bodily limitations Quotes

My life is stupidly physical.

Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.

A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.

It is disgusting -- Why must we have bodies?

The body is what reminds us on a daily basis that we're human. The body defies us, it betrays us, we have to struggle with it, you know. And it reveals in curious and in abiding ways how we are not perfect.

The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak.

Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out.

It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.

When you've been really beaten, you realize that you are just an envelope of skin, an easily penetrated envelope that holds together a lot of fluids and some rigid structures, which in their turn can simply be broken and invaded.

There's a sense of urgency in understanding that your body is not really your own. We can control it to a certain extent through habits and good behavior, but there's so much we don't have control of.

Your physicality is this great thing, but it is also the thing that makes you clumsy and limits you in the world, so to speak.

Flesh goes on pleasuring us, and humiliating us, right to the end.