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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"William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was 'A smell of petroleum prevails throughout'."
"I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket."
"Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it."
"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."
"Your world is all these elements. Of light and sound, of taste, smell, and touch, woven together in many dimensions on the fabulous loom of your brain. Your brain; the most complicated thing in the world, which you yourself grew...without even thinking about it."
"He felt so lost, he said later, that the familiar studio felt like a haunted valley deep in the mountains, with the smell of rotting leaves, the spray of a waterfall, the sour fumes of fruit stashed away by a monkey; even the dim glow of the master's oil lamp on its tripod looked to him like misty moonlight in the hills."
"There is something about the aroma of fresh books that's totally intoxicating. A new book has a certain clean, crisp smell full of promise that is difficult to define. Sort of like the scent and feeling of just-washed bed linens at the moment you slide your legs between them."
"Climbers have no sense of smell."
"Be selective about your external influences. Your multi-dimensional brain is influenced by everything you see, hear, read, smell, touch, feel or say."
"The lovesick, the betrayed, and the jealous all smell alike."
"The smell of a freshly printed book is the best smell in the world."
"...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells."
"A woman can smell mink through six inches of lead."
"So great is the economy of nature, that most flowers which are fertilised by crepuscular or nocturnal insects emit their odour chiefly or exclusively in the evening."
"A smell of petroleum prevails throughout."
"It was a hot afternoon and I can still remember the smell of honeysuckle all along the street. How can I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?"
"We all want to be in love and find that person who is going to love us no matter how our feet smell, no matter how angry we get one day, no matter the things we say that we don't mean."
"If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it."
"On that gray street, with the smell of industrial smokes in the air and the afternoon bleeding away to evening, downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming than a dead hooker in a church pew."
"The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews, and what is more, a wonderful means whereby out of money to make more money."
