Quotes About Cleanliness

It's disgusting eating over a keyboard.

My kitchen is limited at best. I have one drawer. But I make do with what I have; it's taught me to be super efficient in terms of how I clean and how I put things away.

I highly recommend cleanliness. It pleases women and annoys men, which are two excellent ways to get on in society.

Have you ever taken something out of the clothes hamper because it had become, relatively, the cleanest thing?

But far more than the Jewish quarter or the bestequipped monastery, the cleanest corner of early medieval Europe was Arab Spain. Unlike in Christianity, cleanliness was an important religious requirement for the Muslim, and a ninth-century observer described the Andalusian Arabs as "the cleanest people on earth.

We are concerned about the environment, but we avoid thinking very much about the gallons of clean hot water we use every day and the toxins in our cleansers that we pour down the drain. Living up to our hygienic standards takes huge amounts of energy, but cleanliness is such a sacred cow that to be told "cut down on your washing" would be even more repugnant than being urged to restrict our driving.

During the sixteenth, seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries, when people avoided water and believed that a clean linen shirt extracted dirt, there was little or no demand for toilet soap. The rich women who used it, mostly on face and hands, thought of it as more a cosmetic or perfume than a cleanser.

Just as the Cleanliness Institute closed its doors in 1932, a casualty of the stalled economy, Aldous Huxley published his satire of a sanitized utopia, Brave New World. It's doubtful that Huxley, living in England, had heard of the Institute, although naturally enough there are parallels between its emphasis on indoctrination and social pressure and the vastly more extreme measures taken in the novel's odour- and germ-phobic future civilization.

since the royal body was the most precious body in the kingdom, and hence deserved the greatest protection from the dangerous assault of water, it is possible that James I of England and Philip V of Spain were dirtier than some of their subjects.

When the middle and upper classes feared water, roughly from the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century, they washed as little as peasants or the urban poor.

In Spain, the early Christian concerns about the corrupting influence of bathing and the late medieval worries about the plague were compounded by the Moorish occupation. Because the Moor was clean, the Spanish decided that Christians should be dirty.

The archetypal link between dirt and guilt, and cleanliness and innocence, is built into our language—perhaps into our psyches.

For the seventeenth century, clean linen was not a substitute for washing the body with water—it was better than that, safer, more reliable and based on scientific principles. White linen, learned men believed, attracted and absorbed sweat. As one wrote, with mystifying confidence, "We understand why linen removes the perspiration from our bodies, because the sweat is oleaginous or salty, it impregnates these dead plants [the

Christianity's relationship to the body and so to cleanliness was complicated. On the positive side, the body was intended to be a temple of God. Parts of it—the saliva of saints, for example, or the fluid that magically sprang from their breasts—could work miracles, or be worshipped, in the form of relics. At the same time, the body's potential for temptation provoked suspicion, if not hostility.

The "rain bath," as the shower was called, was the simplest, quickest, cheapest, cleanest and withal best bath for people's bath houses; the one which requires the least space, the least time, the least amount of water, the least fuel for warming water, the least attendance, the least cost of maintenance. Standing

Nightingale had focused attention on the fact that deaths from disease and infection in wartime outnumbered those from gunshot wounds and that cleanliness could reduce those deaths.

even at the highest level: Elizabeth I of England bathed once a month, as she said, "whether I need it or not." But the seventeenth century raised the bar: it was spectacularly, even defiantly dirty. Elizabeth's successor, James I, reportedly washed only his fingers. The body odour of Henri IV of France (1553–1610) was notorious, as was that of his son Louis XIII. He boasted, "I take after my father, I smell of armpits.

Apologizing is like spring cleaning.

The classes that wash most are those that work least.

The difficulty of living alone is that any mess he makes he is forced to clean up himself. No, the real difficulty of living alone is that no one cares if you are upset.

The difficulty of living alone is that any mess he makes he is forced to clean up himself.

The difficulty of living alone is that any mess he makes he is forced to clean up himself. No

Civilization begins with soap.

Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom would not willingly drown without first washing their faces.