Quotes About Smell

Pus can be distinguished from mucus, wrote Dr. Samuel Cooper in his 1823 Dictionary of Practical Surgery, by its "sweetish mawkish" taste and a "smell peculiar to itself." To the doctor who is still struggling with the distinction, perhaps because he has endeavored to learn surgery from a dictionary, Cooper offers this: "Pus sinks in water; mucus floats.

Taste, like smell, is a doorman for the digestive tract, a chemical scan for possibly dangerous (bitter, sour) elements and desirable (salty, sweet) nutrients.

dogs rely more on smell than taste in making choices about what to eat and how vigorously. (Pat Moeller estimates that for dogs, the ratio for how much aroma matters to how much taste matters is 70/30. For cats, the ratio is more like 50/50.)

recruiting sensory panelists to sniff* amniotic fluid (withdrawn during amniocentesis) and breast milk from women who had and those who hadn't swallowed a garlic oil capsule. Panelists agreed: the garlic-eaters' samples smelled like garlic. (The babies didn't appear to mind. On the contrary, the Monell team wrote, "Infants . . . sucked more when the milk smelled like garlic.")

Hydrogen sulfide is as lethal, molecule for molecule, as cyanide. This may explain why humans evolved such exquisite sensitivity to its smell.

Flavor is a combination of taste (sensory input from the surface of the tongue) and smell, but mostly it's the latter. Humans perceive five tastes—sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and umami (brothy)—and an almost infinite number of smells. Eighty to ninety percent of the sensory experience of eating is olfaction.

Humans are better equipped for sight than for smell. We process visual input ten times faster than olfactory.

Rawson points out that although snakes can't taste, they have a primitive sense of smell. They'll extend their tongue to gather volatile molecules and then pull it back in and plug it into the vomeronasal organ at the roof of the mouth to get a reading. Snakes are keenly attuned to the aroma of favored prey—so much so that if you slip a rat's face and hide, Hannibal Lecter–style, over the snout of a non-favored prey item, a python will try to swallow it.

as dogs rely more on smell than taste in making choices about what to eat and how vigorously. (Pat Moeller estimates that for dogs, the ratio for how much aroma matters to how much taste matters is 70/30. For cats, the ratio is more like 50/50.) The takeaway lesson is that if the palatant smells appealing, the dog will dive in with instant and obvious zeal, and the owner will assume the food is a hit. In reality it may have only smelled like a hit.

Sasuke: Snakes can sense things through temperature, and they can also do it with their sense of smell by passing the smell in the mouth. Itachi: You've learnt a lot...Dr. Snakes

We never like the smell of our own vices in other people, Holmes. Ah, let's steer here for a drink or two, Lowell suggested.

Yes, she still smelled a bit of night funk, but that was fine. Sometimes detectives smell like night funk.

I waited a moment, then lowered myself, cross-legged, to the earth. Some of the graves were adorned with flowers, in various stages of freshness and decay. As though the dead could smell the bouquets.

It was a love that had nothing to do with Joe Camber's day-to-day behavior toward him or his mother; it was a brute, biological thing that he would never be free of, a phenomenon with many illusory referents of the sort which haunt for a lifetime: the smell of cigarette smoke, the look of a double-edged razor reflected in a mirror, pants hung over a chair, certain curse words.

The smell of oil in the air was huge and furry.

An older, inebriated Scot who looked like he'd been sitting on his barstool all day looked me up and down, then smelled the air. Heh, neebr, goat a deid an'mal in yer bac'pac, or iz it ye tha' bloody stinks? My brain took a moment to translate. Actually, yes, there is a dead animal in my backpack, but I probably stink, too.

The other dry shampoo I was using was wet feeling but I love Prive's smell and how light and airy my hair feels afterwards!

Horses calm me. I love being around them. They smell great, they are beautiful to look at, they are loving, demanding, temperamental, and they settle you.

I love that smell of the emissions!

I love just going into stores and testing fragrances. The smell of a fragrance is kind of like hearing a song, it makes you feel something that's really unique to you and can be quite exciting.

I smelled the cinnamon, and I imagined myself full of white light. I think I felt something. Something more than the desire for a piece of toast—though that was there, too.

Fee, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of a Christian man, Be he dead, be he living, with my brand, I'll dash his brains from his brain-pan.

belching out a stinking cloud from its hindquarters.

I thought it smelled a bit odd, but when a medicine cat gives it to you—