Quotes about the soul
page 29

Alice Walker photo

“The harm that you do to others is the harm that you do to yourself and you cannot think then that you can cause wars in other parts of the world and destroy people and drone them without this having a terrible impact on your own soul and your own consciousness.”

Alice Walker (1944) American author and activist

Poet, Author Alice Walker Meets the Inner Journey with Global Activism in "The Cushion in the Road" http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/28/poet_author_alice_walker_meets_the (May 28, 2013).

Trent Reznor photo
Thomas Fuller (writer) photo
Frederick Rolfe photo

“Pray for the repose of His soul. He was so tired.”

Source: Hadrian the Seventh (1904), Ch. 24, p. 360

Jim Starlin photo
Linh Nga photo
Bartolomé de las Casas photo
William Blake photo

“God appears and god is light
To those poor souls who dwell in night
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Source: 1800s, Auguries of Innocence (1803), Line 129

William Somervile photo
Hilaire Belloc photo
Albert Einstein photo
Damian Pettigrew photo
Van Morrison photo
David Thomas (born 1813) photo

“Unselfish and noble acts are the most radiant epochs in the biography of souls.”

David Thomas (born 1813) (1813–1894) 19th-century Welsh preacher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 4.

Brian W. Aldiss photo
Thomas Carlyle photo

“Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires, — Necessity and Free Will.”

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

Essays, Goethe's Works.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)

Cassandra Clare photo
Adolph Freiherr Knigge photo

“Without inspiration, which fills the soul with a healthy warmth, nothing great can ever be brought to pass.”

Adolph Freiherr Knigge (1752–1796) German writer and Freemason

Ohne Begeisterung, welche die Seele mit einer gesunden Wärme erfüllt, wird nie etwas Großes zustande gebracht.
As quoted in ‪30 Minuten für intelligente Schlagfertigkeit‬ (2004) by Stephané Etrillard, p. 55.

Pliny the Younger photo

“The living voice is that which sways the soul.”

Pliny the Younger (61–113) Roman writer

Letter 3, 9.
Letters, Book II

Samuel Johnson photo
Harry V. Jaffa photo
Cora L. V. Scott photo
Jane Roberts photo
Pythagoras photo

“The soul of man is divided into three parts, intelligence, reason, and passion. Intelligence and passion are possessed by other animals, but reason by man alone.”

Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher

As reported by Alexander Polyhistor, and Diogenes Laërtius in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, "Pythagoras", Sect. 30, in the translation of C. D. Yonge (1853)

John Oldham (poet) photo

“Ah, dearer than my soul…
Dearer than light, or life, or fame.”

John Oldham (poet) (1653–1683) English satirical poet and translator

Lament for Saul and Jonathan; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922).

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu photo
R. H. Tawney photo
W. Somerset Maugham photo
Conor Oberst photo

“Because the truth is that gossip
is as good as gospel in this town.
You can save face but
you won't ever save your soul.
And that's a fact.”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

Make War
Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002)

Alexander Pope photo

“The mouse that always trusts to one poor hole
Can never be a mouse of any soul.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

"The Wife of Bath her Prologue, from Chaucer" (c.1704, published 1713), lines 298-299. Compare: "I hold a mouses wit not worth a leke, That hath but on hole for to sterten to", Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, "The Wif of Bathes Prologue", line 6154; "The mouse that hath but one hole is quickly taken", George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum.

Antoni Lange photo

“People souls — perennial loners. They're loners like stray stars.”

Antoni Lange (1862–1929) Polish writer and philosopher

Loneliness

Henry Adams photo
Jean Toomer photo
Angela of Foligno photo
Henry Clay Trumbull photo

“p>One translucent day I leave the city
to visit my home, the land of Champa.Here are stupas gaunt with yearning,
ancient temples ruined by time,
streams that creep alone through the dark
past peeling statues that moan of Champa.Here are dense and drooping forests
where long processions, lost souls of Champa,
march; and evening spills through thick,
fragrant leaves, mingling with the cries of moorhens.Here is the field where two great armies
were reduced to a horde of clamoring souls.
Champa blood still cascades in streams of hatred
to grinding oceans filled with Champa bones.Here too are placid images: hamlets at rest
in evening sun, Champa girls gliding homeward,
their light chatter floating
with the pink and saffron of their dresses.Here are magnificent sunbaked palaces,
temples that blaze in cerulean skies.
Here battleships dream on the glossy river, while the thunder
of sacred elephants shakes the walls.Here, in opaque light sinking through lapis lazuli,
the Champa king and his men are lost in a maze of flesh
as dancers weave, wreathe, entranced,
their bodies harmonizing with the flutes.All this I saw on my way home years ago
and still I am obsessed,
my mind stunned, sagged with sorrow
for the race of Champa.”

Chế Lan Viên (1920–1989) Vietnamese writer

"On the Way Home", in A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry, ed. Nguyễn Ngọc Bích (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 167; quoted in full in Buddhism & Zen in Vietnam by Thich Thien-an (Tuttle Publishing, 1992)

John Ruskin photo

“We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that it divided; but the men: — Divided into mere segments of men — broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished, — sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is — we should think that there might be some loss in it also. And the great cry that rises from our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, — that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can be met only in one way: not by teaching nor preaching, for to teach them is but to show them their misery, and to preach at them, if we do nothing more than preach, is to mock at it. It can only be met by a right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour.”

Volume II, chapter VI, section 16.
The Stones of Venice (1853)

Samuel Longfellow photo
Bernice King photo

“It is, deep in my soul, difficult to place what my father described as precious heirlooms under the custody of the government, even if only for a season. Yet, I recognize that justice and righteousness are not always aligned, and there is often a disconnect between God's law and man's law.”

Bernice King (1963) American minister, daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Statement on potential selling of father's Nobel Peace Prize and bible (06 March 2014) http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/03/06/bernice-king-heirloom-lawsuit/6143899/

“For not by numbers of men, nor by measure of body, but by valor of soul is war to be decided.”

As quoted in 100 Decisive Battles : From Ancient Times to the Present (2001) by Paul K. Davis, p. 93; cited to the records of Procopius, in Procopius, Vol. IV, I, pp. 15-16.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling photo
Khalil Gibran photo

“My Soul gave me good counsel, teaching me and demonstrating to me that I am not exalted over the panhandler nor less than the mighty.”

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

The Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul (1994)
Context: My Soul gave me good counsel, teaching me and demonstrating to me that I am not exalted over the panhandler nor less than the mighty. Before my Soul taught me, I thought people consisted of two types: the weak, whom I pitied and disregarded, and the powerful, whom I followed or against I rebelled. Now, I have discovered that I was formed as one individual from the same substance from which all human beings were created. I am made up of the same elements as they are, and my pattern is theirs. My struggles are theirs, and my path is theirs.

Daniel Abraham photo

“This was the kind of man who’d killed Julie, Miller thought. Stupid. Shortsighted. A man born with a sense for raw opportunity where his soul should have been.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Leviathan Wakes (2011), Chapter 28 (p. 281)

Anne Brontë photo
Michel De Montaigne photo

“Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Attributed

Báb photo
Julian of Norwich photo
Elfriede Jelinek photo
Edmund Waller photo

“The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that Time has made;
Stronger by weakness, wiser, men become
As they draw near to their eternal home.
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view,
That stand upon the threshold of the new.”

Edmund Waller (1606–1687) English poet and politician

On the Divine Poems (1686). Compare: "To vanish in the chinks that Time has made", Samuel Rogers, Pæstum; "As that the walls worn thin, permit the mind
Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham (1857)

Joseph Goebbels photo

“Christianity is not a religion for the masses, let alone for all. Cultivated by few and translated into deeds, it is one of the most splendid blossoms that can grow in the soul of a good man.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Das Christentum ist keine Religion für viele, geschweige denn für alle. Von wenigen gepflegt und in die Tat umgesetzt, ist es eine der köstlichsten Blüten, die eine Kulturseele je getrieben hat.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Eliezer Yudkowsky photo
Geddy Lee photo
Piet Mondrian photo
André Maurois photo
Laurence Sterne photo
Paula Modersohn-Becker photo
Thomas Carlyle photo

“Even in the meanest sorts of Labor, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.”

Past and Present.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)

Lydia Maria Child photo

“Misfortune is never mournful to the soul that accepts it; for such do always see that every cloud is an angel’s face. Every man deems that he has precisely the trials and temptations which are the hardest of all others for him to bear; but they are so, simply because they are the very ones he most needs.”

Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist

1840s, Letters from New York (1843)
Source: Letters from New York http://www.bartleby.com/66/64/12264.html, vol. 1, letter 39

Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo

“Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.”

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 8

Sri Aurobindo photo
Sri Aurobindo photo

“What the Divine wants is for man to embody Him here, in the individual and in the collectivity… to realise God in life. The old system of yoga could not harmonise or unify Spirit and life; it dismissed the world as Maya or a transient play of God. The result has been a diminution of life-power and the decline of India. The Gita says, utsideyur ime loka na kuryam karma cedaham ["These peoples would crumble to pieces if I did not do actions," 3.24]. Truly 'these peoples' of India have gone to ruin. What kind of spiritual perfection is it if a few Sannyasins, Bairagis and Saddhus attain realisation and liberation, if a few Bhaktas dance in a frenzy of love, god-intoxication and Ananda, and an entire race, devoid of life, devoid of intelligence, sinks to the depths of extreme tamas?… But now the time has come to take hold of the substance instead of extending the shadow. We have to awaken the true soul of India and in its image fashion all works…. I believe that the main cause of India's weakness is not subjection, nor poverty, nor a lack of spirituality or Dharma, but a diminution of thought-power, the spread of ignorance in the motherland of Knowledge. Everywhere I see an inability or unwillingness to think… incapacity of thought or 'thought-phobia'…. The mediaeval period was a night, a time of victory for the man of ignorance; the modern world is a time of victory for the man of knowledge. It is the one who can fathom and learn the truth of the world by thinking more, searching more, labouring more, who will gain more Shakti. Look at Europe, and you will see two things: a wide limitless sea of thought and the play of a huge and rapid, yet disciplined force. The whole Shakti of Europe lies there. It is by virtue of this Shakti that she has been able to swallow the world, like our Tapaswins of old, whose might held even the gods of the universe in awe, suspense and subjection. People say that Europe is rushing into the jaws of destruction. I do not think so. All these revolutions, all these upsettings are the initial stages of a new creation….. We, however, are not worshippers of Shakti; we are worshippers of the easy way…. Our civilisation has become ossified, our Dharma a bigotry of externals, our spirituality a faint glimmer of light or a momentary wave of intoxication. So long as this state of things lasts, any permanent resurgence of India is impossible…. We have abandoned the sadhana of Shakti and so the Shakti has abandoned us…. You say what is needed is emotional excitement, to fill the country with enthusiasm. We did all that in the political field during the Swadeshi period; but all we did now lies in the dust…. Therefore I no longer wish to make emotional excitement, feeling and mental enthusiasm the base. I want to make a vast and heroic equality the foundation of my yoga; in all the activities of the being, of the adhar [vessel] based on that equality, I want a complete, firm and unshakable Shakti; over that ocean of Shakti I want the vast radiation of the sun of Knowledge and in that luminous vastness an established ecstasy of infinite love and bliss and oneness. I do not want tens of thousands of disciples; it will be enough if I can get as instruments of God a hundred complete men free from petty egoism. I have no faith in the customary trade of guru. I do not want to be a guru. What I want is that a few, awakened at my touch or at that of another, will manifest from within their sleeping divinity and realise the divine life. It is such men who will raise this country.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

April, 1920, Letter to Barin Ghose, Sri Aurobindo's brother, Translated from Bengali
India's Rebirth

Julien Offray de La Mettrie photo
John Lancaster Spalding photo

“[Scripture], by which, “as in a glass, we may survey ourselves, and know what manner of persons we are,” (James 1. 23) discovers ourselves to us; pierces into the inmost recesses of the mind; strips off every disguise; lays open the inward part; makes a strict scrutiny into the very soul and spirit; and critically judges of the thoughts and intents of the heart. (Heb. iv. 12) It shows us with what exactness and care we are to search and try our spirits, examine ourselves, and watch our ways, and keep our hearts, in order to acquire this important self-science; which it often calls us to do. “Examine yourselves; prove your own selves; know you not yourselves? Let a man examine himself.” (1 Cor. xi. 28) Our Saviour upbraids his disciples with their self-ignorance, in not “knowing what manner of spirits they were of.” (Luke ix. 55) And, saith the apostle, “If a man (through self-ignorance) thinketh himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself. But let every man prove his work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself, and not another.” (Gal. vi. 3, 4) Here we are commanded, instead of judging others, to judge ourselves; and to avoid the. inexcusable rashness of condemning others for the very crimes we ourselves are guilty of, (Rom. ii. 1, 21, 22) which a self-ignorant man is very apt to do; nay, to be more offended at a small blemish in another's character, than at a greater in his own; which folly, self-ignorance, and hypocrisy, our Saviour, with just severity, animadverts upon. (Mat. vii. 3-5) And what stress was laid upon this under the Old Testament dispensation appears sufficiently from those expressions. "Keep thy heart with all diligence." (Prov. iv. 23) "Commune with your own heart." (Psal. iv. 4) "Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts." (Psal. cxxxix. 23) "Examine me, O Lord, and prove me; try my reins and my heart." (Psal. xxvi. 2) "Let us search and try our ways." (Lam. iii. 4) "Recollect, recollect yourselves, O "nation not desired."”

John Mason (1706–1763) English Independent minister and author

Zeph. ii. 1
A Treatise on Self-Knowledge (1745)

Joseph Priestley photo

“From the fame opinion of a soul distinct from the body came the practice of praying, first for the dead, and then to them with a long train of other absurd opinions, and superstitious practices.”

General Conclusions, Part I : Containing Considerations addressed to Unbelievers and especially to Mr. Gibbon
An History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782)

Báb photo
Jerry Coyne photo
Clarence Darrow photo
Jean Meslier photo
Pierre Corneille photo

“True, I am young, but for souls nobly born
Valor doesn’t await the passing of years.”

Je suis jeune, il est vrai; mais aux âmes bien nées
La valeur n’attend point le nombre des années.
Don Rodrigue, act II, scene ii.
Le Cid (1636)

Paul Fort photo

“Poetry is the vision in a man's soul which he translates as best he can with all the means at his disposal.”

Paul Fort (1872–1960) French Poet

Preface to Some Imagist Poets, Constable, 1916

Giorgio de Chirico photo
Alan Keyes photo
Cormac McCarthy photo
Alexej von Jawlensky photo

“Every artist works within a tradition. I am a native of Russia. My Russian soul has always been close to the art of old Russia, the Russian icons, Byzantine art, the mosaics in Ravenna, Venice, Rome, and to Romanesque art. All these artworks produced a religious vibration in my soul, as I sensed in them a deep spiritual language. This art was my tradition.”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

quote from his letter to the National Socialist State Cultural administration, 1939; Jawlensky asked permission to exhibit his painting art, which was turned down by the Nazi regime
Source: 1936 - 1941, Life Memories' (1938), p. 24

Common (rapper) photo

“Let the truth be told from young souls that become old
From days spent in the jungle, where must one go
To find it, time is real, we can't rewind it
Out of everybody I met, who told the truth?
Time did”

Common (rapper) (1972) American rapper, actor and author from Illinois

"The Truth", Pharoahe Monch Internal Affairs (1999)
Albums, Compilations, Singles, and Cameos

Herbert Spencer photo

“We too often forget that not only is there "a soul of goodness in things evil," but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous.”

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist

Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. I, Religion and Science; quoting from "There is some soul of goodness in things evil / Would men observingly distil it out", William Shakespeare, Henry V, act iv. sc. i
First Principles (1862)

Bayard Taylor photo

“Knowledge alone is the being of Nature,
Giving a soul to her manifold features,
Lighting through paths of the primitive darkness,
The footsteps of Truth and the vision of Song.”

Bayard Taylor (1825–1878) United States poet, novelist and travel writer

Kilimandjaro (1852), Stanza 2; later published in The Poetical Works of Bayard Taylor (1907), p. 73.

Gu Hongming photo
Caspar David Friedrich photo
Gerry Rafferty photo
Ralph Vaughan Williams photo

“The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) English composer

National Music (1934) p. 123.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photo
Daniel Dennett photo
Joan Miró photo

“.. wherever you are, you find the sun, a blade of grass, the spirals of the dragonfly. Courage consists of staying at home, close to nature, which could not care less about our disasters. Each grain of dust contains the soul of something marvellous.”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

Miró admonished art-critic w:Georges Duthuit
1915 - 1940
Source: 'Où allez-vous Miró?' (Where do you go, Miró), Georges Duthuit in Cahiers d'Art 11, nos. 8-10, 1936

Ernst Gombrich photo
Thomas Brooks photo
Bernice King photo
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel photo

“Aristotle (De Anima, I. 1) makes in the first place the general remark that it appears as if the soul must, on the one hand, be regarded in its freedom as independent and as separable from the body, since in thinking it is independent; and, on the other hand, since in the emotions it appears to be united with the body and not separate, it must also be looked on as being inseparable from it; for the emotions show themselves as materialized Notions (λόγοι έννοια), as material modes of what is spiritual. With this a twofold method of considering the soul, also known to Aristotle, comes into play, namely the purely rational or logical view, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the physical or physiological; these we still see practiced side by side. According to the one view, anger, for instance, is looked on as an eager desire for retaliation or the like; according to the other view it is the surging upward of the heartblood and the warm element in man. The former is the rational, the latter the material view of anger; just as one man may define a house as a shelter against wind, rain, and other destructive agencies, while another defines it as consisting of wood and stone; that is to say, the former gives the determination and the form, or the purpose of the thing, while the latter specifies the material it is made of, and its necessary conditions.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History Vol 2 1837 translated by ES Haldane and Francis H. Simson first translated 1894 p. 181
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 2

Julia Ward Howe photo

“He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is wisdom to the mighty, he is succour to the brave,
So the world shall be his footstool, and the soul of Time his slave,
Our God is marching on.”

Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) American abolitionist, social activist, and poet

First manuscript version (19 November 1861).
The Battle Hymn of the Republic (1861)

David Dixon Porter photo
Patrick Buchanan photo

“Like materialism, consumerism and socialism, transnationalism suffers from the same fatal flaw. It feeds the body and starves the soul. And eventually bored people hear the old calls again.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

"The Specter Haunting Europe" http://buchanan.org/blog/specter-haunting-europe-6416 (May 23, 2014), Patrick J. Buchanan
2010s

John Clare photo
Louisa May Alcott photo
Gautama Buddha photo