. Michael Connelly
• Listen to the trees as they sway in the wind. Their leaves are telling secrets. Their bark sings songs of olden days as it grows around the trunks. And their roots give names to all things. Their language has been lost.  But not the gestures. Vera Nazarian
• The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said. Peter Drucker

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Awaken the senses of others

• My task is to make you hear, feel and see. That and no more, and that is everything. Joseph Conrad
• What greater gift than being able to communicate and enable our fellow humans the sensations of being alive. Nicoletta Baumeister

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Love is the poetry of the senses

• As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks, I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour. William H. Gass
• Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses. Lao Tzu
• Love is the poetry of the senses. Honoré de Balzac
• Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other. Eight-year- old
• Love lost is still love. It takes a different form, that’s all. You can’t see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it. Life has to end. Love doesn’t. Mitch Albom
• The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart. Helen Keller
• The best smell in the world is that man that you love. Jennifer Aniston
• The lover is drawn by the thing loved, as the sense is by that which it perceives… Leonardo da Vinci
• I would rather have eyes that cannot see; ears that cannot hear; lips that cannot speak, than a heart that cannot love. Robert Tizon
• Sexual love is the most stupendous fact of the universe, and the most magical mystery our poor blind senses know. Amy Lowell
• Love

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The senses cannot be adequately described in words

• Nothing is more memorable than a smell. Still, when we try to describe a smell, words fail us like the fabrications they are.  The physiological links between the smell and language centers of the brain are pitifully weak, not so the links between the smell and memory centers. Our sense of smell can be extraordinarily precise, yet it’s almost impossible to describe how something smells to someone who hasn’t smelled it (e.g. a new book, lilac).  Smell is the mute sense, the one without words.  We use words in terms of other things to describe smells (e.g. floral, fruity, smoky).  We tend to describe how they make us feel. Try it.  Describe the smell of your  lover or your child, or your favorite scent.  Diane Ackerman, Natural History of the Senses
• Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses. Hannah Arendt

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Many animals are gifted with more developed senses than us

• We patronize the animals for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they are more finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other Nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time. Henry Beston
• We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well- developed condition, in the lower animals. Charles Darwin
• Animals

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Faith tells us what the senses do not

• Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them. Blaise Pascal

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• Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something he can see and feel. Ambrose Bierce
• In the land of the skunks, he who has half a nose is king.  Chris Farley
• It has been observed that one’s nose is never so happy as when it is thrust into the affairs of another, from which some physiologists have drawn the inference that the nose is devoid of the sense of smell.  Ambrose Bierce
• Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other. Eight-year-old
• Art is the reasoned derangement of the senses.  Kenneth Rexroth
• noise, n. A stench in the ear. Undomesticated music. The chief product and authenticating sign of civilization.  Ambrose Bierce

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