Bodies are real entities. Surfaces and lines are but fictitious entities. A surface without depth, a line without thickness, was never seen by any man; no; nor can any conception be seriously formed of its existence.

Jeremy Bentham
About This Quote

The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote this poem in honor of his friend, the novelist Oliver Wendell Holmes. “Bodies” refers to the objects of everyday life, like chairs and tables. Surfaces and lines are used to represent the relationships between people, their senses of sight and touch, heat and cold, or soul and body. When you see someone sitting on a chair or touching a table, you can say that their body is sitting on the surface of the chair or touching the surface of the table.

For all intents and purposes, you haven’t seen them at all. As for lines, they are much more difficult to visualize. These are abstract concepts that you can’t really see or feel.

Source: The Panopticon Writings

Some Similar Quotes
  1. The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. - Elie Wiesel

  2. Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We... - Haruki Murakami

  3. The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace. - Mahatma Gandhi

  4. He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. - Milan Kundera

  5. It does not matter how long you are spending on the earth, how much money you have gathered or how much attention you have received. It is the amount of positive vibration you have radiated in life that matters, - Amit Ray

More Quotes By Jeremy Bentham
  1. ...the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.

  2. Happiness is a very pretty thing to feel, but very dry to talk about.

  3. Bodies are real entities. Surfaces and lines are but fictitious entities. A surface without depth, a line without thickness, was never seen by any man; no; nor can any conception be seriously formed of its existence.

  4. In the mind of all, fiction, in the logical sense, has been the coin of necessity;–in that of poets of amusement–in that of the priest and the lawyer of mischievous immorality in the shape of mischievous ambition, –and too often both priest and lawyer have...

  5. Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you, --will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others, --or to diminish something of their pains.

Related Topics