quotations about the soul
It is only God who can satisfy the soul.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
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
Trouble is, most times, when you go looking to sell your soul, nobody's buying.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Philosophy of Composition", The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 3
The fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars.
GEORG LUKACS
attributed, "Can Poetry Change Your Life?", The New Yorker, July 31, 2017
The soul is the connecting link between God and man, and between the spirit and the flesh, and has its earthly abode in the blood or life.
VAN BRUNT WYCKOFF
attributed, Day's Collacon
If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Clockwork Angel
And unto them too, souls are born,
Those wondrous things, so slowly wrought,
That breathes a subtler thing in air,
And daily at the altar fare
Upon the living bread of thought.
CAROLINE SPENCER
"Humanity"
Life, with the Soul predominant,
Is a noble mosaic, a bewitching arabesque.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Song of the Soul"
Human beings frequently speak of their soul without, however, having the slightest comprehension of what the soul and its attributes really are. Only those who possess spiritual illumination, who have attained to the degree of mastership in psychic unfoldment can speak authoritatively on this subject. In order to give my readers a slight comprehension of the soul and its attributes, I quote from a book titled "The Light of Egypt," by T. H. Burgoyne (now out of print): "The soul is formless and intangible, and constitutes the attributes of the divine spirit: therefore, we can only conceive and know the soul by learning the powers or attributes of the spirit. To illustrate, take a ray of light. What do we know concerning it? Nothing, except by its action upon something else. This action we term the attributes of light. In themselves the attributes of light are formless, but they may easily be rendered visible, either by their colors when refracted by the prism, or by their effects when concentrated upon material objects. This may be termed the soul of the ray of light. The organism of man gives us another example. Man possesses five external senses, viz: seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting and smelling. In reality he has seven senses which can be used externally. All our knowledge concerning external phenomena must come at present through the mediumship of one or more of the five physical senses. The organs through which the function of the senses become manifest are visible, but the senses themselves are invisible and formless. We know them only as the attributes of the body; while the mind, which is perfectly and absolutely dependent upon the senses for information, well represents the spiritual Ego in its relation to the soul. The soul is formless and intangible, and can only be defined as the attribute of spirit. One cannot exist without the other; they cannot be called the same; there is the same difference between them as between a ray of light and its action and between the body and its physical senses.
WALTER MATTHEWS
"The Soul", Human Life from Many Angles
And more than once in the course of time, the same theme reappears: among the mystics of the fifteenth century, it has become the motif of the soul as a skiff, abandoned on the infinite sea of desires, in the sterile field of cares and ignorance, among the mirages of knowledge, amid the unreason of the world -- a craft at the mercy of the sea's great madness, unless it throws out a solid anchor, faith, or raises its spiritual sails so that the breath of God may bring it to port.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.
ANATOLE FRANCE
attributed, Kinship with the Animals
When you're born a lover
You're born to suffer
Like all soul sisters
And soul brothers
DEPECHE MODE
"Goodnight Lovers"
The soul is the human being considered as having a value in itself.
SIMONE WEIL
Gravity and Grace
Within the human soul lie depths as deep
As ever slept within the ocean's breast,
And heights that rise beyond the breaker's crest
In the vain wish to pass their narrow bound.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"The Depths"
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"A Psalm of Life"
The soul that has conceived one wickedness can nurse no good thereafter.
SOPHOCLES
Philoctetes
To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.
MURIEL SPARK
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
attributed, Albert Einstein: The Human Side