A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Senses (35 quotes)
…Latin sensus communis, or common sense [is] the translation of all senses into each other…
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt (1972), p 3
Year: 1972
The deaf hate reading and like math; the blind love reading and hate math.
Culture Is Our Business (1970), p 143
Year: 1970
…human perception is literally incarnation.
Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters” The McAuley Lectures: Christian Humanism in Letters, Saint Joseph College, West Hartford Connecticut, (1954), p 63, reprinted in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 169.
Year: 1954
Chapter:
Religion
Smell is a totally invisible environment. A happening. It is literally an electric circus. A perivallo, or striking from all sides.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 182
Year: 1970
Listening to a concert with an eminent psychologist, I happened to mention the highly tactile character of orchestral strings as compared with the other instruments. He seemed quite surprised and asked: “Do you mean that an auditory experience can have a tactile component?” Discussing the matter with him later, it became apparent that many psychologists assume not only is auditory experience merely auditory, but so with the other senses.
“The Role of New Media in Social Change” (1964), p 1
Year: 1964
The 19th-century painterly interest in the nude goes together with the rediscoveries of sculptural values.
Letter to Michael Wolff (1964), in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 305
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Sculpture, Sculptural
The ear is intolerant, closed, and exclusive, whereas the eye is open, neutral, and associative. Ideas of tolerance came to the West only after two or three centuries of literacy and visual Gutenberg culture. No such saturation with visual values had occurred in Germany by 1930. Russia is still far from any such involvement with visual order and values.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, pp 302-303
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Eye vs Ear
Our very word "grasp" or "apprehension" points to the process of getting at one thing through another, of handling and sensing many facets at a time through more than one sense at a time. It begins to be evident that "touch" is not skin but the interplay of the senses, and "keeping in touch" or "getting in touch" is a matter of a fruitful meeting of the senses, of sight translated into sound and sound into movement, and taste and smell. The "common sense" was for many centuries held to be the peculiar human power of translating one kind of experience of one sense into all the senses, and presenting the result continuously as a unified image to the mind. In fact, this image of a unified ratio among the senses was long held to be the mark of our rationality, and may in the computer age easily become so again. For it is now possible to program ratios among the senses that approach the condition of consciousness.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 60
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Tactile, Touch
Again, in a visual and highly literate culture, when we meet a person for the first time his visual appearance dims out the sound of the name, so that in self-defense we add- "How do you spell your name?" Whereas, in an ear culture, the sound of a man’s name the overwhelming fact, as Joyce knew when he said in Finnegans Wake, "Who gave you that numb?" For the name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 32
Year: 1964
The Greeks had the notion of a consensus or a faculty of “common sense” that translated each sense into each other sense, and conferred consciousness on man. Today, when we have extended all part of our bodies and senses by technology, we are haunted by the need for outer consensus of technology and experience that would raise our communal lives to the level of a world-wide consensus.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 108
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Extending Consciousness
The human sensorium is a system in which, for example, if there is an alteration in temperature, all other senses accommodate themselves to the alteration of temperature. It changes our visual and auditory life considerably.
“Information Hunt Looms Big” (1967), p 5
Year: 1967
Technology stresses and emphasizes some one function of man's senses; at the same time, other senses are dimmed down or temporarily obsolesced.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers (1989), p 3
Year: 1989
Chapter:
LOM 2 - Obsolesce
We speak of loud color or bright sounds; and everyone knows what we mean.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers, 1989, p 5
Year: 1989
The Baroque painters did exactly as did Montaigne in shifting attention to the peripheries of vision.
The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962, p 242
Year: 1962
The media can be viewed as artificial extensions of our sensory experience – each medium an externalized species, as it were, of the inner genus sensation.
A Historical Approach to the Media, 1955, p 104
Year: 1955
Each of our senses makes its own space, but no sense can function in isolation. Only as sight relates to touch, or kinesthesia, or sound, can the eye see.
Symposium (1973), in McLuhan Unbound (2017), p 13
Year: 1973
To externalize and extend one of your senses by technology is to give immensely greater stress and also capacity to that sense.
“The Care and Feeding of Communication Media”, 1961, pp 4-5
Year: 1961
Chapter:
Extension Theory
Each sense actually makes its own space with its own distinctive perceptual structure. Only the visual sense is connected; all others resonate consensually.
Take Today with Barrington Nevitt, 1972, p 137
Year: 1972
If one sense is isolated by stress or intensity we are in the state of hypnosis at once. Pushed a bit further, the isolation of sense leads swiftly to insanity. Our heartbeat put on a PA system acts like the Chinese water torture to send us insane.
“The Care and Feeding of Communication Media”, 1961, pp 5
Year: 1961
The human sensorium is a system in which, for example, if there is an alteration in temperature, all other senses accommodate themselves to the alteration of temperature. It changes our visual and auditory life considerably.
“Information Hunt Looms Big”, 1967, p 5
Year: 1967
When the auditory image is of high definition, as with radio, we visualize the experience or complete it with the sense of sight. When the visual image is of high definition or intensity, we complete it by providing sound.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 235
Year: 1964
Never drink coffee after eating ice cream. It cracks your teeth. [a pause] You know--you must never go from hot to cool too quickly.
Quoted by B.W. Powe, “McLuhan: the Put-On,” in A Climate Changed (1984)
Year: 1984
The "hard" sell and the "hot" line become mere comedy in the TV age, and the death of all the salesmen at one stroke of the TV axe has turned the hot American culture into a cool one that is quite unacquainted with itself.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge, p 27
Year: 1964
Chapters:
Between Two Ages | Hot & Cool
The auditory image of the telephone is of low definition. It elicits maximum attention and cannot be used as background. All the senses rally to strengthen the weak sound of the phone. We even feel the need to be kinetically involved via doodling or pacing. And whereas we complete the strong auditory image of radio by visualizing, we only slightly visualize on the phone.
“The Role of the New Media—” (1964), p 4
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Telephone
"If you paint," wrote Picasso, "close your eyes and sing.”
“McLuhan Looks at Fashion” (1968), On the Nature of Media (2016), p 155
Year: 1968
E.H. Gombrich: “What is called ‘synaesthesia,’ the splashing over of sense impressions from one sense modality to another is a fact to which all languages testify…”
...No sense can function in isolation. Only as sight relates to touch, or sound, can the eye see.
“The Argument: Causality in the Electric World”, in Technology and Culture, Vol.14, No. 1, January (1973), p 13, reprinted in McLuhan Unbound # 3, (2005), p 22
Year: 1973
[J]ust as white is a result of the assembling of the primary colors in ratio, so touch is an assembly of all the senses in ratio. Black is, therefore, the after-image of touch.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 15
Year: 1968
Chapter:
Tactile, Touch
Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind?
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 105
Year: 1964
The TV camera has no shutter. It does not deal with aspects or facets of objects in high resolution. It is a means of direct pick-up by the electrical groping over surfaces.
“The New Media and the Arts” (1964), p 242
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Television
The TV image is the first technology to project or externalize our tactile sense.
“The Care and Feeding of Communication Innovation”, 1961, p 6
Year: 1961
[H]omeostasis of the perceptual factors in a rapidly changing environment requires much redistribution of emphasis among the senses. For example, a blind or deaf person compensates for the loss of one sense by a heightening of activity in the others. It seems to me this also occurs to whole populations when new technologies create new sensory environments.
Letter to Hans Selye, July 25, 1974
Year: 1974
Blake makes quite explicit that when sense ratios change, men change. Sense ratios change when any one sense or bodily or mental function is externalized in technological form:
The Spectre is the reasoning Power in Man, & when separated
From Imagination and closing itself as in steel in a Ratio
Of the things of Memory, It thence frames Laws & Moralities
To destroy Imagination, the Divine Body, by Martrydoms & Wars.
“Inside Blake and Hollywood”, in Sewanee Review, Vol.55, No.4, October, (1947),p 710; reprinted in McLuhan Unbound (2003),
Year: 1947
Chapters:
Imagination | Memory
TV, then, is not part of the 19th century art-program for the reconquest of synaesthesia. TV is rather the overwhelming and technological success of that program after its artistic exponents have retired.
“Inside the Five Sense Sensorium” (1961), in On the Nature of Media (2016)
Year: 1961
Isolating one sense from all others calls for enormous training and self-control, and it is probably never fully achieved. Test this yourself: run water into the bath while switching the light on and off – the sound appears louder in the darkness.
“McLuhan Looks at Fashion (1968)”, in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 154
Year: 1968
Chapter:
Education