quotations about the soul
Abandon all those precious things
One soul now
Carry only what twilight brings
One soul now
Watch the color drain from the sky
One soul now
COWBOY JUNKIES
"One Soul Now"
No theory of the soul, as we know the soul in philosophy, is entitled to respect, which ignores or diminishes the reality of the personal union into which it has taken the body with itself, a union the most consummate and absolute of which we know, or of which we can conceive, infinitely transcending the completeness of the most perfect mechanical and chemical unions--a union so complete that, though two distinct substances are involved in it, it makes them, through a wide range of observations, as completely one to us as if they were one substance; so that we can say the human body does nothing proper to it without the soul, the human soul does nothing proper to it without the body.
GEORGE BERKELEY
A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
The soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
I held my breath, for to me there is nothing more awe-inspiring than when a man discovers to you the nakedness of his soul.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
"The Pool", Collected Short Stories
A fiery soul, which, working out its way,
Fretted the pygmy-body to decay,
And o'er-inform'd the tenement of clay.
JOHN DRYDEN
Absalom and Achitophel
The soul, like the body, acquires vigor by the exercise of all its faculties. In the midst of the world, in overcoming difficulties, in conquering selfishness, indolence, and fear--in all the occasions of duty, it employs, and reveals by employing, energies that render it efficient and robust--that broaden its scope, adjust its powers, and mature it with a rich experience.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
It has long seemed ridiculous to me to suppose that the nature of things has been so poor and stingy that it provided souls only to such a trifling mass of bodies on our globe, like human bodies, when it could have given them to all, without interfering with its other ends.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
letter to Johann Bernoulli, November 18, 1698
The soul is too great to know itself, yet each individual portion of the soul seeks this knowledge, and in the seeking creates new possibilities of development, new dimensions of actuality. The individual self at any given moment can connect with its soul.
JANE ROBERTS
Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness
The soul may be immortal because she is fitted to rise towards that which is neither born nor dies, towards that which exists substantially, necessarily, invariably, that is to say towards God.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
It is common, even in the pulpit, to hear the phrase, "Man has a soul;" and it is scarcely possible to avoid embodying this same thought sometimes in the phrase "man's soul," which is only an abbreviation. This phrase, however, expresses a falsehood. It is not true that man has a soul. Man is a soul. It would be more accurate to say that man has a body. We may say that the body has a soul, or that the soul has a body; as we may say that the ship has a captain, or the captain has a ship; but we ought never to forget that the true man is the mental and spiritual; the body is only the instrument which the mental and the spiritual uses.
LYMAN ABBOTT
A Study in Human Nature
Why should the soul ever repose? God, its Principle, reposes never.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Lucretia; or, The children of Night
Soul is a feeling, feeling deep within
Soul is not the colour of your skin
Soul is the essence, essence from within
It is where everything begins
VAN MORRISON
"Soul"
The history of a man's soul, even the pettiest soul, is hardly less interesting and useful than the history of a whole people; especially when the former is the result of the observations of a mature mind upon itself, and has been written without any egotistical desire of arousing sympathy or astonishment.
MIKHAIL LERMONTOV
A Hero of Our Time
All those who write either explicitly or by insinuation against the dignity, freedom, and immortality of the human soul, may so far forth be justly said to unhinge the principles of morality, and destroy the means of making men reasonably virtuous.
GEORGE BERKELEY
The Works of George Berkeley
Christ asks for a home in your soul, where he can be at rest with you, where he can talk easily to you, where you and he, alone together, can laugh and be silent and be delighted with one another.
CARYLL HOUSELANDER
This War is the Passion
Life, with the Soul predominant,
Is a noble mosaic, a bewitching arabesque.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Song of the Soul"
Most men would gladly give their souls to the Devil, were he willing to accept them.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
Whoever saw his own soul? No man. Yet what is there more present, or what to each man nearer, than his own soul?
EDWARD VI
attributed, Day's Collacon
A man's soul ought to be as the heavens were on the night when the shepherds looked up, and saw them full of angels as well as stars.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
ANNE SEXTON
attributed, The Words of Extraordinary Women