Theodore Dreiser: Quotes about the soul

Theodore Dreiser was Novelist, journalist. Explore interesting quotes on soul.
Theodore Dreiser: 40 quotes1 like

“Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.”

Theodore Dreiser

"Life, Art and America", in The Seven Arts (February 1917)

“Literature, outside of the masters, has given us but one idea of the mistress, the subtle, calculating siren who delights to prey on the souls of men. The journalism and the moral pamphleteering of the time seem to foster it with almost partisan zeal. It would seem that a censorship of life had been established by divinity, and the care of its execution given into the hands of the utterly conservative. Yet there is that other form of liaison which has nothing to do with conscious calculation. In the vast majority of cases it is without design or guile. The average woman, controlled by her affections and deeply in love, is no more capable than a child of anything save sacrificial thought—the desire to give; and so long as this state endures, she can only do this. She may change—Hell hath no fury, etc.—but the sacrificial, yielding, solicitous attitude is more often the outstanding characteristic of the mistress; and it is this very attitude in contradistinction to the grasping legality of established matrimony that has caused so many wounds in the defenses of the latter. The temperament of man, either male or female, cannot help falling down before and worshiping this nonseeking, sacrificial note. It approaches vast distinction in life. It appears to be related to that last word in art, that largeness of spirit which is the first characteristic of the great picture, the great building, the great sculpture, the great decoration—namely, a giving, freely and without stint, of itself, of beauty.”

Theodore Dreiser book The Financier

Source: The Financier (1912), Ch. XXIII

“If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance.”

Theodore Dreiser

The Genius (1915) The University of Illinois Press, 2004, ISBN 0-252-03100-8, p. 734