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1 " Juliet's version of cleanliness was next to godliness, which was to say it was erratic, past all understanding and was seldom seen. "
― Terry Pratchett , Unseen Academicals (Discworld, #37; Rincewind #8)
2 " In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. Yet the cleanliness and dignity of Michel Angelo's male figures are incontestable, and bear striking witness to that nobility of the sentiment in him, which we have already seen illustrated in his sonnets. "
― Edward Carpenter , The Intermediate Sex: A Study Of Some Transitional Types Of Men And Women
3 " Neatness and cleanliness is not a function of how rich or poor you are but that of mentality and principle. "
― , Great Reflections on Success
4 " Mrs Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her clenliness more umcomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and some people do the same by their religion. "
― Charles Dickens , Great Expectations
5 " Karma yoga is giving food to the hungry, clothes to the needy, shelter to the homeless, education to the uneducated, medicine to the sick, and trees and cleanliness to the environment. "
― Amit Ray , Yoga The Science of Well-Being
6 " Let a man radically alter his thoughts, and he will be astonished at the rapid transformation it will effect in the material conditions of his life. Men imagine that thought can be kept secret, but it cannot; it rapidly crystallizes into habit, and habit solidifies into circumstance. Bestial thoughts crystallize into habits of drunkenness and sensuality, which solidify into circumstances of destitution and disease: impure thoughts of every kind crystallize into enervating and confusing habits, which solidify into distracting and adverse circumstances: thoughts of fear, doubt, and indecision crystallize into weak, unmanly, and irresolute habits, which solidify into circumstances of failure, indigence, and slavish dependence: lazy thoughts crystallize into habits of uncleanliness and dishonesty, which solidify into circumstances of foulness and beggary: hateful and condemnatory thoughts crystallize into habits of accusation and violence, which solidify into circumstances of injury and persecution: selfish thoughts of all kinds crystallize into habits of self-seeking, which solidify into circumstances more or less distressing. On the other hand, beautiful thoughts of all kinds crystallize into habits of grace and kindliness, which solidify into genial and sunny circumstances: pure thoughts crystallize into habits of temperance and self-control, which solidify into circumstances of repose and peace: thoughts of courage, self-reliance, and decision crystallize into manly habits, which solidify into circumstances of success, plenty, and freedom: energetic thoughts crystallize into habits of cleanliness and industry, which solidify into circumstances of pleasantness: gentle and forgiving thoughts crystallize into habits of gentleness, which solidify into protective and preservative circumstances: loving and unselfish thoughts crystallize into habits of self-forgetfulness for others, which solidify into circumstances of sure and abiding prosperity and true riches.A particular train of thought persisted in, be it good or bad, cannot fail to produce its results on the character and circumstances. A man cannot directly choose his circumstances, but he can choose his thoughts, and so indirectly, yet surely, shape his circumstances. "
― James Allen , As a Man Thinketh
7 " He longed for cleanliness and tidiness: it was hard to find peace in the middle of disorder. "
― Robin Hobb , City of Dragons (Rain Wild Chronicles, #3)
8 " Environmental cleanliness begins with each individual desire to be clean. "
― Lailah Gifty Akita
9 " Environmental cleanliness begins with individual desire to be clean. "
10 " These hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any number of people had hung up their hats on those pegs. Even the flies, if you thought of it, had settled on other people’s noses. As for the cleanliness which hit him in the face, it wasn’t cleanliness, so much as bareness, frigidity; a thing that had to be. "
― Virginia Woolf , Mrs. Dalloway
11 " Why is it that medical strictures and recommendations so often work in favor of food processors and against food producers? Why, for example, do we so strongly favor the pasteurization of milk to health and cleanliness in milk production? (Gene Logsdon correctly says that the motive here " is monopoly, not consumer's health." ) "
12 " Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partlynatural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, mostof which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity orincivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections);obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal tobelieve what all sensible people know is true); childishness (anapparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondnessfor daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of properrespect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for cryingover nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixationor both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking,smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness andneatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes);remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usualfeature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strangeadmixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness,the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelingsfor or against religion; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak ofcunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness,and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurableaddiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. "
― John Gardner , On Becoming a Novelist
13 " Solitude is a virtue for us, since it is a sublime inclination and impulse to cleanliness which shows that contact between people, “society”, inevitably makes things unclean. Somewhere, sometime, every community makes people—“base. "
― Friedrich Nietzsche , Beyond Good and Evil
14 " Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds? … It is certainly not lions and wolves that we eat out of self-defense; on the contrary, we ignore these and slaughter harmless, tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us, creatures that, I swear, Nature appears to have produced for the sake of their beauty and grace. But nothing abashed us, not the flower-like tinting of the flesh, not the persuasiveness of the harmonious voice, not the cleanliness of their habits or the unusual intelligence that may be found in the poor wretches. No, for the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being. "
― Plutarch , Moralia
15 " Nothing could exceed his energy when the working fit was upon him: but now and again a reaction would seize him, and for days on end he would lie upon the sofa in the sitting- room, hardly uttering a word or moving a muscle from morning to night. On these occasions I have noticed such a dreamy, vacant expression in his eyes, that I might have suspected him of being addicted to the use of some narcotic, had not the temperance and cleanliness of his whole life forbidden such a notion. "
― Arthur Conan Doyle , A Study in Scarlet (Sherlock Holmes, #1)
16 " This medical view of an ideal male who was insulated from pathogens was inextricably bound up with a parallel discourse about the maintenance of strong ego boundaries, a psychic investment in one’s bodily peripheries that effected a gradual closing (and, one might say, a closing off) of the male body, at once from the outer world of dangerous stimuli and from the inner world of threatening passions. Without a doubt, as Norbert Elias has shown, in the western world both men and women experienced a shift in their sense of personal boundaries during the early modern era where, amid changing social circumstances, rising thresholds of repugnance and shame were manifested among the upper-classes as a growing aversion to their own bodily functions and to the bodies of others. The changes wrought by new developments in table manners and etiquette were extended by the introduction of hygienic practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that endeavored to maximise the order and cleanliness of the social body while futher compartmentalising the bourgeois self as a discrete bodily unit. "
― Christopher Forth
17 " They say the level of civilization is proportionate to the degree of cleanliness of the skin. Assuming that man has a soul, it must, in all likelihood, be housed in the skin. "
― Kōbō Abe
18 " Let's make no mistake about this: The American Dream starts with the neighborhoods. If we wish to rebuild our cities, we must first rebuild our neighborhoods. And to do that, we must understand that the quality of life is more important than the standard of living. To sit on the front steps--whether it's a veranda in a small town or a concrete stoop in a big city--and to talk to our neighborhoods is infinitely more important than to huddle on the living-room lounger and watch a make-believe world in not-quite living color....And I hardly need to tell you that in the 19- or 24-inch view of the world, cleanliness has long since eclipsed godliness. Soon we'll all smell, look, and actually be laboratory clean, as sterile on the inside as on the out. The perfect consumer, surrounded by the latest appliances. The perfect audience, with a ringside seat to almost any event in the world, without smell, without taste, without feel--alone and unhappy in the vast wasteland of our living rooms. I think that what we actually need, of course, is a little more dirt on the seat of our pants as we sit on the front stoop and talk to our neighbors once again, enjoying the type of summer day where the smell of garlic travels slightly faster than the speed of sound. "
19 " Cleanliness is a freedom movement for an aspiring Nation. Culture of cleanliness will influence the heygine, health, asthetics and natural setting of the nation, which is a new age currency of a country. "
― Vishwas Chavan
20 " In our society, defecation involves anindividual in activity which is defined as inconsistent withthe cleanliness and purity standards expressed in many of ourperformances. Such activity also causes the individual todisarrange his clothing and to 'go out of play," that is, todrop from his face the expressive mask that he employs inface-to-face interaction. At the same time ic becomes difficultfor him to reassemble his personal front should the need toenter into interaction suddenly occur. Perhaps that is areason why toilet doors in our society have locks on them. "