Physical Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Just as certain people have physical and temperamental characteristics that make them good marathon runners, or pianists, or bar bouncers, others have what it takes to become superior cooks.

The brain, to be sure, is indeed the physical embodiment of the mind, the organ through which the mind finds expression and through which it acts in the world.

Jeffrey M. Schwartz

For an hour, blended with all she could offer, something noble had been created which had nothing to do with the physical world. And from the turn of his throat, the warmth of his hair, the strong, slender sinews of his hands, something further; which had. Though she combed the earth and searched through the smoke of the galaxies there was no being she wanted but this, who was not and should not be for Philippa Somerville.

Dorothy Dunnett

Daylight seemed then to be the physical manifestation of common sense.

Everything that happened, good or bad, would subtract something from the lessening store of useful energy, till a time arrived when nothing could happen any more, and the universe, frozen into eternal repose, would for ever be as if it were not. /.../ The physical course of nature does not merely fail to indicate design, it seems loudly to proclaim its absence.

Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.

John Kenneth Galbraith

More souls become casualties of war than physical bodies. War is a soul-shattering experience for the innocent.

The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world.

Statistical science is indispensable to modern statesmanship. In legislation as in physical science it is beginning to be understood that we can control terrestrial forces only by obeying their laws. The legislator must formulate in his statutes not only the national will, but also those great laws of social life revealed by statistics.

James A. Garfield

Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.

I preferred to set off and perish in search of my own kind than to live a lonely half-life of physical comfort and spiritual death on this murderous island.

As far as the physical miseries go, I am sure I will cope. I lived at Eton in the 1950s and I know all about life in uncomfortable quarters.

Jonathan Aitken

[Sports] provides a wonderful opportunity for initiating acquaintance. Regardless of the degree of our civilization, people still thrill to physical combat and admire the man who excels. He who is of proven merit in the field of major sports has shown to all that he is possessed of strength, vigor, stamina, and courage. The great majority of people want to know such a man... How well I have taken advantage of the football reputation it was my good fortune to gain is for others to judge, but I personally am very thankful for the whole experience and the fun and friends it has brought me.

I believe that there are varying points of contact. You have to be able to see the whole thing first. All great paintings are sculptures – there's so much of the factualness about it that a great painting forces you into a visual, physical movement of yourself. That's what determines the way you experience a painting kinetically. You move closer, you sight down it, you till your head, you step back, you feel as though you are in it. That being in it is just as important as looking from a distance.

Having purpose and vision during retirement is one of the most important determinants of mental, social, spiritual, and physical well-being in later life.

Harold G. Koenig

The crisis of physical hunger is essentially a crisis of faith. What or whom will you trust to meet your most basic needs? Will you trust the God who made human bodies, or will you seek your own way? (Deuteronomy 8:1-3)

Physical disability looms pretty large in one's life. But it doesn't devour one wholly. I'm not, for instance, Ms. MS, a walking, talking embodiment of a chronic incurable degenerative disease.

Underneath your physical and psychological form, you are one with Life itself, one with Being.

Physical theories must not introduce as many arbitrary constants as there are phenomena to be accounted for; they must establish connections among the various experimental facts and, above all, must lead to predictions.

Henri Poincaré

All of Chinese thinking - Confucianism, Taoism, as well as Buddhism - contains the idea that in the course of life, man will shape harmoniously those psychic and physical predispositions that he received as capital assets by unifying them and giving them form from within a center.

Richard Wilhelm (sinologist)

In an information economy, entrepreneurs master the science of information in order to overcome the laws of the purely physical sciences. They can succeed because of the surprising power of the laws of information, which are conducive to human creativity. The central concept of information theory is a measure of freedom of choice. The principle of matter, on the other hand, is not liberty but limitation- it has weight and occupies space.

None of the three great apes is considered ancestral to modern man, Homo sapiens, but they remain the only other type of extant primate with which human beings share such close physical characteristics. From them we may learn much concerning the behavior of our earliest primate prototypes, because behavior, unlike bones, teeth, or tools, does not fossilize.

On the very instant that we know that our assailant intends us serious physical harm, we must work just as fast as we can.

Instead of antiquated notions of physical daring, courage is much more about making small choices to take initiative even when we are experiencing anxiety and facing risk.

Robert Biswas-Diener

Attraction, as gravitation, is the muscle and tendon of the universe, by which its mass is held together and its huge limbs are wielded. As cohesion and adhesion, it determines the multitude of physical features of its different parts. As chemical or interatomic action, it is the final source to which we trace all material changes.