“The man with the greatest soul will always face the greatest war with the low minded person.”
Quotes about the soul
page 2
“She's a tear that hangs inside my soul forever”
“though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
Source: The Secret History
“A heavy burden lifted from my soul,
I heard that love was out of my control.”
Source: Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs
Alex Jones: The "Justin Biebler" Rant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDMB0KyhPN8, 21 February 2011.
2011
“For nature forms our spirits to receive
Each bent that outward circumstance can give:
She kindles pleasure, bids resentment glow,
Or bows the soul to earth in hopeless woe.”
Format enim Natura prius nos intus ad omnem
Fortunarum habitum, juvat, aut impellit ad iram,
Aut ad humum moerore gravi deducit, et angit.
Source: Ars Poetica, or The Epistle to the Pisones (c. 18 BC), Line 108 (tr. Conington)
“That soul that can
Be honest is the only perfect man.”
Epilogue. Compare: "An honest man's the noblest work of God", Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, epistle iv. line 248.
The Honest Man's Fortune, (1613; published 1647)
Me & Rumi (2004)
The Rubaiyat (1120)
Mother Courage
Mother Courage and Her Children (1939)
As quoted in Anderson, H. George; Stafford, J. Francis; Burgess, Joseph A., eds. (1992). The One Mediator, The Saints, and Mary. Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue. VIII. Minneapolis: Augsburg. ISBN 0-8066-2579-1., p. 236
“When we understand this we see clearly that the subject round which the alternative senses play must be twofold. And we must therefore consider the subject of this work [the Divine Comedy] as literally understood, and then its subject as allegorically intended. The subject of the whole work, then, taken in the literal sense only is "the state of souls after death" without qualification, for the whole progress of the work hinges on it and about it. Whereas if the work be taken allegorically, the subject is "man as by good or ill deserts, in the exercise of the freedom of his choice, he becomes liable to rewarding or punishing justice."”
Hiis visis, manifestum est quod duplex oportet esse subiectum circa quod currant alterni sensus. Et ideo videndum est de subiecto huius operis, prout ad litteram accipitur; deinde de subiecto, prout allegorice sententiatur. Est ergo subiectum totius operis, litteraliter tantum accepti, status animarum post mortem simpliciter sumptus. Nam de illo et circa illum totius operis versatur processus. Si vero accipiatur opus allegorice, subiectum est homo, prout merendo et demerendo per arbitrii libertatem iustitie premiandi et puniendi obnoxius est.
Letter to Can Grande (Epistle XIII, 23–25), as translated by Charles Singleton in his essay "Two Kinds of Allegory" published in Dante Studies 1 (Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 87.
Epistolae (Letters)
Last words before John Hus died singing, being martyred July 6, 1415
Source: Peace of Soul (1949), Ch. 2, p. 20
“Man is so made that when anything fires his soul, impossibilities vanish.”
L'homme est ainsi bâti: Quand un sujet l'enflamme
L'impossibilité disparaît à son âme.
Book VIII (1678-1679), fable 25.
Fables (1668–1679)
Babur writing about the battle against the Rajput Confederacy led by Maharana Sangram Singh of Mewar. In Babur-Nama, translated into English by A.S. Beveridge, New Delhi reprint, 1979, pp. 547-572.
https://archive.org/stream/baburnama017152mbp/baburnama017152mbp_djvu.txt
From Sex to Superconsciousness
Context: Whenever I meet prostitutes, they never speak of sex. They inquire about the soul, and about God. I also meet many ascetics and monks, and whenever we are alone they ask about nothing but sex. I was surprised to learn that ascetics, who are always preaching against sex, seem to be captivated by it. They are curious about it and disturbed by it; they have this mental complex about it, yet they sermonize about religion and about the animal instincts in man. And sex is so natural.
30 December 1850
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries
Context: Each bud flowers but once and each flower has but its minute of perfect beauty; so, in the garden of the soul each feeling has, as it were, its flowering instant, its one and only moment of expansive grace and radiant kingship. Each star passes but once in the night through the meridian over our heads and shines there but an instant; so, in the heaven of the mind each thought touches its zenith but once, and in that moment all its brilliancy and all its greatness culminate. Artist, poet, or thinker, if you want to fix and immortalize your ideas or your feelings, seize them at this precise and fleeting moment, for it is their highest point. Before it, you have but vague outlines or dim presentiments of them. After it you will have only weakened reminiscence or powerless regret; that moment is the moment of your ideal.
“The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet.”
Blüthenstaub (1798), Unsequenced
Context: The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.
“Love is the unity of soul, mind and body. Pay attention to the precedence… ”
1977 (from the poem, Douse the Flames)
“If the soul does not exist, then stop believing in life and death as well.”
“And what difference is there in the color of the soul?”
Variant: What difference is there in the color of the soul?
Source: Twelve Years a Slave
“The words that enlighten the soul are more precious than jewels.”
“Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.”
“You should rejoice that you're in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul.”
Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
“Selling my soul would be a lot easier if I could just find it.”
Source: The Heroin Diaries: A Year In The Life Of A Shattered Rock Star
“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope… I have loved none but you.”
Variant: You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever.
Source: Persuasion
Heathcliff (Ch. XVI).
Source: Wuthering Heights (1847)
Context: Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you — haunt me then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe; I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always — take any form — drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss where I can not find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!
“The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body”
Discipline and Punish (1977)
Context: The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence... the soul is the effect and instrument of political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.
Context: But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.
“Reading is not walking on the words; it's grasping the soul of them.”
“The reason it hurts so much to separate is because our souls are connected.”
“We'll stop it, even if my body crumbles to bits I'll stop it with my soul!”
The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)
Context: Don't imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your perfection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you. And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders Individualism at every step.
Part 2, Book 1, Ch. 2
Variant translation: What makes night within us may leave stars.
Source: Ninety-Three (1874)
Context: Cimourdain was a pure-minded but gloomy man. He had "the absolute" within him. He had been a priest, which is a solemn thing. Man may have, like the sky, a dark and impenetrable serenity; that something should have caused night to fall in his soul is all that is required. Priesthood had been the cause of night within Cimourdain. Once a priest, always a priest.
Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars. Cimourdain was full of virtues and truth, but they shine out of a dark background.
“You are an Universe of Universes and your soul a source of songs.”
Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p. 59-60
“For one moment our lives met, our souls touched.”
Variant: For one moment our lives met our souls touched.
“The soul exists partly in eternity and partly in time.”
“You shall create beauty not to excite the senses
but to give sustenance to the soul.”
Source: Shantaram
“I count myself in nothing else so happy as in a soul remembering my good Friends”
Source: The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi
Socrates, p. 145
Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)
Lecture on "Electrical Units of Measurement" (3 May 1883), published in Popular Lectures Vol. I, p. 73, as quoted in The Life of Lord Kelvin (1910) by Silvanus Phillips Thompson
Letter to Deborah Hatheway (1741), in Letters and Personal Writings (1998), edited by George S. Claghorn, Vol. 16.
Speech as Viceroy of India (1926), quoted in Birkenhead, Halifax (Hamish Hamilton, 1965), pp. 223-234
Viceroy of India
D. Martin Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 61 vols., (Weimar: Verlag Hermann Böhlaus Nochfolger, 1883-1983), 52:39 [hereinafter: WA] 1544