- Quotations on Breath & Breathing(18/24)
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- MUSCLE, PAIN, BREATH, ESCAPE, SUFFERING, SHAKING
- Great pain urges all animals, and has urged them during endless generations, to make the
most violent and diversified efforts to escape from the cause of suffering. Even when a
limb or other separate part of the body is hurt, we often see a tendency to shake it, as
if to shake off the cause, though this may obviously be impossible. Thus a habit of
exerting with the utmost force al the muscles will have been established, whenever great
suffering is experienced. As the muscles of the chest and vocal organs are habitually
used, these will be particularly liable to be acted on, and loud, harsh screams or cries
will be uttered. But the advantage derived from outcries has here probably come into play
in an important manner; for the young of most animals, when in distress or danger, call
loudly to their parents for aid, as do the members of the same community for mutual aid.
- Charles Darwin, Expression of The Emotions In Man And Animals
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- ORATORY, ELOQUENCE, IMAGERY
- "Thoughts that breath, and words that burn."
- Gray
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- Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to
your thoughts.
- Thich Nhat Hanh
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- BREATH, AIR, ENVIRONMENT
- Courage is a matter of the red corpuscle. It is oxygen that makes every attack; without
oxygen in his blood to back him, a man attacks nothing-- not even a pie, much less a blank
canvas.
- Elbert Hubbard
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- FREEDOM, LIBERTY
- Liberty is the breath of progress.
- R.G. Ingersoll
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- "There is very little difference between one man and another," he
said,"when you go to the bottom of it. But what little there is , is very
important." And the remark certainly applies to this case. The general
over-contraction may be small when estimated in foot pounds, but its importance is immense
on account of its effects on the over-contracted person's spiritual life. This
follows as a necessary consequence from the theory of our emotions to which I made
reference at the beginning of this article. For by the sensations that so incessantly pour
in from the over-tense excited body the over-tense and excited habit of mind is kept up;
and the sultry, threatening, exhausting, thunderous inner atmosphere never quite clears
away.
- "If you never wholly give yourself up to the chair you sit it, but always keep your
leg and body muscles half contracted for a rise; if you breathe eighteen or nineteen
instead of sixteen times a minute, and never quite breath out at that,-- what mental mood
can you be in but one of inner panting and expectancy, and how can the future and its
worries possibly forsake your mind? On the other hand, how can they gain admission to your
mind if your brow be unruffled, your respiration calm and complete and your muscles all
relaxed?
- James, William, 1899, TALKS TO TEACHERS ON PSYCHOLOGY: And To Students On Some of Life's
Ideals, Chapter 1-The Gospel of Relaxation
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- "Invention and imitation, taken together, form, one may say, the warp and woof of
human life, in so far as it is social. The American over-tension and jerkiness and
breathlessness and intensity and agony of expression are primarily social, and only
secondarily physiological, phenomena. They are bad habits, nothing more or less,
bred of custom or example, born of imitation of bad models and the cultivation of false
personal ideals.
- James, Wm.
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- "A thing of BEAUTY is a JOY forever. Its loveliness increases; it will never pass
into nothingness; but still will keep. A bower for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams,
and health, and quiet breathing."
- Keats, John 1795-1821/hl
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- MEMORY, CHANGE, BODY
- There is what I call the long body. That body is the present history of all the bodies
we have lived from the egg-sperm implosion, through all the embryonic stages, through
childhood to the present. ...our past lifestyles can still be seen in the present shape of
our bodies. ...If, for example, we have lived a competitive life, the scars of
competition, like raised shoulders and fighting upper chest breathing, may still be
present.
- Stanley Keleman, Somatic Reality
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- SINGING, THRILLS
- "There is something exceedingly thrilling in the voices of children singing. Though
their music is unskillful, yet it finds its way to the heart with wonderful alacrity.
Voices of cherubs are they, for they breath of Paradise; clear liquid tones, that flow
from pure lips and innocent hearts, like the sweetness of a flute, or the falling of water
from a fountain."
- LONGFELLOW
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- PERSPECTIVE, MEMORY, HORIZON, VISION, ATTITUDE
- "It is only in the space that our thoughts and our feelings enclose that our
happiness can breath in freedom."
- Maeterlinck, Maurice, WISDOM and DESTINY
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- Perhaps the final outcome and consumation of all wealth is in the producing as many as
possible full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy hearted human creatures. Our modern wealth,
I think, has rather a tendency the other way.
- John Ruskin, Unto This Last
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- Youth will never live to age unless they keep themselves in breath with exercise, and in
heart with joyfulness.
- Sir P. Sidney
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- OPTIMISM, DELIGHT, JOY, ENERGY
- To breath the air, how delicious!
- To speak, to walk, to seize something by the hand!...
- To be this incredible God I am!..
- O amazement of things, even the last particle!
- O spirituality of things!
- I too carol the Sun, usher'd or at noon, or as now, setting;
- I too throb to the brain and beauty of the earth and of all the growths of the earth....
- Walt Whitman
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- Memories thrill,
- Like a breath from the wood, like a breeze from the hill.
- Holmes, O.W.
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- He that waits for an opportunity... may breathe out his life in idle wishes, and regret,
in the last hour..
- Johnson, Samuel, Idler
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- TRUTH, SINCERITY
- "Thou art full of love and honesty,
- And weigh'st thy words before thou givest them breath,--
- Therefore these stops of thine fright me the more:
- for such things, in a flase, disloyal knave,
- Are trick of custom; but in a man that's just,
- They are close denotements working from the heart,
- That passion cannot rule."
- Shakespeare
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- MEMORY
- "But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
- nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
- Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in its shade.
- When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
- So long as men can breath or eyes can see,
- So long lives this and this gives life to thee."
- William Shakespeare, 1564-1616 sonnets/os
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