Quotes about the soul
page 40

Steven Erikson photo
Eric Hoffer photo
J.M. Coetzee photo
Kris Kristofferson photo
Leo Tolstoy photo

“The relation of word to thought, and the creation of new concepts is a complex, delicate and enigmatic process unfolding in our soul.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Pegagogicheskie Statli (Pedagogical Writings), pg. 143.
Pedagogical Writings (1903)

“Our wearier spirit faints,
Vexed in the world‘s employ:
His soul was of the saints;
And art to him was joy.”

Lionel Johnson (1867–1902) English poet

By the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross (1895)

Masiela Lusha photo

“I would like to see from women in this industry what I have had the privilege of witnessing for a decade now. Strength, conviction, and unapologetic sensitivity for the healing of souls.”

Masiela Lusha (1985) Albanian actress, writer, author

On women in the entertainment industry http://reelladies.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/reel-lady-masiela-lusha/

John Steinbeck photo
Yehuda Ashlag photo
Nicholas of Cusa photo

“Within itself the soul sees all things more truly than as they exist in different things outside itself. And the more it goes out unto other things in order to know them, the more it enters into itself in order to know itself.”

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) German philosopher, theologian, jurist, and astronomer

Nicholas of Cusa and Jasper Hopkins (Translator). On Equality. 1459.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake — Aye! and what then?”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

"Anima Poetæ : From the Unpublished Note-books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge" (1895) edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, p. 238

Aldo Palazzeschi photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Robert Montgomery (poet) photo

“The soul aspiring pants its source to mount,
As streams meander level with their fount.”

Robert Montgomery (poet) (1807–1855) English poet

The Omnipresence of the Deity, Part i, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "We take this to be, on the whole, the worst similitude in the world. In the first place, no stream meanders or can possibly meander level with the fount. In the next place, if streams did meander level with their founts, no two motions can be less like each other than that of meandering level and that of mounting upwards", Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, Review of Montgomery's Poems (Eleventh Edition), Edinburgh Review, (April, 1830). These lines were omitted in the subsequent edition of the poem.

Annie Besant photo
Douglas Hofstadter photo
Steven Erikson photo
Berthe Morisot photo
Joe Trohman photo

“We mean a lot to each other as musicians and people, but sometimes we start believing what people write about us: The band is just one guy or two guys. That can be harsh for the soul.”

Joe Trohman (1984) American musician

On the lack of attention he and Andy Hurley get
My Heart Will Always Be The B-Side To My Tongue (2004), Rolling Stone Interview

Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Vincent Van Gogh photo

“And my intention is to try to form a collection of many such things, which would not be quite unworthy of the title 'heads of the people.' By working hard, boy, I hope to succeed in making something good. It isn't there yet, but I aim at it, and struggle for it. I want something serious, - some thing fresh - something with soul in it! Forward - forward”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

quote in his letter to brother Theo, from The Hague, The Netherlands, 3 Jan. 1883; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 257), pp. 20-21
1880s, 1883

Kate Bush photo
Yehuda Ashlag photo
Walter Rauschenbusch photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.”

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

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

Thomas Carlyle photo
George William Russell photo

“Here in these shades the Ancient knows itself, the Soul,
And out of slumber waking starts unto the goal.”

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

By Still Waters (1906)

E.M. Forster photo
Paramahansa Yogananda photo
Anna Laetitia Barbauld photo
Tim McGraw photo
Common (rapper) photo
John of Patmos photo
Swami Vivekananda photo
Philip Roth photo
Isaac Leib Peretz photo
John Ruysbroeck photo

“Contemplation The shining forth of That which is Unconditioned is as a fair mirror wherein shines the Eternal Light of God. It has no attributes, And here all the works of Reason fail. It is not God, But it is the Light whereby we see Him. Those who walk in the Divine Light discover in themselves the UnwalledEven though the eagle, king of birds, can with his powerful sight gaze steadfastly upon the brightness of the sun; yet do the weaker eyes of the bat fail and falter in the same It is neither thus nor thus, neither here nor there; for that which is Unconditioned hath enveloped all…Behold! such a following of the Way that is WaylessThe Love of God is a consuming Fire, which draws us out of ourselves and swallows us up in unity with God This revelation of the Father lifts the soul above the reason into the Imageless Nudity. There the soul is simple, pure, spotless, Empty of all things; And it is in this state of perfect emptiness that the Father manifests His Divine radiance is a knowing that is unconditioned,
For ever dwelling above the Reason.
Never can it sink down into the Reason,
And above it can the Reason never climb.
The shining forth of That which is Unconditioned is as a fair mirror.
Wherein shines the Eternal Light of God.
It has no attributes,
And here all the works of Reason fail.
It is not God, But it is the Light whereby we see Him.
Those who walk in the Divine Light of it
Discover in themselves the Unwalled.
That which Unconditioned,
Is above the Reason, not without it:
It beholds all things without amazement.
Amazement is far beneath it:
The contemplative life is without amazement.
That which is Unconditioned, it knows not what;
For it is above all, and is neither This nor That.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Twelve Beguines

Eugene J. Martin photo
Stephen L. Carter photo

“Liberalism, for all its virtues, has begun to develop a sense of entitlement, and needs time to rediscover its soul.”

Stephen L. Carter (1954) American legal academic and writer

Trump and the Fall of Liberalism (November 11, 2016)

Robert Sarah photo
Adlai Stevenson photo

“Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity — in short, of tyranny — and it is committed to making tyranny universal.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

Quoted in "Major Campaign Speeches of Adlai E. Stevenson" (1952), Random House. Republished in the New York Times, "Books of the Times", by Charles Poore, April 20, 1953, p. 23

Winston S. Churchill photo

“Hitherto, Hitler's triumphant career has been borne onwards, not only by a passionate love of Germany, but by currents of hatred so intense as to sear the souls of those who swim upon them.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

"Hitler and His Choice", The Strand Magazine (November 1935), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 680
The 1930s

Thomas Chandler Haliburton photo

“Punctuality […] is the soul of business.”

Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796–1865) Canadian-British politician, judge, and author

Sam Slick's Wise Saws and Modern Instances, Hurst and Blackett, 1859, p. 31 http://books.google.it/books?hl=it&id=d9EsAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA31.

Hugh Macmillan, Baron Macmillan photo
Donald J. Trump photo
José Ortega Y Gasset photo
Camille Paglia photo
Qu Yuan photo
William Morris photo
Joseph Joubert photo
Dio Chrysostom photo
Albert Szent-Györgyi photo

“When I received the Nobel Prize, the only big lump sum of money I have ever seen, I had to do something with it. The easiest way to drop this hot potato was to invest it, to buy shares. I knew that World War II was coming and I was afraid that if I had shares which rise in case of war, I would wish for war. So I asked my agent to buy shares which go down in the event of war. This he did. I lost my money and saved my soul.”

Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893–1986) Hungarian biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937

[Szent-Györgyi, Albert, The Crazy Ape: Written by a Biologist for the Young, 1970, 20-21, The Universal Library Crosset & Dunlap, A National General Company, New York, https://archive.org/details/isbn_0448002566, July 24, 2017, Internet Archive]

Thomas Carlyle photo
Julian of Norwich photo

“All this was shewed in a touch and quickly passed over into comfort: for our good Lord would not that the soul were affeared of this terrible sight.
But I saw not sin: for I believe it hath no manner of substance nor no part of being, nor could it be known but by the pain it is cause of.”

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

The Thirteenth Revelation, Chapter 27
Context: In this naked word sin, our Lord brought to my mind, generally, all that is not good, and the shameful despite and the utter noughting that He bare for us in this life, and His dying; and all the pains and passions of all His creatures, ghostly and bodily; (for we be all partly noughted, and we shall be noughted following our Master, Jesus, till we be full purged, that is to say, till we be fully noughted of our deadly flesh and of all our inward affections which are not very good;) and the beholding of this, with all pains that ever were or ever shall be, — and with all these I understand the Passion of Christ for most pain, and overpassing. All this was shewed in a touch and quickly passed over into comfort: for our good Lord would not that the soul were affeared of this terrible sight.
But I saw not sin: for I believe it hath no manner of substance nor no part of being, nor could it be known but by the pain it is cause of.
And thus pain, it is something, as to my sight, for a time; for it purgeth, and maketh us to know ourselves and to ask mercy. For the Passion of our Lord is comfort to us against all this, and so is His blessed will.

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all;
And where it cometh, all things are;
And it cometh everywhere.”

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

Epigraph to History
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Essays, First Series

Muhammad photo

“Righteousness is good morality, and wrongdoing is that which wavers in your soul and which you dislike people finding out about.”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

An-Nawawi's "Forty Hadith," Hadith 27
Sunni Hadith

Ali Shariati photo

“The enlightened soul is a person who is self-conscious of his "human condition" in his time and historical and social setting, and whose awareness inevitably and necessarily gives him a sense of social responsibility.”

Ali Shariati (1933–1977) Iranian academic and activist

Source: Where Shall We Begin, 1997-2013, p. 1 ; as cited in: Robert Deemer Lee, Overcoming tradition and modernity: the search for Islamic authenticity, (11997), p. 127.

James Hamilton photo
Baruch Spinoza photo
Oliver Goldsmith photo
William Styron photo

“In many of Albrecht Dürer’s engravings there are harrowing depictions of his own melancholia; the manic wheeling stars of Van Gogh are the precursors of the artist’s plunge into dementia and the extinction of self. It is a suffering that often tinges the music of Beethoven, of Schumann and Mahler, and permeates the darker cantatas of Bach. The vast metaphor which most faithfully represents this fathomless ordeal, however, is that of Dante, and his all-too-familiar lines still arrest the imagination with their augury of the unknowable, the black struggle to come:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
Ché la diritta via era smarrita.
In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.
One can be sure that these words have been more than once employed to conjure the ravages of melancholia, but their somber foreboding has often overshadowed the last lines of the best-known part of that poem, with their evocation of hope. To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists. But in science and art the search will doubtless go on for a clear representation of its meaning, which sometimes, for those who have known it, is a simulacrum of all the evil of our world: of our everyday discord and chaos, our irrationality, warfare and crime, torture and violence, our impulse toward death and our flight from it held in the intolerable equipoise of history. If our lives had no other configuration but this, we should want, and perhaps deserve, to perish; if depression had no termination, then suicide would, indeed, be the only remedy. But one need not sound the false or inspirational note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul’s annihilation; men and women who have recovered from the disease — and they are countless — bear witness to what is probably its only saving grace: it is conquerable.”

Source: Darkness Visible (1990), X

Jacopone da Todi photo
Jacques Maritain photo

“To philosophize man must put his whole soul into play, in much the same manner that to run he must use his heart and lungs.”

Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) French philosopher

An Essay on Christian Philosophy (1955), p. 17.

Willem de Kooning photo
Thomas Fuller photo

“Anger is one of the sinews of the soul; he that wants it hath a maimed mind.”

Thomas Fuller (1608–1661) English churchman and historian

Of Anger.
The Holy State and the Profane State (1642)

Winston S. Churchill photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Dante Gabriel Rossetti photo
Joseph Joubert photo
Noel Gallagher photo

“We need each other / We believe in one another / And I know we're gonna uncover / What's sleeping in our souls”

Noel Gallagher (1967) British musician

Acquiesce, released 24 April 1995
B-sides released by Oasis

Hermann Weyl photo

“In these days the angel of topology and the devil of abstract algebra fight for the soul of each individual mathematical domain.”

Weyl, Hermann. Invariants. Duke Math. J. 5 (1939), no. 3, 489--502. doi:10.1215/S0012-7094-39-00540-5. http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.dmj/1077491405.

Jack Johnson (musician) photo
Charles Dickens photo

“Originality is the essence of true scholarship. Creativity is the soul of the true scholar.”

Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904–1996) First President of Nigeria

Attributed without citation in Answers Africa 40 famous quotes about Africa, http://answersafrica.com/quotes-about-africa.html answersafrica.com

Nick Bostrom photo
George William Russell photo
Alexej von Jawlensky photo
Emma Goldman photo
Gottfried Feder photo

“The abolition of enslavement to interest signifies the restoration of the free personality, the redemption of man from slavery, from the curse whereby Mammonism has bound his soul.”

Gottfried Feder (1883–1941) German economist and politician

"Manifesto for the Abolition of Enslavement to Interest on Money" (1919)

Gerard Bilders photo

“For me Ruisdael is the true man of poetry, the real poet. There is a world of sad, serious and beautiful thoughts in his paintings. They possess a soul and a voice that sounds deep, sad and dignified. They tell melancholic stories, speak of gloomy things and are witnesses of a sad spirit. I see him wander, turned in on himself, his heart opened to the beauties of nature, in accordance with his mood, on the banks of that dark gray stream that rustles and splashes along the reeds. And those skies!... In the skies one is completely free, untied, all of himself.... what a genius he is! He is my ideal and almost something perfect. When it storms and rains, and heavy, black clouds fly back and forth, the trees whiz and now and then a strange light breaks through the air, and falls down here and there on the landscape, and there is a heavy voice, a grand mood in nature; that is what he paints; that is what he [Ruysdael] is imaging.”

Gerard Bilders (1838–1865) painter from the Netherlands

(version in original Dutch / citaat van Bilders' brief, in het Nederlands:) Ruisdael is voor mij de ware man der poezië, de echte dichter. Daar is een wereld van droevige, ernstige schone gedachten in zijn schilderijen. Ze hebben een ziel en een stem, die diep, treurig, deftig klinkt. Zij doen weemoedige verhalen, spreken van sombere dingen, getuigen van een treurige geest. Ik zie hem dwalen, in zichzelf gekeerd, het hart geopend voor de schoonheden der natuur, in overeenstemming met zijn gemoed, aan de oevers van die donkere grauwe stroom die ritselt en plast langs het riet. En die luchten!.. .In de luchten is men geheel vrij, ongebonden, geheel zichzelf.. ..welke een genie is hij [Ruisdael]! Hij is mijn ideaal en bijna iets volmaakts.Als het stormt en regent, en zware, zwarte wolken heen en weer vliegen, de bomen suizen en nu en dan een wonderlijk licht door de lucht breekt en hier en daar op het landschap neervalt, en er een zware stem, een grootse stemming in de natuur is, dat schildert hij, dat geeft hij weer.
Source: 1860's, Vrolijk Versterven' (from Bilders' diary & letters), pp. 51+52, - quote from Bilders' diary, 24 March 1860, written in Amsterdam

Richard Rodríguez photo
Hermann Hesse photo

“In the beginning was the myth. God, in his search for self-expression, invested the souls of Hindus, Greeks, and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child's soul with poetry every day.”

Variant translation: In the beginning was the myth. Just as the great god composed and struggled for expression in the souls of the Indians, the Greeks and Germanic peoples, so to it continues to compose daily in the soul of every child.
Peter Camenzind (1904)

Florbela Espanca photo

“To be a poet is to be taller, to be bigger
Than men! It is to bite as if you’re kissing!
It is to give alms, although you are a beggar like
King of the Realm where only pain is missing!It is to have a thousand desires for splendor
And do not even know what we want!
It is to have inside yourself a flaming star,
It is to have the condor’s mighty claw and wing!It is to be hungry, to be thirsty of Infinity!
By helmet, golden and satin mornings…
It is to condense the world into one lonely cry!And it is loving you, thus, hopelessly…
And it is you being soul, and blood, and life in me
And tell it singing to everyone!”

Florbela Espanca (1894–1930) Portuguese poet

Ser poeta é ser mais alto, é ser maior
Do que os homens! Morder como quem beija!
É ser mendigo e dar como quem seja
Rei do Reino de Áquem e de Além Dor!<p>É ter de mil desejos o esplendor
E não saber sequer que se deseja!
É ter cá dentro um astro que flameja,
É ter garras e asas de condor!<p>É ter fome, é ter sede de Infinito!
Por elmo, as manhas de oiro e de cetim...
É condensar o mundo num só grito!<p>E é amar-te, assim, perdidamente...
É seres alma, e sangue, e vida em mim
E dizê-lo cantando a toda a gente!
Quoted in Citações e Pensamentos de Florbela Espanca (2012), p. 163
Translated http://emocaoeeuforia.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/beautiful-flower-flor-bela/ by Isabel Teles
The Flowering Heath (1931), "Perdidamente"

William Gilbert (astronomer) photo

“Only on the superficies of the globes is plainly seen the host of souls and of animate existences, and their great and delightful diversity the Creator taketh pleasure”

As quoted in Gilbert, William. 2013 ed. De Magnete https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=QsLDAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false. Courier Corporation, pp. 311.
De Magnete (1600)

Jean Paul Sartre photo

“I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.”

Electra to her brother Orestes, Act 2
The Flies (1943)

Frederik Pohl photo
George William Russell photo
Cora L. V. Scott photo

“The aim of Satanic power is to cut off communication with God. To accomplish this aim he deludes the soul with a sense of defeat, covers him with a thick cloud of darkness, depresses and oppresses the spirit, which in turn hinders prayer and leads to unbelief – thus destroying all power.”

James O. Fraser (1886–1938) missionary to China, inventor of Tibeto-Burman Nosu alphabet

20 March 1916 Source: Geraldine Taylor. Behind the Ranges: The Life-changing Story of J.O. Fraser. Singapore: OMF International (IHQ) Ltd., 1998, 157.