the body12 quotes

“ALWAYS LIFT HEAVY—THAT’S WHAT MAKES LIFE WORTH LIVING!”

“Although it may appeal to a man’s selfish instincts to sit in sweatpants and type on a computer in a locked room while gnawing on a turkey leg, he’s spiritually, civically and morally improved by embodied interactions, by spending time in public space.

The relaxed fashion and behavior in the home may seem preferable to the formalities of the office, but the current resentment toward a public standard of appearance indicates widespread maladaptation and stunted maturity, a pathological obliviousness to others and a decline of outwardly directed behavior in professional and collective settings. We dress like refugees and mental patients because of mass-produced sleepwear and because we’re not expected to cultivate self-respect or restraint. We don’t value bodily comfort obesity and chronic illness ravage the body, bad choices trouble the soul.

People wear comfortable clothes in public because they’re uncomfortable, because their bodies are panicked and inflamed from decades of nutritional and emotional chaos.

Modern hedonism violently contradicts the sagely approach to moderating passions and limiting pleasures. Unrestrained eating, drinking, drug intake and consumption of media implies hatred of the body, not love of the senses.”

“What greater glory attends a man, when he’s alive, than what he wins with his racing feet and striving hands?”

“Here are my conclusions after a lifetime of observation and reflection. Maleness at its hormonal extreme is an angry, ruthless density of self, motivated by a principle of ‘attack’ (cf. ‘roid rage’ produced in male bodybuilders by anabolic steroids). Femaleness at its hormonal extreme is first an acute sensitivity of response, literally thin-skinned (a hormonal effect in women) and secondly a stability, composure, and self-containment, a slowness approaching the sultry. Biologically, the male is impelled towards restless movement; his moral danger is brutishness. Biologically, the female is impelled toward waiting, expectancy; her moral danger is in stasis. Androgen agitates; estrogen tranquilizes—hence the drowsiness and ‘glow’ of pregnancy. Most of us inhabit not polar extremes but a constantly shifting great middle. However, a preponderance of gray does not disprove the existence of black and white. Sexual geography, our body image, alters our perception of the world. Man is contoured for invasion, while woman remains the hidden, a cave of archaic darkness. No legislation or grievance committee can change these eternal facts.”

“Nothing so astounds me as the delusion of rationalists that human life is free of biophysical influences. It is irreligious and hubristical to imagine that we are divorced from the continuum of living things, alone among plants and animals in our imperviousness to lunar and seasonal rhythms. Science has barely begun to chart the complexities of our multiple hormone systems, which intricately interact and alter us physically and psychologically hour by hour. Hormones are our link to pagan nature. Thought itself is a net of racing electric impulses, the energy that unifies the cosmos, a music of atom’s dance.”

“Contrary to this exists the surfeit of flesh we see on the obese and in general the lassitude, the spiritual obesity, not only of modern life but of many historical forms of life as well, the domestic life of the village, of the village sewer, of the fetid valleys, of matriarchy and domestics, of slaves, the life of the human animal collapsed to mere life, life for the sake of life, as it devolves to the yeast form aesthetically, morally, intellectually, physically. On the other side is the life of the immortal gods who live in pure mountain air, and the sign of this life, where energy is marshaled to the production of higher order, is the aesthetic physique, the body in its glorious and divine beauty.”

“Hormones hold the key to the meaning of life in the most fundamental way, and if this sounds “reductionist” to you, if you think I demystify things too much, it’s because you think you know what you don’t, or you think scientists know, when they actually don’t. These substances, seen with fresh eyes, are pure Big Magic.”

“Bodily vigor is good, and vigor of intellect is even better, but far above both is character. It is true, of course, that a genius may, on certain lines, do more than a brave and manly fellow who is not a genius; and so, in sports, vast physical strength may overcome weakness, even though the puny body may have in it the heart of a lion. But, in the long run, in the great battle of life, no brilliancy of intellect, no perfection of bodily development, will count when weighed in the balance against that assemblage of virtues, active and passive, of moral qualities, which we group together under the name of character; and if between any two contestants, even in college sport or in college work, the difference in character on the right side is as great as the difference of intellect or strength the other way, it is the character side that will win. Of course this does not mean that either intellect or bodily vigor can safely be neglected. On the contrary, it means that both should be developed, and that not the least of the benefits of developing both comes from the indirect effect which this development itself has upon the character.”

Aἰσχρὸν δὲ καὶ τὸ διὰ τὴν ἀμέλειαν γηρᾶναι, πρὶν ἰδεῖν ἑαυτὸν ποῖος ἂν κάλλιστος καὶ κράτιστος τῷ σώματι γένοιτο.

“It is a shame indeed for a man to grow old indifferently, without seeing the beauty and strength that his body can attain.”

“Distinctions between bodily structure and way of life are only anatomists’ distinctions; if we start from the inner form of the life instead of that of the body, tactics of living and the organisation of the body appear as one and the same, both being expressions of one organic actuality.”

“A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of lifespan. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility, with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy, and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.”

“Our minds, our souls, our bodies work most efficiently, most profoundly, most happily, when moving and, in particular, walking. Modern civilization imprisons us in offices, and treats tramps, Gypsies, mystics, and nomads as misfits. But in fact these wanderers are in tune with an ancient and more natural form of human life. It is homes and cities and sedentary jobs that are unnatural. To find yourself, you must travel.”