“What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul.”
Oscar Wilde book A House of Pomegranates
Source: A House of Pomegranates
First Ennead, Book VI, as translated by Thomas Taylor, The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries: A Dissertation https://books.google.com/books?id=vEt0LaOue8IC (1891) pp. 43-44. <br class="br">The First Ennead (c. 250)
“What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul.”
Oscar Wilde book A House of Pomegranates
Source: A House of Pomegranates
Plotinus (203–270) Neoplatonist philosopher
First Tractate : The Animate and the Man, §3
The First Ennead (c. 250)
Galén (129–216) Roman physician, surgeon and philosopher
Arabian Society In The Middle Ages, by Edward William Lane, (1883) citing Nowwájee, En-, Shems-ed-deen Moḥammad (died 1454), Ḥalbet El-Kumeyt, at footnote 167.
Latter day attributions
Thomas Fuller (1608–1661) English churchman and historian
Life of the Duke of Alva (1642). Compare: "A fiery soul, which, working out its way, Fretted the pigmy-body to decay, And o'er-inform'd the tenement of clay", John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, part i. line 156.
Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher
As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, both Ancient and Modern (1908) by Tyron Edwards, p. 592
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), III Six books on Light and Shade