Hands quotes
11.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside hands — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Great pressure is brought to bear to make us undervalue ourselves. On the other hand, civilization teaches that each of us is an inestimable prize. There are, then, these two preparations: one for life and the other for death. Therefore we value and are ashamed to value ourselves."
"Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization. ... The first thing a woman does when she gets a little money into her hands is to hire some other poor wretch to do her housework."
"I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind; the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships. I don't complain, because I think my left hand's power, as much as it has, is due to its knowledge of what my right hand is doing."
"We think in youth that our bodies are identical to ourselves and have the same interests, but discover later in life that they are heartless companions who have been accidentally yoked with us, and who are as likely as not, in our extreme sickness or old age, to treat us with less mercy than we would have received at the hands of the worst bandits."
"She saw she had fallen into the hands of one of those doctors who have strayed too far from apparent in the direction of the soul."
"When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you."
"Neurotics, who cause less distress to themselves and their neighbours than those in the other category, are at war with their own natures. Their right hands are in conflict with their left. Psychotics, and it is those who commit purposeless crimes and prefer death to life, are at war with their environment. Right and left hands strike against the womb that carries them."
"Embraces do not matter; they merely indicate the will to love and may as well be followed by defeat as victory. But disregard means that now there needs to be no straining of the eyes, no stretching forth of the hands, no pressing of the lips, because theirs is such a union that they are no longer aware of the division of their flesh."
"A force as of madness in the hands of reason has done all that was ever done in the world."
"Men are grown mechanical in head and in the heart, as well as in the hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force of any kind."
"Venerable to me is the hard hand,--crooked, coarse,--wherein, notwithstanding, lies a cunning virtue, indispensably royal as of the sceptre of the planet."
"There is but one temple in this Universe: The Body. We speak to God whenever we lay our hands upon it."
"Republicans run the machine when it's their turn, and then hand the wheel over to Democrats when the public has had enough."
"I don't know necessarily that I would produce under my own company right now. Producing is not something that I'm thinking about. Directing is something that I will be doing very shortly, trying to figure out what to get my hands on. And I can't imagine writing a script and wanting to direct it and not having a producing credit, because I would want to have a big chunk of power on that end, if I wrote something."
"I can't memorize names and shake hands at the same time."
"I burned out my drawing hand by using it too much. The common word for it is writer's cramp. The fancy words for it are focal dystonia. The symptom in my case was a pinky finger that went spastic when I tried to draw."
"What really put me over the top was receiving a packet of hundreds of hand-written thank you notes, telling me how the kids were inspired and excited about the [Cube] project."
"From the dawn of exact knowledge to the present day, observation, experiment, and speculation have gone hand in hand; and, whenever science has halted or strayed from the right path, it has been, either because its votaries have been content with mere unverified or unverifiable speculation (and this is the commonest case, because observation and experiment are hard work, while speculation is amusing); or it has been, because the accumulation of details of observation has for a time excluded speculation."
"Regarded anatomically, the resemblances between the foot of Man and the foot of the Gorilla are far more striking and important than the differences... be the differences between the hand and foot of Man and those of the Gorilla what they may the differences between those of the Gorilla and those of the lower Apes are much greater."
"The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitiousfabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance"
