Life & Wisdom Quote by Jose Rizal

Law, in Rizal's hands, becomes an anatomy lesson: a body with no body. "Law has no skin" is a ruthless image for how legal systems claim neutrality while remaining untouched by the pain they authorize. Skin is where the world meets the self; it bruises, burns, remembers. A law without skin can’t feel the lash, the hunger, the humiliation of colonial rule. It can only declare.

"Reason has no nostrils" pushes the indictment further. Nostrils are for detecting what’s in the air: rot, smoke, perfume, crowd-sweat - the ordinary evidence of lived reality. Reason without them is pure abstraction, incapable of smelling corruption or sensing danger until it is already suffocating everyone. Rizal isn’t mocking reason as such; he’s attacking the way "reason" is invoked by institutions to launder violence into logic. The form of rationality he’s skewering is odorless: it prides itself on being clean precisely because it refuses contact.

Context matters. As a Filipino writer under Spanish colonial power, Rizal watched bureaucratic language do what bullets could not: make domination sound procedural. Courts, church, and state presented themselves as enlightened, while dissent was branded irrational and criminal. The line functions like a compact manifesto for his novels and political essays: if law and reason are severed from the senses, they become tools of empire, not instruments of justice.

The brilliance is the sensory sabotage. By stripping law and reason of skin and smell, Rizal exposes their greatest vulnerability: they depend on human bodies to obey them, yet they pretend bodies don’t count.