Smell quotes
1.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside smell — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Today no matter where I'm going, no matter what I'm doing, no matter who I'm doing it with, it is my dominant intent to look for and find things that feel good when I see them, when I hear them, when I smell them, when I taste them, when I touch them. It is my dominant intent to solicit from experience and exaggerate and talk about and revel in the best of what I see around me here and now."
"O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven"
"Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other Who think the same thoughts without need of speech"
"She knew with suddeness and ease that this moment would be with her always, within hand's reach of memory. She doubted if they all sensed it - they had seen the world - but even George was silent for a minute as they looked, and the scene, the smell, even the sound of the band playing a faintly recognisable movie theme, was locked forever in her, and she was at peace."
"If you admire somebody, you should go ahead and tell them. People never get the flowers while they can still smell them."
"I always believe that to be the best, you have to smell like the best, dress like the best, act like the best. When you throw your trash in the garbage can, it has to be better than anybody else who ever threw trash in the garbage can."
"Watch a cat when it enters a room for the first time. It searches and smells about, it is not quiet for a moment, it trusts nothing until it has examined and made acquaintance with everything."
"The biggest thing I've found since I left the game - and I'm glad I chose to leave rather than being sacked - is that so many people are in football for the wrong reasons. Not because they love the game, but because they smell money."
"Heart disease has changed my eating habits, but I still cook bacon for the smell."
"I wouldn't mind dying in a plane crash. It'd be a good way to go. I don't want to die in my sleep, or of old age, or OD... I want to feel what it's like. I want to taste it, hear it, smell it. Death is only going to happen to you once; I don't want to miss it"
"As for the garden of mint, the very smell of it alone recovers and refreshes our spirits, as the taste stirs up our appetite for meat."
"Does koala bear poop smell like cough drops?"
"It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed, is you."
"Every man knows the smell of his own fart."
"Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all."
"There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in sickly air. People can be slaveships in shoes."
"Of all the unchristian beverages that ever passed my lips, Turkish coffee is the worst. The cup is small, it is smeared with grounds; the coffee is black, thick, unsavory of smell, and execrable in taste. The bottom of the cup has a muddy sediment in it half an inch deep. This goes down your throat, and portions of it lodge by the way, and produce a tickling aggravation that keeps you barking and coughing for an hour."
"I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world."
"The snow has quietness in it; no songs, no smells, no shouts or traffic. When I speak my own voice shocks me."
"There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers."
