Quotes about the soul
page 19

Paulo Coelho photo
John Keats photo
Marilyn Monroe photo

“Hollywood's a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

As quoted in Marilyn Monroe : In Her Own Words (1983), edited by Roger Taylor
Context: Hollywood's a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.

Norman Mailer photo

“The desire for success lubricates secret prostitution in the soul.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate
Ram Dass photo
Tanith Lee photo

“The soul is a magician. Only living flesh hampers it.”

Source: Death's Master

Henry David Thoreau photo

“He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist
Joyce Meyer photo
Van Morrison photo

“Hark, now hear the sailors cry,
Smell the sea and feel the sky.
Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Into the Mystic
Song lyrics, Moondance (1970)

Anne Rice photo
Cassandra Clare photo

“It was like I saw your soul in the notes of the music. And it was beautiful.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Princess

Edith Hamilton photo
Sean O`Casey photo
Nikos Kazantzakis photo

“My entire soul is a cry, and all my work the commentary on that cry.”

Author's Introduction, p. 15
Report to Greco (1965)

Steven Erikson photo

“We're going to have to let truth scream louder to our souls than the lies that have infected us.”

Beth Moore (1957) American evangelist

Source: So Long, Insecurity: You've Been a Bad Friend to Us

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.”

Variant: In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning.
Source: Quoted, The Crack-Up (1936)

Chuck Palahniuk photo
Jim Morrison photo

“Door of passage to the other side, the soul frees itself in stride.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

Source: The Lords and the New Creatures

“Your soul is the priestess of memory, selecting, sifting, and ultimately gathering your vanishing days toward presence.”

John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher

Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Nikos Kazantzakis photo
Pablo Neruda photo
Bob Dylan photo

“I once loved a woman, a child I am told
I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), Don't Think Twice, It's All Right

Paulo Coelho photo
John Bunyan photo
D.H. Lawrence photo
Paulo Coelho photo

“If you spend too much time trying to find out what is good or bad about someone else, you'll forget your own soul and end up exhausted and defeated by the energy you have wasted in judging others.”

Source: Aleph (2011)
Context: What we aim to do is calm the spirit and get in touch with the source from which everything comes, removing any trace of malice or egotism. If you spend too much time trying to find out what is good or bad about someone else, you’ll forget your own soul and end up exhausted and defeated by the energy you have wasted in judging others.

Michel Faber photo
Paulo Coelho photo
Libba Bray photo
Pearl S.  Buck photo
Leo Tolstoy photo
Francesco Petrarca photo

“How do you know, poor fool? Perhaps out there, somewhere, someone is sighing for your absence'; and with this thought, my soul begins to breathe.”

Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374) Italian scholar and poet

Source: Petrarch: The Canzoniere, or Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta

“It is not the terrible occurrences that no one is spared, — a husband’s death, the moral ruin of a beloved child, long, torturing illness, or the shattering of a fondly nourished hope, — it is none of these that undermine the woman’s health and strength, but the little daily recurring, body and soul devouring care s. How many millions of good housewives have cooked and scrubbed their love of life away! How many have sacrificed their rosy checks and their dimples in domestic service, until they became wrinkled, withered, broken mummies. The everlasting question: ‘what shall I cook today,’ the ever recurring necessity of sweeping and dusting and scrubbing and dish-washing, is the steadily falling drop that slowly but surely wears out her body and mind. The cooking stove is the place where accounts are sadly balanced between income and expense, and where the most oppressing observations are made concerning the increased cost of living and the growing difficulty in making both ends meet. Upon the flaming altar where the pots are boiling, youth and freedom from care, beauty and light-heartedness are being sacrificed. In the old cook whose eyes are dim and whose back is bent with toil, no one would recognize the blushing bride of yore, beautiful, merry and modestly coquettish in the finery of her bridal garb.”

Dagobert von Gerhardt (1831–1910) German writer

To the ancients the hearth was sacred; beside the hearth they erected their lares and household-gods. Let us also hold the hearth sacred, where the conscientious German housewife slowly sacrifices her life, to keep the home comfortable, the table well supplied, and the family healthy."
"von Gerhardt, using the pen-name Gerhard von Amyntor in", A Commentary to the Book of Life. Quote taken from August Bebel, Woman and Socialism, Chapter X. Marriage as a Means of Support.

Sarah McLachlan photo
Cormac McCarthy photo
John F. Kennedy photo

“But Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: "Stay, thou art so fair." And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Address in the Assembly Hall at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt
Variant: Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.
Documents on International Affairs, 1963, Royal Institute of International Affairs, ed. Sir John Wheeler Wheeler-Bennett, p. 36.

Hana Maria Pravda photo

“We had so little to eat, we were freezing all the time, but the sheer joy of being able to act fed our souls.”

Hana Maria Pravda (1916–2008) British actress

Quoted in "Holocaust diarist is played by actress granddaughter", Dalya info Evening Standard, Dri 11 Jan 2013 p. 29

Edith Stein photo
Porphyrios Bairaktaris photo
David Brin photo
Theodore Dalrymple photo

“The appeal of political correctness is that it attempts to change men’s souls by altering how they speak. If one sufficiently reforms language, certain thoughts become unthinkable, and the world moves in the approved direction.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Engineering Souls http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_2_sndgs03.html (March 22, 2007).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Marcus Orelias photo

“The only thing holding down my soul is my soles”

Marcus Orelias (1993) American actor, rapper, songwriter, author and entrepreneur

Book VII
Rebel of the Underground (2013)

Lyndon B. Johnson photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“Why should we make account of time, or of magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows how to play with them as a young child plays with graybeards and in churches.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), History

Frederick Rolfe photo

“An appeal to a goodness which is not in him is, to a vain and sensitive soul, a stinging insult.”

Source: Hadrian the Seventh (1904), Ch. 19, p. 296

Zainab Salbi photo

“Saddam gave us a lot of things. The development of the country … but I think what he took away from us in the meantime, was our very souls. We got into a stage where we were fearing each other, where husbands and wives didn't talk to each other, where parents were afraid to express anything in front of their kids because the teachers often asked the kids, 'what does daddy think of uncle Saddam? What does your mummy think of uncle Saddam?.”

Zainab Salbi (1969) Iraqi American author, women's rights activist

And there are horror stories of parents being executed because of the child.
About Human rights in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, as quoted in the documentary I Knew Saddam https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/general/2008/02/2008525183923377591.html (2007) by Al Jazeera English.

Orson Scott Card photo
P.G. Wodehouse photo
Thomas Gray photo

“But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll;
Chill Penury repressed their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

St. 13
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc (written 1750, publ. 1751)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
George W. Bush photo
Alexander Maclaren photo
Michael Swanwick photo
Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Nicholas Rowe photo
Eric Hoffer photo
Khalil Gibran photo

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”

Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) Lebanese artist, poet, and writer

Edwin Hubbell Chapin, as quoted in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert
Misattributed

Van Morrison photo

“Won't you guide me through the dark night of the soul
That I may better understand your way
Let me be just and worthy to receive
All the blessings of the Lord into my life.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Give Me My Rapture.
Source: Song lyrics, Poetic Champions Compose (1987)

Hartley Coleridge photo
Jack Kerouac photo

“Your art is the Holy Ghost blowing through your soul.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

A misquote. It derives from an interview that journalist Bruce Cook conducted with Kerouac in 1968 and reported in his book The Beat Generation (1971). According to Cook, Kerouac explained to him his method of writing: "I'll just sit down and let it flow out of me ... It's the Holy Ghost that comes through you. You don't have to be a Catholic to know what I mean, and you don't have to be a Catholic for the Holy Ghost to speak through you." Source of misquote.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
B.K.S. Iyengar photo

“Health is a state of complete harmony of the body, mind and spirit. When one is free from physical disabilities and mental distractions, the gates of the soul open.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p. 48

Leon R. Kass photo
Karl G. Maeser photo

“Infidelity is consumption of the soul.”

Karl G. Maeser (1828–1901) prominent Utah educator and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Sentence-Sermons from Brigham Young University Quarterly quoted in The Latter-Day Saints' Millenial Star, Vol. 70 https://books.google.com/books?id=eItJAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA452&lpg=PA452&dq=He+that+cheats+another+is+a+knave;+but+he+that+cheats+himself+is+a+fool.&source=bl&ots=WBAQiPjQX6&sig=WLEdKN2_kXPXj8jZALKCp2dguaQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjXmNeF_7HMAhUH42MKHdySDgsQ6AEILzAE#v=onepage&q=fool&f=false

Frank Martinus Arion photo
Heather Mills photo
Thomas Tryon photo
Alexej von Jawlensky photo
James Freeman Clarke photo
B.K.S. Iyengar photo

“Non-physical reality is called Parusa in Sanskrit or Universal Soul is an abiding reality. It is logical, but remains conceptual to our minds under we experience it’s realization within ourselves.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p. 9

Donald Barthelme photo

“What makes The Joker tick I wonder?” Fredric said. “I mean what are his real motivations?”
“Consider him at any level of conduct,” Bruce said slowly, “in the home, on the street, in interpersonal relations, in jail—always there is an extraordinary contradiction. He is dirty and compulsively neat, aloof and desperately gregarious, enthusiastic and sullen, generous and stingy, a snappy dresser and a scarecrow, a gentleman and a boor, given to extremes of happiness and despair, singularly well able to apply himself and capable of frittering away a lifetime in trivial pursuits, decorous and unseemly, kind and cruel, tolerant yet open to the most outrageous varieties of bigotry, a great friend and an implacable enemy, a lover and abominator of women, sweet-spoken and foul-mouthed, a rake and a puritan, swelling with hubris and haunted by inferiority, outcast and social climber, felon and philanthropist, barbarian and patron of the arts, enamored of novelty and solidly conservative, philosopher and fool, Republican and Democrat, large of soul and unbearably petty, distant and brimming with friendly impulses, an inveterate liar and astonishingly strict with petty cash, adventurous and timid, imaginative and stolid, malignly destructive and a planter of trees on Arbor Day—I tell you frankly, the man is a mess.”
“That’s extremely well said Bruce,” Fredric stated. “I think you’ve given a very thoughtful analysis.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“I was paraphrasing what Mark Schorer said about Sinclair Lewis,” Bruce replied.
“The Joker’s Greatest Triumph”.
Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964)

Dan Fogelberg photo

“Now for a heart that scorns dismay:
Now for a soul prepared.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book VI, p. 197

Friedrich Hölderlin photo
André Gide photo
James Allen photo
John Flavel photo

“Here you may suppose the Father to say when driving His bargain with Christ for you. The Father speaks. "My Son, here is a company of poor, miserable souls that have utterly undone themselves and now lay open to my justice. Justice demands satisfaction for them, or will satisfy itself in the eternal ruin of them." The Son responds. "Oh my Father. Such is my love to and pity for them, that rather than they shall perish eternally I will be responsible for them as their guarantee. Bring in all thy bills, that I may see what they owe thee. Bring them all in, that there be no after-reckonings with them. At my hands shall thou require it. I would rather choose to suffer the wrath that is theirs then they should suffer it. Upon me, my Father, upon me be all their debt." The Father responds. "But my Son, if thou undertake for them, thou must reckon to pay the last mite. Expect no abatement. Son, if I spare them… I will not spare you." The Son responds. "Content Father. Let it be so. Charge it all upon me. I am able to discharge it. And though it prove a kind of undoing to me, though it impoverish all my riches, empty all my treasures… I am content to take it."”

John Flavel (1627–1691) English Presbyterian clergyman

The Works of John Flavel, Vol.1, "A Display of Christ in His Essential and Mediatorial Glory", 42 Sermons, Sermon Number 3, "The Covenant of Redemption between the Father and the Redeemer", Use 6.

John Dryden photo

“Jealousy, the jaundice of the soul.”

Pt. III, line 73.
The Hind and the Panther (1687)

Jacques Maritain photo
George Eliot photo

“While the arm is strong to strike and heave,
Let soul and arm give shape that will abide…”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“Love is just a little bit of death in the heart,
For how often can one love in certainty that love will be returned?
Giving so much love, and receiving so little of it;
Because people are fickle, or indifferent? Who knows?
During moments together as in hours apart,
I'm mindful that the moon fades, flowers wither, souls pass away…
They wander lost in the somber darkness of sorrow,
Those fools who follow the footprints of love.
Because life is an endless desert,
And love is an entangling web.
Love is just a little bit of death in the heart.”

Xuân Diệu (1916–1985) Vietnamese poet

"Love" [Yêu], as quoted in "Shattered Identities and Contested Images: Reflections of Poetry and History in 20th-Century Vietnam" by Neil Jamieson, in Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1992, pp. 86–87, and in Understanding Vietnam by Neil Jamieson (University of California Press, 1995), p. 162
Variant translation by Huỳnh Sanh Thông:
To love is to die a little in the heart,
for when you love can you be sure you're loved?
You give so much, so little you get back—
the other lets you down or looks away.
Together or apart, it's still the same.
The moon turns pale, blooms fade, the soul's bereaved...
They'll lose their way amidst dark sorrowland,
those passionate fools who go in search of love.
And life will be a desert bare of joy,
and love will tie the knot that binds to grief.
To love is to die a little in the heart.

James Boswell photo

“I jumped up on the benches, roared out, "Damn you, you rascals!", hissed and was in the greatest rage. […] I hated the English; I wished from my soul that the Union was broke and that we might give them another battle of Bannockburn.”

James Boswell (1740–1795) Scottish lawyer, diarist and author

On an occasion of mocking a pair of Highland officers, circa 1672, as attributed by Ruaridh Nicoll, "As a Scot, I hate this idea of a neutered nation" http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/apr/22/scotland.devolution, The Observer, 22 April 2007

Gottfried Helnwein photo
John Gould Fletcher photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Dana Gioia photo

“Dante and Hopkins, Mozart and Palestrina, Michelangelo and El Greco, Bramante and Gaudi, have brought more souls to God than all the preachers of Texas”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

29
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Simone Weil photo
George William Russell photo

“It was the wise all-seeing soul
Who counselled neither war nor peace:
'Only be thou thyself that goal
In which the wars of time shall cease.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

William Empson photo

“Man, as the prying housemaid of the soul.”

William Empson (1906–1984) English literary critic and poet

Source: This Last Pain' (1930), Line 5.

Steve Kilbey photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1830s, The American Scholar http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm (1837)