Quotes about the soul
page 22

“I had, at that moment, another soul – an almost divine soul, a creative and sacrificial soul.”

Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright

“Twenty-five years ago this Republic was bearing and wearing a triple chain of bondage. Long familiarity with traffic in the bodies and souls of men had paralyzed the consciences of a majority of our people; the narrowing and disintegrating doctrine of State sovereignty had shackled and weakened the noblest and most beneficent powers of the national government; and the grasping power of slavery was seizing upon the virgin territories of the West, and dragging them into the den of eternal bondage.
At that crisis the Republican party was born. It drew its first inspiration from that fire of liberty which God has lighted in every human heart, and which all the powers of ignorance and tyranny can never wholly extinguish. The Republican party came to deliver and to save.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1880s, Speech Nominating John Sherman for President (1880)

Men, God, People, Light

“I consider that in dialectics I am the equal of Socrates. As to women, I agree that each has three or four souls, but none of them a reasoning one.”

Henryk Sienkiewicz book Quo Vadis

Petronius to Marcus Vinicius, in Ch. 3
Quo Vadis (1895)

Women

“Races didn't bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world. And their manners were their own business. And so were their politics. And so, but ten times so, were their souls.”

Archibald Macleish (1892–1982) American poet and Librarian of Congress

"The American Cause", address delivered at Faneuil Hall, Boston, Massachusetts (November 20, 1940); reported in MacLeish, A Time to Act; Selected Addresses (1943), p. 115

People, World, History, Business

“If, when Christ was on his way to Calvary, some brave soul had rescued him from the pious mob, he would not only have been damned for his pains, but would have rendered impossible the salvation of any human being. The Christian world has been trying for nearly two thousand years to explain the atonement, and every effort has ended in an admission that it cannot be understood, and a declaration that it must be believed. Has the promise and hope of forgiveness ever prevented the commission of a sin? Can men be made better by being taught that sin gives happiness here; that to live a virtuous life is to bear a cross; that men can repent between the last sin and the last breath; and that repentance washes every stain of the soul away?”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Some Reasons Why (1881)

Life, Men, Pain, World

“Other books we may read and criticise. To the Scriptures we must bow the entire soul, with all its faculties.”

Edward Norris Kirk (1802–1874) American Christian missionary, pastor, teacher, evangelist and writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 38.

Books, Reading

“He thinks that Hero-worship, done differently in every different epoch of the world, is the soul of all social business among men; that the doing of it well, or the doing of it ill, measures accurately what degree of well-being or of ill- being there is in the world's affairs. He thinks that we, on the whole, do our Hero-worship worse than any Nation in this world ever did it before: that the Burns an Exciseman, the Byron a Literary Lion, are intrinsically, all things considered, a baser and falser phenomenon than the Odin a God, the Mahomet a Prophet of God. It is this Editor's clear opinion, accordingly, that we must learn to do our Hero-worship better; that to do it better and better, means the awakening of the Nation's soul from its asphyxia, and the return of blessed life to us,—Heaven's blessed life, not Mammon's galvanic accursed one. To resuscitate the Asphyxied, apparently now moribund, and in the last agony if not resuscitated: such and no other seems the consummation. 'Hero-worship,' if you will,—yes, friends; but, first of all, by being ourselves of heroic mind.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Life, Men, God, World

“There are two kinds of fears: rational and irrational- or, in simpler terms, fears that make sense and fears that don't. For instance, the Baudelaire orphans have a fear of Count Olaf, which makes perfect sense, because he is an evil man who wants to destroy them. But if they were afraid of lemon meringue pie, this would be an irrational fear, because lemon meringue pie is delicious and would never hurt a soul. Being afraid of a monster under the bed is perfectly rational, because there may in fact be a monster under your bed at any time, ready to eat you all up, but a fear of realtors is an irrational fear. Realtors, as I'm sure you know, are people who assist in the buying and selling of houses. Besides occasionally wearing an ugly yellow coat, the worst a realtor can do to you is show you a house that you find ugly, so it is completely irrational to be terrified of them. -Lemony Snicket”

Daniel Handler book The Wide Window

The Wide Window (2000)

People, Fear, Sense, Evil

“There is but one thing needful — to possess God. All our senses, all our powers of mind and soul, all our external resources, are so many ways of approaching the divinity, so many modes of tasting and of adoring God. We must learn to detach ourselves from all that is capable of being lost, to bind ourselves absolutely only to what is absolute and eternal, and to enjoy the rest as a loan, as a usufruct…. To worship, to comprehend, to receive, to feel, to give, to act: this our law, our duty, our happiness, our heaven.”

Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881) Swiss philosopher and poet

16 July 1848
Only one thing is necessary: to possess God — All the senses, all the forces of the soul and of the spirit, all the exterior resources are so many open outlets to the Divinity; so many ways of tasting and of adoring God. We should be able to detach ourselves from all that is perishable and cling absolutely to the eternal and the absolute and enjoy the all else as a loan, as a usufruct…. To worship, to comprehend, to receive, to feel, to give, to act: this our law, our duty, our happiness, our heaven.
As translated in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries

God, Law, Way, Feeling

“Pythagoras' idea of the transmigration of the soul is central.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Vanna Bonta Talks About Quantum fiction: Author Interview (2007)

Idea

“Moses … denied to the members of the sacred commonwealth unrestricted liberty to use and partake of the other kinds of food. All the animals of land, sea or air whose flesh is the finest and fattest, thus titillating and exciting the malignant foe pleasure, he sternly forbade them to eat, knowing that they set a trap for the most slavish of the senses, the taste, and produce gluttony, an evil very dangerous both to soul and body.”

Philo (-15–45 BC) Roman philosopher

69.
On the Special Laws

Pleasure, Food, Sense, Evil

“Though I'm no expert on all things Pantera, I did hear their version of 'Cat Scratch Fever' and it was exceedingly white. No soul, no balls, no feel. Caucasian all the way. Elements of dope, booze and heroin disconnect quite apparent as usual. There is no excuse for such horrifically negative, irresponsible, criminal, America-wrecking behavior as such chimp-like substance abuse. Period. They appeared as Ozzy-like zombies on TV. Ya think. American drunks and dopers are allahpuke terrorists' favorite allies. Damn them. Damn them all.”

Ted Nugent (1948) American rock musician

Postings on Pantera (2006)

Way, Behavior, Feeling, Cats

“Behind the top hats, a little lady wearing lila-coloured tights was balancing on a tightrope in the middle of all that blue-grey tobacco-laden air. I sauntered in among the standing clientele. I was on the lookout for an attractive girl. Yes – that one wasn’t bad. When she became aware of my gaze her facial expression changed to that of a frozen mask and she stared emptily into space. I found a stair – and collapsed into it – tired and listless. Everyone clapped. The Lila-clad tightrope-walker curtsied, smiled and disappeared. A group of Romanian singers took her place. There was love and hate – and longing and reunion – and lovely dreams – and that soft music melting together with the colours. The melted notes became green palm trees and steely blue water floating in the blue haze of the room. An artwork is a crystal. A crystal has a soul and a mind, and the artwork must also have these.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

a note of Munch, written in Ekely, 1929; Munch Museum
1896 - 1930

Love, Hate, Smile, Dreams

“(When asked about pop music) Pop music has become the largest farce in music history. It is soul-less, mechanical, and only made for the sole purpose of making the fastest dollar possible, with more emphasis on imagery than the music. I would much rather remain an independent recording artist who can dictate his own creativity and make it available to a smaller community of fans then sign with a major label under conditions of compromising my work just to sell lunch boxes and sound like every other thing out there. The only artists that have any longevity are the ones that pioneer a movement not follow a movement. The hundreds of following wannabes always get left in the dust or remain one-hit-wonders.”

Frank Klepacki (1974) American musician, video game music composer and sound director

Gameplay magazine

Music, History, Communication, Box

“That girls should not marry for money we are all agreed. A lady who can sell herself for a title or an estate, for an income or a set of family diamonds, treats herself as a farmer teats his sheep and oxen — makes hardly more of herself, of her own inner self, in which are comprised a mind and a soul, than the poor wretch of her own sex who earns her bread in the lowest state of degradation.”

Anthony Trollope Framley Parsonage

Source: Framley Parsonage (1861), Ch. 21

Money, Family, Sex, Girl

“There is nothing so easy, so sweet, and so favourable, as the divine law: it calls and invites us to her, guilty and abominable as we are; extends her arms and receives us into her bosom, foul and polluted as we at present are, and are for the future to be. But then, in return, we are to look upon her with a respectful eye; we are to receive this pardon with all gratitude and submission, and for that instant at least, wherein we address ourselves to her, to have the soul sensible of the ills we have committed, and at enmity with those passions that seduced us to offend her;”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Essais (1595), Book I

Law, Passion, Future, Gratitude

“[Swami Sri Yukteswar to Paramahansa Yogananda, before whom he appeared in the flesh on June 19, 1936, more than three months after his mahasamadhi (a great yogi’s final conscious exit from the body)] Grieve not for me…. You and I shall smile together, so long as our two forms appear different in the maya-dream of God. Finally we shall merge as one in the Cosmic Beloved; our smiles shall be His smile, our unified song of joy vibrating throughout eternity to be broadcast to God-tuned souls!”

Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936) Indian yogi and guru

Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

God, Smile, Dreams, Appearance

“In the Soviet Union, he knew, great art hangs in public galleries. No scholars, no men and women waiting to mend their souls before a Raphael or a Matisse need wait, cap in hand at the mansion door.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"The Cleric of Treason".
George Steiner: A Reader (1984)

Women, Men, Art, Waiting

“I adore my life: it is filled with so much true poetry, fine feelings, things many have no idea about. I despise my life, which, being rich, allowed itself to be crammed into the confines of conventions. Between these two opinions pulsates my soul always longing for beauty and good.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

1895 - 1905
Source: Lettres à un Inconnu, 1902 (Notebook I, p. 234) - Aux sources de l'expressionnisme. Presentation par Gabrielle Dufour-Kowalska. Klincksieck, 1999. p. 101

Life, Beauty, Feeling, Idea

“Poor Hayduke: won all his arguments but lost his immortal soul.”

Edward Abbey book The Monkey Wrench Gang

The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975)

“In the short time I've known you, Richard, I've noticed you possess a lamentable tendency to put on shining armor and look for ladies to rescue. King Arthur, God rest his soul, would have loved you. He'd have had you fighting every evil knight in the forest.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Captain Michael Hogan, p. 254
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Havoc (2003)

Love, God, Evil, Time

“There is a great and crying evil in modern society. It is want of purpose. It is that narrowness of vision which shuts out the wider vistas of the soul. It is the absence of those sublime emotions which, wherever they arise, do not fall to exalt and consecrate existence.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Founding Address (1876)

Evil, Cry

“If every soul should lose it's way
If every face should lose it's name
If no one tries to end this game
Or find a way to ease the pain
Who's gonna stop the rain?”

Anastacia (1968) American singer-songwriter

Who's Gonna Stop the Rain
Not That Kind (2000)

Pain, Way, Game

“The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.”

Claude Debussy (1862–1918) French composer

Letter to Ernest Chausson (1894)

Sadness, Dreams

“Christ embodies the ideal of human perfection: in Him all bias and defects are removed, and the masculine and feminine virtues are united and their weaknesses redeemed; therefore, His true followers will be progressively exalted over their natural limitations. That is why we see in holy men a tenderness and a truly maternal solicitude for the souls entrusted to them while in holy women there is manly boldness, proficiency, and determination.”

Edith Stein (1891–1942) Jewish-German nun, theologian and philosopher

Essays on Woman (1996), The Separate Vocations of Man and Woman According to Nature and Grace (1932)

Women, Men, Nature, Christ

“It was very competitive in the '60s. And everybody caught the bug, y'know? It was like a “competitive bug.” And, as far as I could see, everybody was turning everybody on. … The Beatles were a part of that whole “competition” thing. Rubber Soul blew my mind. It really made me wanna record; it made me wanna cut. It sounds like a collection of songs that belong together, and it was an uplifting feeling. So I thought I'd make a collection of songs — called Pet Sounds — together. That's how I got that idea. … I'm proud of it. I think it's a very everlasting album. I'm very proud of the love that went into it. A lot of love went into that album. And people pick up on that too, and they really like it 'cause they feel the love.”

Brian Wilson (1942) American musician, singer, songwriter and record producer

Bassics interview (1999)

Love, People, Feeling, Idea

“Heart on her lips, and soul within her eyes,
Soft as her clime, and sunny as her skies.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Stanza 45.
Beppo (1818)

Heart

“Adieu! 'tis love's last greeting,
The parting hour is come!
And fast thy soul is fleeting
To seek its starry home.”

Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780–1857) French poet and chansonnier

L'Adieu; free translation; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 579.

Love, Home, Parting

“In order to test Hanuman's devotion, Rama once asked him, "How do you think of me?" Hanuman replied: "Lord, while I identify myself with the body, I am Thy servant. When I consider myself as an individual soul, I am a part of Thee. And when I look upon myself as the Atman, I am one with Thee—this is my firm conviction."”

Swami Adbhutananda Disciple

Source: God Lived with Them, p.437

Thinking, Parting

“Dialogue in Hell:
Thirteenth Dialogue

Machiavelli: This is because you do not understand, Montesquieu! How much impotence and even simplicity is found among the majority of men of European demagoguism. These tigers have souls of sheep, heads full of wind. Their dream is the absorption of the individual into a symbolic unity. They demand the complete realization of equality.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Men, Dreams, Hell, Understanding

“You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Perelandra

Perelandra (1943)

Thinking

“…I don't like to make judgments about what people like sexually. Some people like one sex, or the other, or they like fat people, or they like to be tied up, whatever. That's fine. Whatever people like is fine by me. I think that's important, too, because in this country a lot of people want to make laws about that and I'm very much against that. Making certain kinds of sex illegal… To me that's immoral, to illegalize things that people want to do. Same with religious things. I think people should be able to believe whatever they want to believe. I think that when governments try to get involved with that sort of stuff, you're really destroying people's souls. I don't make statements like that in my songs because that's not what I want. I don't want to make a political statement.”

John S. Hall (1960) Poet, author, singer, lawyer

Interview by Elein Fleiss and Olivier Zahm, ca. 1992 ( link http://adaweb.com/~purple/kingm.html) Quotes from interviews

People, Law, Sex, Thinking

“Personal independence is a virtue and it is the soul out of which comes the sturdiest manhood. But there can be no independence without a large share of self-dependence, and this virtue cannot be bestowed. It must be developed from within.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1870s, Self-Made Men (1872)

Dependency, Personality

“Mere grace is not enough: a play should thrill
The hearer's soul, and move it at its will.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry of Horace (1869), Art of Poetry, p. 175

“Friends are true Twins in Soul; they Sympathize in every thing, and have the Love and Aversion. One is not happy without the other, nor can either of them be miserable alone. As if they could change Bodies, they take their turns in Pain as well as in Pleasure; relieving one another in their most adverse Conditions. What one enjoys, the other cannot Want. Like the Primitive Christians, they have all things in common, and no Property but in one another.”

William Penn (1644–1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania

108 - 110
Fruits of Solitude (1682), Part I

Love, Pain, Pleasure, Change

“I've been seeing the waves and the white beach of Grand Isle; the quiet, grassy street of the Chênière Caminada; the old sunny fort at Grand Terre. I've been working with a little more comprehension than a machine, and still feeling like a lost soul.”

Kate Chopin book The Awakening

The Awakening (1899)

Feeling

“In this word: Suddenly thou shalt be taken, — I saw that God rewardeth man for the patience that he hath in abiding God’s will, and for his time, and that man lengtheneth his patience over the time of his living. For not-knowing of his time of passing, that is a great profit: for if a man knew his time, he should not have patience over that time; but, as God willeth, while the soul is in the body it seemeth to itself that it is ever at the point to be taken. For all this life and this languor that we have here is but a point, and when we are taken suddenly out of pain into bliss then pain shall be nought.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Fifteenth Revelation, Chapter 63

Life, God, Pain, Time

“Freud describes the neurotic personality of the late nineteenth century as one suffering from fragmentation – that is, from repression of instinctual drives, blocking off of awareness, loss of autonomy, weakness and passivity of the ego, together with the various neurotic symptoms which result from this fragmentation. “Kierkegaard-who wrote the only known book before Freud specifically devoted to the problem of anxiety-analyzes not only anxiety but particularly the depression and despair which result from the individual’s self-estrangement, an estrangement he proceeds to clarify in its different forms and degrees of severity. Nietzsche proclaims ten years before Freud’s first book that the disease of contemporary man is that “his soul had gone stale” he is – he describes how blocked instinctual powers turn within the individual into resentment, self-hatred, hostility and aggression. Freud did not know Kierkegaard’s work, but he regarded Nietzsche as one of the authentically great men of all time.””

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Discovery of Being (1983), p. 60-61

Men, Hostility, Books, Disease

“Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

Notes (1913) http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/exiles.html#notes made by Joyce for his play Exiles

Love

“No words suffice the secret soul to show,
For truth denies all eloquence to woe.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Canto III, stanza 22.
The Corsair (1814)

Truth, Secret

“Owing to the strength of this [the Navajo] tribe which numbered then not less than sixty or seventy thousand (60 or 70,000) souls embracing as it did some of those Indians who now call themselves 'Apaches' but who still speak the same language, and who are so alike, and to the fact that they inhabit a country equal to one-third of the whole Territory; that this section was a 'Terra Incognita' and that there is no portion of the American Continent so well adapted by nature for the peculiar style of warfare adopted by the Indians, it is not at all surprising that the many powerful campaigns made against them by the Spanish Government were entirely barren of results as to their subjugation.”

Kit Carson (1809–1868) American frontiersman and Union Army general

Letter to General James Henry Carleton (May 17, 1864) as quoted by Ralph Emerson Twitchell, The Leading Facts of New Mexican History Vol. 3 https://books.google.com/books?id=GUUOAAAAIAAJ (1917)

Nature, Country

“England’s genius filled all measure
Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure,
Gave to the mind its emperor,
And life was larger than before:
Nor sequent centuries could hit
Orbit and sum of Shakespeare’s wit.
The men who lived with him became
Poets, for the air was fame.”

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

Solution http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=l&p=c&a=p&ID=20586&c=323, l. 35-42 1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

Life, Men, Pleasure, Heart

“Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?”

June Jordan (1936–2002) Poet, essayist, playwright, feminist and bisexual activist

Source: Black Studies: Bringing Back The Person (1969), p. 46

Life, Question, Freedom

“The habits of life form the soul, and the soul forms the physical presence.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

La vie habituelle fait l'âme, et l'âme fait la physionomie.
Source: The Vicar of Tours (1832), Ch. II

Life

“Nor do we merely feel these essences
For one short hour; no, even as the trees
That whisper round a temple become soon
Dear as the temple’s self, so does the moon,
The passion poesy, glories infinite,
Haunt us till they become a cheering light
Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast,
That, whether there be shine, or gloom o’ercast,
They alway must be with us, or we die.”

John Keats Endymion

Bk. I, l. 25
Endymion (1818)

Feeling, Tree, Light, Passion

“I finished the thing; but I think I sprained my soul.”

Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist

On her novel Ship of Fools (1962) in McCall's magazine (August 1965)

Thinking

“Dim as the borrowed beams of moon and stars
To lonely, weary, wandering travellers
Is reason to the soul; and as on high
Those rolling fires discover but the sky
Not light us here, so reason's glimmering ray
Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,
But guide us upward to a better day:
And as those nightly tapers disappear
When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere,
So pale grows reason at religion's sight,
So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light.”

John Dryden book Religio Laici

Religio Laici (1682).

Religion, Way, Travel, Star

“Moreover, nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed; the tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation, or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the soul, to assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked by it, can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune's image.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1940-1941), p. 193

Nature, Suffering, Personality

“The soul speaks to itself in parables.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

“There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely desperate. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity.”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

General Security: The Liquidation of Opium (1925)

Nature

“So remember, we have to find God, that person who is perfect; He is ours and we are His, and we have to find Him … So remember: we are part of Him who has manifested Himself as a Guru and who has come into this earth, and now we have to be one with Him. We have to completely merge and make our souls one with Him because He is perfect, and once we merge with Him we will also be perfect … So if you go to Him, ask. Ask and it shall be given, knock and it shall be opened unto you.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Prem Nagar Ashram, India, 10 December 1971 - quoted on p256 of "Who is Guru Maharaj Ji?" published by Bantam, 1973
1970s

God, Parting, Personality, Perfection

“Let first the onion flourish there,
Rose among roots, the maiden-fair,
Wine-scented and poetic soul
Of the capacious salad bowl.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Underwoods

Bk. I, To a Gardener.
Underwoods (1887)

Wine

“Winds howl and howl at ghosts of those war's killed—
on soldiers' faces shines the stalking moon.
O men, alive or dead, has anyone
portrayed your faces or invoked your souls?”

Đặng Trần Côn (1710–1745) writer

Source: Chinh phụ ngâm, Lines 97–100

Men, War, Dead

“The learning process is endless. We must read, we must observe, we must assimilate, and we must ponder that to which we expose our minds. I believe in the evolution of the mind, the heart, and the soul of humanity. I believe in improvement. I believe in growth. There is nothing quite as invigorating as being able to evaluate and then solve a difficult problem, to grapple with something that seems unsolvable and then find a resolution.”

Gordon B. Hinckley book Standing for Something

Standing for Something: Ten Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes.

Problem, Learning, Reading, Heart

“We can be sure our beloved pope is standing today at the window of the father's house, that he sees us and blesses us. Yes, bless us, Holy Father. We entrust your dear soul to the Mother of God, your Mother, who guided you each day and who will now guide you to the glory of her son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.Today we bury his remains in the earth as a seed of immortality. Our hearts are full of sadness, yet at the same time (full) of joyful hope and profound gratitude.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

Homily during the Requiem Mass of the funeral of [Pope John Paul II], on April 8, 2005
2005

God, Sadness, Hope, Time

“This is the president that looked in the soul of Putin [see George W. Bush's quote above], and I could have told him, he was a KGB agent. By definition he doesn't have a soul. I mean, this is a waste of time, right? This is nonsense, but this is the world we're living in right now.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

On the Russian President Vladimir Putin http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/01/07/hillary_clinton_campaigning_ponders_putins_soul/ Presidential campaign (January 20, 2007 – 2008)

World, Quotes, Time

“Such young unfurrowed souls roll to meet each other like two velvet peaches that touch softly and are at rest; they mingle as easily as two brooklets that ask for nothing but to entwine themselves and ripple with ever-interlacing curves in the leafiest hiding-places.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“The scriptures bid us to send forth our light and our truth and when children carry within their hearts the torch of hope, they learn the darkness yields not only to man-made fire, but to starlight, to the rising sun, and to the light of the soul.”

Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician

Speech, Cleveland City Council (13 October 2003) http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/kucinich/kucin101303.html.

Children, Truth, Hope, Light

“I have three dogs, and to see some of the videos or go online and research how animals are treated for fur, the cruelty is worse than torture. I think it’s right that NFL players—with the platform that we have—can [spread] awareness that animals have lives and souls and they go through pain and suffering just as humans do, and they need to be treated accordingly. A lot of people think [that] wearing a fur is expensive, but you don’t know how expensive it is—lives are priceless. … Protecting animals is definitely something that in America we need to step up and do a better job of.”

Maurice Jones-Drew (1985) All-American college football player, professional football player, running back, kick returner

"NFL Star Maurice Jones-Drew Chooses 'Ink, Not Mink'" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0qJ0k8gaxg, video interview with PETA (5 November 2013).

Pain, People, Dogs, Thinking

“A civil sword (as woeful experience in all ages has proved) is so far from bringing or helping forward an opposite in religion to repentance that magistrates sin grievously against the work of God and blood of souls by such proceedings… Religion cannot be true which needs such instruments of violence to uphold it so.”

Roger Williams (theologian) (1603–1684) English Protestant theologian and founder of the colony of Providence Plantation

The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience (1644)

God, Age, Religion, Help

“I adopted the theory of Reincarnation when I was twenty six. Religion offered nothing to the point. Even work could not give me complete satisfaction. Work is futile if we cannot utilise the experience we collect in one life in the next. When I discovered Reincarnation it was as if I had found a universal plan. I realised that there was a chance to work out my ideas. Time was no longer limited. I was no longer a slave to the hands of the clock. Genius is experience. Some seem to think that it is a gift or talent, but it is the fruit of long experience in many lives. Some are older souls than others, and so they know more. The discovery of Reincarnation put my mind at ease. If you preserve a record of this conversation, write it so that it puts men’s minds at ease. I would like to communicate to others the calmness that the long view of life gives to us.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

Interview in the San Francisco Examiner (26 August 1928)

Life, Men, Religion, Communication

“I may not be able to say all I think; but I am not going to say anything that I do not think. I would rather a thousand times be a free soul in jail than to be a sycophant and coward in the streets.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

The Canton, Ohio Speech, Anti-War Speech (1918)

Thinking, Time

“I have rejected as idolatrous the Religion of Modern Medicine and its fundamental sacrament – vivisection. For years I have encouraged my medical students to surreptitiously photograph animal conditions in their laboratories, to keep diaries, to leak the truth to the media. This sabotage serves not only to inform the public, but also helps save the integrity – indeed, the souls – of the students. For myself, I cling to the Sabbath commandment prohibiting even animals from being worked seven days a week. Every human being whose religion is derived from the Old Testament (and Eastern religions as well) knows the laws protecting animals. Only Modern Medicine, in its arrogant idolatry, sanctions cruelty to animals as the norm.”

Robert S. Mendelsohn (1926–1988) American pediatrician

Foreword to Slaughter of the Innocent, 1982, by Hans Ruesch.

Truth, Religion, Law, Help

“Faith is trusting Jesus to lead us and going where He leads. What avails it to me to analyze Saratoga water, and to believe in its virtues? I must drink the water if I want its purifying power. And the soul that has not actually drunk of Christ can never be purged from sin.”

Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 227.

Faith, Drink, Water, Christ

“When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions. Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that men of God have, from time to time, walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer.”

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

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

Men, God, Truth, Youth

“The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves. Let us not get accustomed and adjusted to these conditions. The one who adjusts ceases to discriminate between good and evil. He becomes a slave in body and soul. Whatever may happen to you, remember always: Don’t adjust! Revolt against the reality!”

Mordechai Anielewicz (1919–1943) Leader of the Jewish Combat Organization

The last letter from Mordecai Anielewicz , April 23 1943, written to Yitzhak Cukierman. [M.Kann], Na oczach swiata, ("In The Eyes of the World"), Zamosc, 1932 [i.e. Warszawa, 1943], pp. 33-34.

Reality, Evil

“So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein — more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Victor Frankenstein in Ch. 3
Frankenstein (1818)

World, Way

“The theology taught by Milton was dear to the Puritan heart. It was accepted by New England, and it poisoned the souls and ruined the lives of thousands. The genius of Shakespeare could not make the theology of Milton poetic. In the literature of the world there is nothing, outside of the “sacred books,” more perfectly absurd.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Why I Am an Agnostic (1896)

Books, World, Literature, Heart

“High up where the poor sat, the people quaked with fear:
they saw the soul stretched on the ground, a votive beast
beaten by the conflicting powers of light and dark,
and their minds shook, nor knew now what great god to choose,
for comfort's road dropped to the right, the rough ascent
rose to the left, and both roads seemed to lead to God,
while at the crossroads stood the human heart, and swayed.”

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) Greek writer

Book VI, line 242
The Odyssey : A Modern Sequel (1938)

God, People, Fear, Light

“God bless my soul, woman, the more personal you are the better! This is a story of human beings — not dummies! Be personal — be prejudiced — be catty — be anything you please! Write the thing your own way. We can always prune out the bits that are libellous afterwards!”

Agatha Christie book Murder in Mesopotamia

Dr Reilly
Murder in Mesopotamia (1936)

God, Way, Personality

“If Christian mysticism and its goal, ecstasy, is the contact of man with God through a leap from human nature to divine nature, national mysticism is nothing other than the contact of man and crowds with the soul of their race through the leap which these forces make from the world of personal and material interests into the outer world of race. Not through the mind, since this anyone can do, but by living with their soul.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Religion

God, World, Nature, Personality

“Exercise ferments the humors, casts them into their proper channels, throws off redundancies, and helps nature in those secret distributions, without which the body cannot subsist in its vigor, nor the soul act with cheerfulness.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 115 (12 July 1711).
The Spectator (1711–1714)

Secret, Exercises, Nature, Help

“As the blood of Christ is the fountain of all merit, so the Spirit is the fountain of all spiritual life; and until He quickens us, imparts the principle of divine life to our souls, we can put forth no vital act of faith to lay hold upon Jesus Christ.”

John Flavel (1627–1691) English Presbyterian clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 319.

Life, Faith, Christ

“The aim of such a religion is not merely to "glorify God"; rather, it is to glorify all souls, as all in the image of God; to glorify them by fulfilling for every one of them its vocation to repeat in a new way the life of universal love that is the life of God, and thus to attain, through the universal greatening, such a real glorification of God as other forms of religion seek after in vain.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Right Relation of Reason to Religion, p.255

Love, Life, God, Religion

“Glad and joyous and sweet is the Blissful lovely Cheer of our Lord to our souls.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Sixteenth Revelation, Chapter 71

Love

“The souls of perished creatures shall… form the elements of the soul-life of the earth.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Life

“In a general way, the literature of the twentieth century is essentially psychological; and psychology consists of describing states of the soul by displaying them all on the same plane, without any discrimination of value, as though good and evil were external to them, as though the effort toward the good could be absent at any moment from the thought of any man.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

“The responsibility of writers,” p. 168
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)

Way, Literature, Effort, Evil

“Ultimately, the basic issue is whether America will provide global leadership that springs from the unity and the integrity of the American people, or whether extremist doctrines, the manipulation of the truth, will define America's role in the world.
At stake is nothing less than our nation's soul.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Post-Presidency, DNC address (2004)

People, Truth, World, Spring

“Complacency is the deadly enemy of spiritual progress. The contented soul is the stagnant soul.”

Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897–1963) American missionary

The Size of the Soul, p. 22

“Marcia: You look lovely. People talk to me about you and I say you're one of the kindest souls I know.”

Hayley Jensen (1983) Australian singer

Australian Idol, Final Performances, Final 7

Love, People

“Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge, and dares to forgive an injury.”

Edwin Hubbell Chapin (1814–1880) American priest

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers, P. 251.

Forgiveness, Revenge, Strong, Appearance

“Nazism … destroys the very soul of our civilization … I have not taken the same grave view of Bolshevism, for it never was clear to me that Bolshevism, in spite of its brutalities and cruelties, really threatened the essentials of our ethical civilization. And after all it was a revolution of a semi-barbarous people against a rotten government and an effete church. Nazi-ism in highly cultured Germany is a very different affair.”

Jan Smuts (1870–1950) military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa

As quoted by W. K. Hancock in SMUTS 2: The Fields of Force 1919-1950, p. 358

People

“At that moment I railed against a God who could condemn such an innocent soul to Purgatory. What had Sedenko done that was not the result of his upbringing or his religion, which encouraged him to kill in the name of Christ? It came to me that perhaps God had become senile, that He had lost His memory and no longer remembered the purpose of placing Man on Earth. He had become petulant, He had become whimsical. He retained His power over us, but could no longer be appealed to. And where was His Son, who had been sent to redeem us? Was God’s Plan not so much mysterious as impossible for us to accept: because it was a malevolent one?”

Michael Moorcock book The War Hound and the World's Pain

Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 7 (pp. 85-86)

God, Religion, Memory, Christ

“His eyes
All radiant with glad surprise,
Looked forward through the Centuries
And saw the seeds which sages cast
In the world’s soil in cycles past
Spring up and blossom at the last;
Saw how the souls of men had grown,
And where the scythes of Truth had mown
Clear space for Liberty’s white throne;
Saw how, by sorrow tried and proved,
The blackening stains had been removed
Forever from the land he loved;
Saw Treason crushed and Freedom crowned,
And clamorous Faction, gagged and bound,
Gasping its life out on the ground.”

Richard Realf (1832–1878) American poet

Apocalypse.

Love, Life, Men, Truth

“This wicked man, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatreds, this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame, has now resolved to try to break our famous Island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction. What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration he has caused in London have been removed. He has lighted a fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burnt out of Europe, and until the Old World—and the New—can join hands to rebuild the temples of man's freedom and man's honour, upon foundations which will not soon or easily be overthrown.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Broadcast (11 September 1940), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 779
The Second World War (1939–1945)

World, Freedom, Light, Heart

“Life itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living: All things fall under this name. The Sun itself is but the dark simulacrum, and the light but the shadow of God.”

Thomas Browne book The Garden of Cyrus

Source: The Garden of Cyrus (1658), Ch. 4

Life, Death, God, Light

“Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul.”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

As quoted in Matisse (1984) by Pierre Schneider
Posthumous quotes

“There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Abolition of Man

The Abolition of Man (1943)

Wisdom, Men, Age, Knowledge

“Things. Cosas. Things attach themselves like leeches to the human soul, then they bleed out the sweetness and the music and the primordial joy of being unencumbered upon the land.”

Tom Robbins Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)

Music, Joy

“The pathology of Western intellectuals has committed them to an adversarial relationship with the culture - free markets and individual rights - that has produced the greatest alleviation of suffering; the greatest liberation from want, ignorance, and superstition; and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in the history of all human life. This pathology allows Western intellectuals to step around the Everest of bodies of the victims of Communism without a tear, a scruple, a regret, an act of contrition, or a reevaluation of self, soul, and mind.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

As quoted in "Notable & Quotable: The Victims of Socialism" https://web.archive.org/web/20160217064704/http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-the-victims-of-socialism-1455667462 (17 February 2016), The Wall Street Journal, A13 2000s, Can There Be an "After Socialism"? (2003)

Life, History, Communication, Tear

“What Miss Moore’s best poetry does, I can say best in her words: it “comes into and steadies the soul,” so that the reader feels himself “a life prisoner, but reconciled.””

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Her Shield”, p. 187
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Life, Feeling

“Communicating wit is a lonely art. It demands an independent soul.”

Lindsey Davis book Last Act in Palmyra

Last Act in Palmyra

Art, Communication

“The name of happiness is but a wider term
for the unalloy'd conditions of the Pleasur of Life,
attendant on all function, and not to be deny'd
to th' soul, unless forsooth in our thought of nature
spiritual is by definition unnatural.”

Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930) British writer

Book IV, lines 533-537.
The Testament of Beauty (1929-1930)

Life, Pleasure, Nature, Happiness

“We never know through what Divine mysteries of compensation the great Father of the universe may be carrying out His sublime plan; but those three words, "God is love" ought to contain, to every doubting soul, the solution of all things.”

Dinah Craik (1826–1887) English novelist and poet

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 270

Love, God, Universe

“On that Day ye will continue to rove distraught, even as camels, seeking a drop of the water of life. God will cause oceans of living water to stream forth from the presence of Him Whom God shall make manifest, while ye will refuse to quench your thirst therefrom, notwithstanding that ye regard yourselves as the God-fearing witnesses of your Faith. Nay, and yet again, nay! Ye will go astray far beyond the peoples unto whom the Gospel, or the Qur’án or any other Scripture was given. Take good heed to yourselves, inasmuch as the Cause of God will come upon you at a time when you will all be entreating and tearfully imploring God for the advent of the Day of His Manifestation; yet when He cometh ye will tarry and will fail to be of those who are well-assured in His Faith.
Beware lest ye grieve Him Who is the Supreme Manifestation of your Lord; verily, He can well afford to dispense with your allegiance unto Him. Be ye careful and bring not despondency upon any soul, for surely ye shall be put to proof.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

XVII, 2
The Kitáb-I-Asmá

Life, God, People, Fear

“The ecclesiastical description of Hell is that of a horrible place of fire and torment; in Dante's Inferno, and in northern climes, it was thought to be an icy cold region, a giant refrigerator. (Even with all their threats of eternal damnation and soul roasting, Christian missionaries have run across some who were not so quick to swallow their drivel. Pleasure and pain, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder. So, when missionaries ventured into Alaska and warned the Eskimos of the horrors of Hell and the blazing lake of fire awaiting transgressors, they eagerly asked: "How do we get there?")”

Anton LaVey book The Satanic Bible

The Satanic Bible (1969)

Pain, Pleasure, Beauty, Hell

“By following up this idea, also, we might go a little further. We might arrive at the conviction that our present science is human, petty, and contingent; that it is closely linked with the structure of our sensory organs; that this structure results from the evolution which fashioned these organs; that this evolution has been an accident of history; that in the future it may be different; and that, consequently, by the side or in the stead of our modern science, the work of our eyes and hands—and also of our words—there might have been constituted, there may still be constituted, sciences entirely and extraordinarily new—auditory, olfactory, and gustatory sciences, and even others derived from other kinds of sensations which we can neither foresee nor conceive because they are not, for the moment, differentiated in us. Outside the matter we know, a very special matter fashioned of vision and touch, there may exist other matter with totally different properties. …We must, by setting aside the mechanical theory, free ourselves from a too narrow conception of the constitution of matter. And this liberation will be to us a great advantage which we shall soon reap. We shall avoid the error of believing that mechanics is the only real thing and that all that cannot be explained by mechanics must be incomprehensible. We shall then gain more liberty of mind for understanding what the union of the soul with the body may be.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 43

Error, History, Idea, Fashion

“And if I drink oblivion of a day,
So shorten I the stature of my soul.”

George Meredith (1828–1909) British novelist and poet of the Victorian era

St. 12. Modern Love http://www.ev90481.dial.pipex.com/Meredith/modern_love.htm (1862)

Drink

“The events of the past one and one-half years have gripped the whole German people and affected them deeply. It seems almost like a dream that out of the valley of misery, hopelessness, hate, and fragmentation we have found our way back to a German national community. The horrendous tensions in which we have lived since the August days of 1914 have dissolved, and out of this discord, the German soul has emerged once again, before which the glorious and yet so painful history of our people pass in review, from the sagas of the German heroes to the trenches of Verdun, and even to the street fights of our time.”

Franz von Papen (1879–1969) German chancellor

Marburg speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marburg_speech (June 1934), as quoted in The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts. p. 170. Editors Roderick Stackelberg, Sally A. Winkle. Editor Routledge, 2013 ISBN 1134596936. 1930s

Pain, Hate, People, Dreams

“Whoever desires that his intellect may grow up to soundness, to healthy vigor, must begin with moral discipline. Reading and study are not enough to perfect the power of thought. One thing above all is needful, and that is, the disinterestedness which is the very soul of virtue. To gain truth, which is the great object of the understanding, I must seek it disinterestedly. Here is the first and grand condition of intellectual progress. I must choose to receive the truth, no matter how it bears on myself. I must follow it, no matter where it leads, what interests it opposes, to what persecution or loss it lays me open, from what party it severs me, or to what party it allies. Without this fairness of mind, which is only another phrase for disinterested love of truth, great native powers of understanding are perverted and led astray.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Self-Culture (1838)

Love, Truth, Understanding, Study

Quotes about the soul page 22

Quotes about the soul
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