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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"I was in his hands, he called me by the thunder at my ear. I was in his hands: I was being changed; all that I could do was cling to him. I did not realize, until I realized it, that I was also kissing him, that everything was breaking and changing and turning in me and moving toward him."
"The hand of the painter is incurably mechanical: his technique is incurably artificial... The camera... is so utterly unmechanical."
"I fought linotype and montype for some time because it would not justify as well as handset could be made to do; but at last, as always happens, the machine outdid the hand, and got all the best types on it."
"When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell's major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine."
"While browsing in a second-hand bookshop one day, George Bernard Shaw was amused to find a copy of one of his own works which he himself had inscribed for a friend: "To ----, with esteem, George Bernard Shaw." He immediately purchased the book and returned it to the friend with a second inscription: "With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw."
"The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching."
"Why do 'slow down' and 'slow up' mean the same thing? Why is the third hand on the watch called the second hand?"
"It is pleasant to have a kind word now and then when one is not near enough to have a kind glance or a hearty shake by the hand."
"There's times when the crockery seems alive, an' flies out o' your hand like a bird. It's like the glass, sometimes, 'ull crack as it stands. What is to be broke will be broke."
"Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope."
"We have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands."
"'Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio."
"When you've been used to doing things, and they've been taken away from you, it's as if your hands had been cut off, and you felt the fingers as are of no use to you."
"even those who call themselves 'intimate' know very little about each other - hardly ever know just how a sorrow is felt, and hurt each other by their very attempts at sympathy or consolation. We can bear no hand on our bruises."
"I am like a person whose hands were kept numb, without sensation from the first moment of awareness - until one day the ability to feel is forced into them. And I say "Look! I have no hands!" But the people all around me say: "What are hands?"
"No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero."
"I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion."
"I love it all. I don't want to go through my career with one hand tied behind my back. I love making kids happy. I love the midnight audience. I like intense dramas. And I like high-adrenaline action films."
"I don't want to get pigeonholed, and I want to try my hand at anything that excites me. I'm not just a Disney writer."
"If the blind put their hands in God's, they find their way more surely than those who see but have not faith or purpose."
