The universe evolves in consciousness of itself and causes itself to be. We are just this blessed consciousness, nothing more and nothing less. We are the light inside light that fuses into the atoms of our bodies; we are the fire that whirls across the stellar deeps and dances all things into being.
The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful. " If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.
When we dream, we create. All of life is a dream or a series of waking dreams. We dream our surroundings. We dream our friends, our relations. We dream our bodies. We dream our dreams.
Now I see that all relationships are virtual, even those that take place in person. Whether we use our bodies or a keyboard, it all comes down to two minds crying out from their solitude.
We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.
In that temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the great Abbey which has during many ages afforded a quiet resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the Great Hall.
The volumes, the surfaces, the lines-in one word, the structures that build a tectonic construction-do not represent the whole picture: there is also the movement that animated and still animates these bodies because the history continues and we live under no particular privileged conditions at any given time in this great process.
. . . this idea, that humans are essentially weak creatures, is actually deeply woven into a lot of the ways in which humans think about our bodies.
Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens to the which our wills are gardeners.
Large legislative bodies resolve themselves into coteries, and coteries into jealousies.
Let’s reserve judgment for people who beat their children, sell their daughters into prostitution, or deny women the right to make decisions about their bodies and their lives.
Aristotle saw nature as intelligent and purposive, whereas for the Epicureans, and the 17th century 'mechanical' philosophers, there is no intentionality in nature except where there are animal minds and bodies.
Most people are far more concerned that they can control their own bodies than they are about petitioning Congress.
At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague or subordinate. Not among Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds.
[Hazel] hissed in frustration. 'I hate eidolons. I thought Piper made them promise to stay away. ' 'Oh. . . ' Frank said, like he'd just had his own daily happy thought. 'Piper made them promise to stay off the ship and not possess any of us. But if they followed us, and used other bodies to attack us, then they're not technically breaking their vow. . . ' 'Great,' Leo muttered. 'Eidolons who are also lawyers. Now I really want to kill them.
If I had lady-spider legs, I would weave a sky where the stars lined up. Matresses would be tied down tight to their trucks, bodies would never crash through windshields. The moon would rise above the wine-dark sea and give babies only to maidens and musicians who had prayed long and hard. Lost girls wouldn't need compasses or maps. They would find gingerbread paths to lead them out of the forest and home again. They would never sleep in silver boxes with white velvet sheets, not until they were wrinkled-paper grandmas and ready for the trip.
The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring -- that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.
We define thermodynamics. . . as the investigation of the dynamical and thermal properties of bodies, deduced entirely from the first and second law of thermodynamics, without speculation as to the molecular constitution.
The family is both mystery and reality; it houses our bodies and our spirits.