Quotes about the soul (5690 quotes, page 42)

“But this, this which we say before we’re sorry,
This which we live behind our unseen faces,
Is neither dream, nor childhood, neither
Myth, nor landscape, final, nor finished,
For we are incomplete and know no future,
And we are howling or dancing out our souls
In beating syllables before the curtain:
We are Shakespearean, we are strangers.”

Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966) American poet

"Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children Are Strangers" http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/print.html?id=171346
Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)

Dreams , Future , Dance , Childhood

“Yes, I am so free. And what a superb absence is my soul.”

Jean Paul Sartre The Flies

Orestes, Act 1
The Flies (1943)

“The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.”

Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French writer and philosopher

Source: La poétique de la rêverie (The Poetics of Reverie) (1960), Ch. 2, sect. 3

Sleep , Night

“To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.
He has only to look into a human face in order to read there the soul within — not a feature deceives him; hypocrisy is as transparent as sincerity — the line of a forehead, the least lifting of a brow, the flash of an eye, reveal to him all the secrets of a heart.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. II. To the artist, all in nature is beautiful, p. 47-48

Truth , Secret , Books , Beauty

“Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.”

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

Attributed

Sense

“You are ready to give your life for your honour … Be ready to give up your honour for your soul.”

Josemaría Escrivá (1902–1975) Spanish theologian

#614
The Furrow (1986)

Life

“Caprice
You held a wild flower in your finger -tips,
Idly you pressed it to indifferent lips,
Idly you tore its crimson leaves apart…
Alas! It was my heart You held wine-cup in your finger-tips,
Lightly you raised it to indifferent lips,
Lightly you drank and flung away the bowl…,
Alas! It was my soul. Page 153”

Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949) Indian politician, governor of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh from 1947 to 1949

Her poem in [Gokak, Vinayak Krishna, The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry, 1828-1965, http://books.google.com/books?id=WLE8GVsAfEMC, 1970, Sahitya Akademi, 978-81-260-1196-4, 153]
Poetry

Flowers , Wine , Heart , Indifference

“That is the greatest thing about him. That he is not only our leader and a great hero. But himself, upright, firm and simple. In him the roots of our world. And his soul touches the stars. And yet he remains a man like you and me.”

Baldur von Schirach (1907–1974) German Nazi leader convicted of crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg trial

A poem written by Schirach about Hitler in 1936. Quoted in "The Trial of the Germans" - Page 287 - by Eugene Davidson - History - 1997

World , Star

“It is God’s will that we set the point of our thought in this blissful beholding as often as we may, — and as long time keep us therein with His grace; for this is a blessed contemplation to the soul that is led of God, and full greatly to His worship, for the time that it lasteth.”

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

The Fifteenth Revelation, Chapter 63

God , Time

“Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding
Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind. Me and my mother and father, and a grandmother and a grandfather. were driving through the desert, at dawn, and a truck load of Indian workers had either hit another car, or just — I don't know what happened — but there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death.
So the car pulls up and stops. That was the first time I tasted fear. I musta' been about four — like a child is like a flower, his head is just floating in the breeze, man. The reaction I get now thinking about it, looking back — is that the souls of the ghosts of those dead Indians… maybe one or two of 'em… were just running around freaking out, and just leaped into my soul. And they're still there.”

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

An American Prayer (1978)

Death , Fear , Cars , Flowers

“As verily as God is our Father, so verily God is our Mother; and that shewed He in all, and especially in these sweet words where He saith: I IT AM. That is to say, I IT AM, the Might and the Goodness of the Fatherhood; I IT AM, the Wisdom of the Motherhood; I IT AM, the Light and the Grace that is all blessed Love: I IT AM, the Trinity, I IT AM, the Unity: I am the sovereign Goodness of all manner of things. I am that maketh thee to love: I am that maketh thee to long: I IT AM, the endless fulfilling of all true desires.
For there the soul is highest, noblest, and worthiest, where it is lowest, meekest, and mildest: and of this Substantial Ground we have all our virtues in our Sense-part by gift of Nature, by helping and speeding of Mercy and Grace: without the which we may not profit.”

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

Summations, Chapter 59

Love , Wisdom , God , Nature

“These persons all have two souls, two beings within them. There is God and the devil in them; the mother's blood and the father's; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man in Harry.”

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf (1927)

God , Suffering , Wolf , Personality

“Hunger for vengeance poisoned the soul.”

Steven Erikson book Gardens of the Moon

Source: Gardens of the Moon (1999), Chapter 4 (p. 153)

Hunger

“In those days, dances were dances and songs were songs. Film dances always had a semi-classical or folk element to them and songs were all about soul-stirring lyrics and haunting music. These days, they are more about technique and technology, often it's the camera that's dancing, the synthesiser that's singing. Not my cup of tea.”

Vyjayanthimala (1936) Indian actress, politician & dancer

Vyjayanthimala still cuts a striking figure tall

Music , Singing , Dance , Tea

“The average Christian confuses the Law of Rebirth with what he calls "the transmigration of souls", and frequently believes that the Law of Rebirth signifies the passing of human beings into the bodies of animals or of lower forms of life. Such is by no means the case.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Reappearance of the Christ (1948), p. 324

Life , Law , Animals

“The desire of love, Joy:
The desire of life, Peace:
The desire of the soul, Heaven:
The desire of God … a flame-white secret forever.”

William Sharp (writer) (1855–1905) Scottish writer

Desire, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Love , Life , God , Secret

“Poverty and adversity is the cause of the soul’s rebellion, revolt, and the gravity of dismay.”

Ali al-Hadi (829–868) imam

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.78, p. 368.
Religious Wisdom

“The goal of mankind is knowledge.... Now this knowledge is inherent in man. No knowledge comes from outside: it is all inside. What we say a man "knows," should, in strict psychological language, be what he "discovers" or "unveils"; what man "learns" is really what he discovers by taking the cover off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Knowledge , Learning

“Bid us sigh on from day to day,
And wish and wish the soul away,
Till youth and genial years are flown,
And all the life of life is gone.”

Samuel Beckett book Watt

Addenda, p. 248
Watt (1943)

Life , Youth

“The most momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or to evil.”

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

As quoted in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, as translated by Robert Drew Hicks (1925)
Variant translation: The most momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.
As quoted in Ionia, a Quest (1954) by Freya Stark, p. 94

Life , Art , Evil

“The Age that admires talk so much can have little discernment for inarticulate work, or for anything that is deep and genuine. Nobody, or hardly anybody, having in himself an earnest sense for truth, how can anybody recognize an inarticulate Veracity, or Nature-fact of any kind; a Human Doer especially, who is the most complex, profound, and inarticulate of all Nature's Facts? Nobody can recognize him: till once he is patented, get some public stamp of authenticity, and has been articulately proclaimed, and asserted to be a Doer. To the worshipper of talk, such a one is a sealed book. An excellent human soul, direct from Heaven,—how shall any excellence of man become recognizable to this unfortunate? Not except by announcing and placarding itself as excellent,—which, I reckon, it above other things will probably be in no great haste to do.”

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

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

Truth , Books , Age , Nature

“Yet, wake again, I pray thee, wake;
My soul yet lives upon the chords —
My heart must breathe its wrongs, or break :
Yet can it find relief in words!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(20th March 1824) Metrical Tales. Tale IV.— The Troubadour
The London Literary Gazette, 1824

Heart

“May they not forget to keep pure the great heritage that puts them ahead of the West: the artistic configuration of life, the simplicity and modesty of personal needs, and the purity and serenity of the Japanese soul.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Comment made after a six-week trip to Japan in November-December 1922, published in Kaizo 5, no. 1 (January 1923), 339. Einstein Archive 36-477.1. Appears in The New Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (2005), p. 269
1920s

Life , Personality , Forgetting

“Out of the city, far away
With spring to-day!
Where copses tufted with primrose
Give me repose,
Wood-sorrel and wild violet
Soothe my soul's fret.”

William Allingham (1824–1889) Irish man of letters and poet

Poem: A Holiday.

Spring

“Because of this great, endless love that God hath to all Mankind, He maketh no disparting in love between the blessed Soul of Christ and the least soul that shall be saved.”

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

Summations, Chapter 54

Love , God , Christ

“Moved by a generous eagerness to turn men's attention to the power which dwelt in circumstances, Mr. Owen devised the instructive phrase, that "man's character was formed for him and not by him." He used the unforgettable inference that "man is the creature of circumstances." The school of material improvers believed they could put in permanent force right circumstances. The great dogma was their charter of encouragement. To those who hated without thought It seemed a restrictive doctrine to be asked to admit that there were extenuating circumstances in the career of every rascal. To the clergy with whom censure was a profession, and who held that all sin was wilful, man being represented as the "creature of circumstances," appeared a denial of moral responsibility. When they were asked to direct hatred against error, and pity the erring — who had inherited so base a fortune of incapacity and condition — they were wroth exceedingly, and said it would be making a compromise with sin. The idea of the philosopher of circumstances was that the very murderer in his last cell had been born with a staple in his soul, to which the villainous conditions of his life had attached an unseen chain, which had drawn him to the gallows, and that the rope which was to hang him was but the visible part. Legislators since that day have come to admit that punishment is justifiable only as far as it has preventive influence. To use the great words of Hobbes, "Punishment regardeth not the past, only the future."”

George Holyoake (1817–1906) British secularist, co-operator, and newspaper editor

George Jacob Holyoake in The History of Co-operation in England (1875; 1902).

Life , Men , Hate , School

“How alien our country has become from her noblest Province and how unfaithful to that Province's spirit; how far body and soul, ideal and reality have moved apart in our country; how little they know about each other, or want to know.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Unfaithfulness , Reality , Country

“He was once asked what a friend is, and his answer was, "One soul abiding in two bodies."”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Aristotle, 9.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 5: The Peripatetics

“There are some sordid minds, formed of slime and filth, to whom interest and gain are what glory and virtue are to superior souls; they feel no other pleasure but to acquire money.”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

Il y a des âmes sales, pétries de boue et d’ordure, éprises du gain et de l’intérêt, comme les belles âmes le sont de la gloire et de la vertu; capables d’une seule volupté, qui est celle d’acquérir ou de ne point perdre.
Aphorism 58
Les Caractères (1688), Des biens de fortune

Money , Pleasure , Feeling

“Hither and thither spins
The wind-borne mirroring soul,
A thousand glimpses wins,
And never sees a whole.”

Matthew Arnold book Empedocles on Etna

Act I, sc. ii
Empedocles on Etna (1852)

“Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.”

Robert Benchley (1889–1945) American comedian

As quoted in The Routledge Dictionary of Quotations : A Dictionary of Quotations (1987) by Robert Andrews, p. 154

Spring , Literature

“The highest part of the human soul, which is called the intelligence and which is not the act of any body and does not need for its proper operation a corporeal instrument—this intelligence, if it were not obscured and weighed down by the mass of the body, would itself have complete knowledge from the irradiation received from the superior light without the help of sense, just as it will have when the soul is drawn forth from the body, and as perhaps those people have who are free from the love and the imaginings of corporeal things.”

Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253) English bishop and philosopher

Commentarius in Posteriorum Analyticorum Libros (c. 1217-1220)

Love , People , Imagination , Intelligence

“The impressions we receive, which often appear merely chaotic, consist of three elements; the impression of the color of the object, its form, and of its combined color and form, i. e., of the object itself. At this point the individuality of the artist comes to the front and disposes, as he wills, these three elements. It is clear, therefore, that the choice of object (i. e., of one of the elements in the harmony of form) must be decided only by a corresponding vibration in the human soul..”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote of Kandinsky, Munich, 1910; as cited in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 450
1910 - 1915

Color , Appearance

“The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul.”

Alfred Austin (1835–1913) British writer and poet

Source: As quoted in Growing with the Seasons (2008) by Frank & Vicky Giannangelo, p. 115., and one or two other gardening books, as well as on various internet gardening sites and lists of quotations. However, it is sometimes attributed to Voltaire, and about one-third of the time it is quoted without attribution (at times even without quotation marks). It is not to be found in Austin's The Garden That I Love or any of its five sequels.

Nature , Sun , Heart

“Poverty of body in itself mattered nothing; what Francis wanted was poverty of pride, and the external robe or the bare feet were outward and necessary forms of protection against its outward display. Against riches or against all external and visible vanity, rules and laws could be easily enforced if it were worth while, although the purest humility would be reached only by those who were indifferent and unconscious of their external dress; but against spiritual pride the soul is defenceless, and of all its forms the subtlest and the meanest is pride of intellect. […] Lord Bacon held much the same opinion. [..:] "Let men please themselves as they will in admiring and almost adoring the human mind, this is certain:— that, as an uneven mirror distorts the rays of objects according to its own figure and section, so the mind … cannot be trusted …"”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Bacon's first object was the same as that of Francis, to humiliate and if possible destroy the pride of human reason; both of them knew that this was their most difficult task.
The Bacon quote is from the Preface to The Great Instauration (1620).
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Men , Law , Indifference

“A soul so pitiably forlorn,
If such do on this earth abide,
May season apathy with scorn,
May turn indifference to pride;
And still be not unblest—compared
With him who grovels, self-debarred
From all that lies within the scope
Of holy faith and christian hope;
Or, shipwrecked, kindles on the coast
False fires, that others may be lost.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

To the Lady Fleming, st. 7 (1823).

Faith , Hope , Falseness , Indifference

“It must be so — Plato, thou reasonest well!
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?
Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror,
O falling into nought? Why shrinks the soul
Back on herself, and startles at destruction?
'Tis the divinity that stirs within us;
'Tis heaven itself, that points out an hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man.”

Joseph Addison book Cato

Act V, scene i.
Cato, A Tragedy (1713)

Secret , Hope

“The heterodox current in Judaism led by Jesus seems to have had no notion of an immortal soul, created by God and then infused into the body: immortality meant being raised from the dead in the body one had in life, then living for ever in a world without decay or corruption. In the Christian religion invented by Paul and Augustine, which was strongly influenced by Plato, immortality meant something quite different – a life out of time, enjoyed by the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ of the departed. How this Platonic immortality could preserve anything like the persons that once lived was not made clear.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Cross-correspondences (pp. 32-3)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

Life , God , World , Religion

“The three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, aided by the highest and most sublime gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as understanding, wisdom, knowledge, and counsel, unite the creature, the human spirit, with his God, the souls with the Word of God. It is this sacred union that you must seek, hold and possess; in it lie the spiritual life, health and strength, and from it originate all the other virtues.”

Francisco Palau (1811–1872) Beatified Spanish Discalced Carmelite friar and priest

Letter to Juana Gratia (1857)

Life , Wisdom , God , Health

“I feel a kind of intellectual regret, not an emotional regret, at having left my parents and that world behind. But it's not a great weight on my soul. In a way I wish it were. To leave one’s background without guilt is an indication of shallowness of character, I suspect.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)

World , Way , Feeling , Parent

“By one hour's intimate access to the throne of grace, where the Lord causes his glory to pass before the soul that seeks him, you may acquire more true spiritual knowledge and comfort, than by a day or a week's converse with the best of men, or the most studious perusal of many folios.”

John Newton (1725–1807) Anglican clergyman and hymn-writer

Letter (February 1772) http://www.graceonlinelibrary.org/articles/full.asp?id=33|35|383

Men , Knowledge

“Return unto thy rest, my soul,
From all the wanderings of thy thought,
From sickness unto death made whole,
Safe through a thousand perils brought.”

James Montgomery (1771–1854) British editor, hymn writer, and poet

Rest for the Soul.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Death

“Our first necessity, if India is to survive and do her appointed work in the world, is that the youth of India should learn to think,—to think on all subjects, to think independently, fruitfully, going to the heart of things, not stopped by their surface, free of prejudgments, shearing sophism and prejudice asunder as with a sharp sword, smiting down obscurantism of all kinds as with the mace of Bhima. (…) When there is destruction, it is the form that perishes, not the spirit—for the world and its ways are forms of one Truth which appears in this material world in ever new bodies…. In India, the chosen land, [that Truth] is preserved; in the soul of India it sleeps expectant on that soul's awakening, the soul of India leonine, luminous, locked in the closed petals of the ancient lotus of love, strength and wisdom, not in her weak, soiled, transient and miserable externals. India alone can build the future of mankind. (…) Ancient or pre-Buddhistic Hinduism sought Him both in the world and outside it; it took its stand on the strength and beauty and joy of the Veda, unlike modern or post-Buddhistic Hinduism which is oppressed with Buddha's sense of universal sorrow and Shankara's sense of universal illusion,—Shankara who was the better able to destroy Buddhism because he was himself half a Buddhist. Ancient Hinduism aimed socially at our fulfilment in God in life, modern Hinduism at the escape from life to God. The more modern ideal is fruitful of a noble and ascetic spirituality, but has a chilling and hostile effect on social soundness and development; social life under its shadow stagnates for want of belief and delight, sraddha and ananda. If we are to make our society perfect and the nation is to live again, then we must revert to the earlier and fuller truth.”

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

1910-1912
India's Rebirth

Love , Life , Wisdom , God

“Everything is game except what makes the soul better or worse.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Game

“Ours it is to bear the Sabbath in our souls.”

Nina Salaman (1877–1925) British Jewish poet, translator, and social activist

Poem The Sabbath (1918)

“The God who created these fair heavens with the same facility as yon green sapling; he who hath bestowed on man a life of toil, of transient joys and fleeting pains, that he might not forget the higher worth of his enduring soul, and might feel that immortality waited for him beyond the grave;—He, he is one only God!”

Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803) German poet, writer and linguist

The Messiah, VII. 460; as quoted in Beautiful thoughts from German and Spanish authors (1868) by C.T. Ramage, p. 240

Life , God , Pain , Feeling

“Shah Alamgir, that high and mighty king,
Pride and renown of Gurgan Timur’s line,
In whom Islam attained a loftier fame
And wider honour graced the Prophet’s Law,
He the last arrow to our quiver left
In the affray of Faith with Unbelief;
When that the impious seed of heresy,
By Akbar nourished, sprang and sprouted fresh
In Dara’s soul, the candle of the heart
Was dimmed in every breast, no more secure
Against corruption our Community
Continued; then God chose from India
That humble-minded warrior, Alamgir,
Religion to revive, faith to renew.
The lightning of his sword set all ablaze
The harvest of impiety; faith’s torch
Once more its radiance o’er our counsels shed.”

Muhammad Iqbál (1877–1938) Urdu poet and leader of the Pakistan Movement

The Secrets of Selflessness, Emperor Alamgir and the Tiger

God , Faith , Religion , Law

“Your theology has taught you to believe that any religion, to be perfected, must be so at the sacrifice of the physical form or powers. Hence, the ancient religionists confined themselves within the cloistered cells of monasteries, and there with true devoutness of feeling they sought to perfect the immortality of the soul by crucifying the body. Health, life, intellect—all were sacrificed to this fanaticism for a happy immortality. … Ask any religionist what constitutes true and perfect religion, and he will tell you it is that which crucifies the human part and cultivates the divine.”

Cora L. V. Scott (1840–1923) American spiritualist, writer

“The Religion of Life” (1858)

Life , Health , Religion , Feeling

“And what did ye look they should compass?
Warcraft learned in a breath,
Knowledge unto occasion at the first far view of Death?
So? And ye train your horses and the dogs ye feed and prize?
How are the beasts more worthy than the souls, your sacrifice?
But ye said, “Their valour shall show them”; but ye said, “The end is close.”
And ye sent them comfits and pictures to help them harry your foes:
And ye vaunted your fathomless power, and ye flaunted your iron pride,
Ere—ye fawned on the Younger Nations for the men who could shoot and ride!
Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented your souls
With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

The Islanders http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/verse/p1/islanders.html, l. 22-31 (1902).
Other works

Death , Men , Dogs , Fools

“One solace yet remains for us who came
Into this world in days when story lacked
Severe research, that in our hearts we know
How, for exciting youth's heroic flame,
Assent is power, belief the soul of fact.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Memorials of a Tour in Italy (1837), IV ("story" refers to History).

Youth , World , Heart

“Let then no doubt, Celinda, touch,
Much less your fairest mind invade:
Were not our souls immortal made
Our equal loves can make them such.”

Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648) Anglo-Welsh soldier, diplomat, historian, poet and religious philosopher

"An Ode Upon a Question Moved Whether Love Should Continue for Ever", line 121

Love

“The very beginning of the soul’s purgation is tranquility, in which the tongue is not given to discussing the affairs of men, nor the eyes to contemplating rosy cheeks or comely bodies, nor the ears to lowering the tone of the soul by listening to songs whose sole object is to amuse, or to words spoken by wits and buffoons—a practice which above all things tends to relax the tone of the soul.”

Basil of Caesarea (329–379) Christian Saint

vol. 1, p. 13
Letters

Men

“Our two souls therefore which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, stanza 6

“No seed shall perish which the soul hath sown.”

John Addington Symonds (1840–1893) English poet and literary critic

Sonnet. Versöhnung. A Belief.

“I am not speaking, obviously, to the laughing hyenas who enjoy seeing images of the wreckage and snicker good–it–serves–the–Americans–right. I am speaking to those who, though not stupid or evil, are wallowing in prudence and doubt. And to them I say: "Wake up, people. Wake up!!" Intimidated as you are by your fear of going against the current—that is, appearing racist (a word which is entirely inapt as we are speaking not about a race but about a religion)—you don’t understand or don’t want to understand that a reverse–Crusade is in progress. Accustomed as you are to the double–cross, blinded as you are by myopia, you don’t understand or don’t want to understand that a war of religion is in progress. Desired and declared by a fringe of that religion, perhaps, but a war of religion nonetheless. A war which they call Jihad. Holy War. A war that might not seek to conquer our territory, but that certainly seeks to conquer our souls. That seeks the disappearance of our freedom and our civilization. That seeks to annihilate our way of living and dying, our way of praying or not praying, our way of eating and drinking and dressing and entertaining and informing ourselves. You don’t understand or don’t want to understand that if we don’t oppose them, if we don’t defend ourselves, if we don’t fight, the Jihad will win. And it will destroy the world that for better or worse we’ve managed to build, to change, to improve, to render a little more intelligent, that is to say, less bigoted—or even not bigoted at all. And with that it will destroy our culture, our art, our science, our morals, our values, our pleasures… Christ! Don’t you realize that the Osama Bin Ladens feel authorized to kill you and your children because you drink wine or beer, because you don’t wear your beard long or a chador, because you go to the theater or the movies, because you listen to music and sing pop songs, because you dance in discos or at home, because you watch TV, wear miniskirts or short–shorts, because you go naked or half naked to the beach or the pool, because you *** when you want and where you want and who you want? Don’t you even care about that, you fools? I am an atheist, thank God. And I have no intention of letting myself be killed for it.”

Oriana Fallaci book The Rage and the Pride

"Rage and the Pride">Oriana Fallaci - The Rage and the Pride http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rage-Pride-Oriana-Fallaci/dp/084782599X - Universe Publishing; Intl edition, 2002, ISBN 9780847825998

God , War , Children , People

“I belong to the Great Church which holds the world within its starlit aisles; that claims the great and good of every race and clime; that finds with joy the grain of gold in every creed, and floods with light and love the germs of good in every soul.”

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

Robert G. Ingersoll, a declaration in discussion with Rev. Henry M. Field on Faith and Agnosticism, quoted in Vol. VI of Farrell's edition of his works, also in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922) edited by Kate Louise Roberts, p. 663.

Love , World , Light , Joy

“You have now in the field armies sufficient to repel the whole force of your enemies and their base and mercenary auxiliaries. The hearts of your soldiers beat high with the spirit of freedom; they are animated with the justice of their cause, and while they grasp their swords can look up to Heaven for assistance. Your adversaries are composed of wretches who laugh at the rights of humanity, who turn religion into derision, and would, for higher wages, direct their swords against their leaders or their country. Go on, then, in your generous enterprise, with gratitude to Heaven for past, success, and confidence of it in the future. For my own part, I ask no greater blessing than to share with you the common danger and common glory. If I have a wish dearer to my soul than that my ashes may be mingled with those of a Warren and a Montgomery, it is that these American States may never cease to be free and independent.”

Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher

Speech about Declaration of Independence (1776)

Religion , Justice , Confidence , Freedom

“The highway's jammed with broken heroes
On a last chance power drive.
Everybody's out on the run tonight
But there's no place left to hide.
Together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness.
I'll love you with all the madness in my soul.
Someday girl, I don't know when we're gonna get to that place
Where we really want to go and we'll walk in the sun.
But till then tramps like us, baby we were born to run.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Born To Run"
Song lyrics, Born to Run (1975)

Love , Sadness , Girl , Chance

“Of Christian souls more have been wrecked on shore
Than ever were lost at sea.”

Charles Henry Webb (1834–1905) American poet

With a Nantucket Shell, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Sea

“This is a struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party, which in too many cases has become so corporate and identified with corporate interests that you can't tell the difference between Democrats and Republicans.”

Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician

Interview with Judy Woodruff, Inside Politics, CNN (17 February 2003) http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0302/17/ip.00.html.

“Your great employment is to bring the individual souls of men to Christ.”

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

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 411.

Men , Christ

“Now Euxenus realized that he was attached to a lofty ideal, and asked him at what point he would begin it. Apollonius answered: "At the point at which physicians begin, for they, by purging the bowels of their patients prevent some from being ill at all, and heal others." And having said this he declined to live upon a flesh diet, on the ground that it was unclean, and also that it made the mind gross; so he partook only of dried fruits and vegetables, for he said that all the fruits of the earth are clean. And of wine he said that it was a clean drink because it is yielded to men by so well-domesticated a plant as the vine; but he declared that it endangered the mental balance and system and darkened, as with mud, the ether which is in the soul. After then having thus purged his interior, he took to walking without shoes by way of adornment and clad himself in linen raiment, declining to wear any animal product.”

Philostratus book Life of Apollonius of Tyana

Book 1, § 8.
Life of Apollonius of Tyana

Men , Shoe , Way , Drink

“All his tunk-a-tunks, his hoo-goo-boos — those mannered, manufactured, individual, uninteresting little sound-inventions — how typical they are of the lecture-style of the English philosopher, who makes grunts or odd noises, uses homely illustrations, and quotes day in and day out from Alice, in order to give what he says some appearance of that raw reality it so plainly and essentially lacks. These “tootings at the wedding of the soul” are fun for the tooter, but get as dreary for the reader as do all the foreign words — a few of these are brilliant, a few more pleasant, and the rest a disaster: “one cannot help deploring his too extensive acquaintance with the foreign languages”, as Henry James said, of Walt Whitman, to Edith Wharton.”

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

“Reflections on Wallace Stevens”, p. 129
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Quotes , Home , Reality , Wedding

“The first requisite of a gentleman is to be true, brave and noble, and to be therefore a rebuke and scandal to venal and vulgar souls.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 120

“Pope Benedict XVI is working softly, slowly, often silently, unobtrusively, behind the scenes, mostly unseen. But he is working hard. I like the great job of reconciliation that he is doing inside the Roman Catholic Church: reconciliation between traditionalists and liberals, conservative and reform-oriented faithful, liturgical Latinists and Mass polyglots, old-time lovers and progressives, high-flying souls and pedestrian believers, thinkers and doers--Christians and Catholics. It is a hidden work of diplomacy, interactions, influences, concessions, agreements, acknowledgments. A "hard job" well done until now.”

Leon Bertoletti (1971)

Christians and Catholics http://www.hicsuntleones.co.uk/2008/10/christians-and-catholics.html, Hic Sunt Leones, 9/10/2008

Faith , Lovers , Time , Flying

“When my soul was in the lost and found,
You came along to claim it.
I didn't know just what was wrong with me
Till your kiss helped me name it.
Now I'm no longer doubtful of what I'm living for,
Cause if I make you happy I don't need to do more.”

Carole King book A Natural Woman

(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman (1967), Co-written with Gerry Goffin and Jerry Wexler, first recorded by Aretha Franklin
Song lyrics, Singles

Kiss , Help , Happiness

“One of the major activities of art consists in sharpening the edge of platitudes to make them enter the soul as realities.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 7

Art , Reality

“While utterly discarding all creeds, and denying the truth of all religions, there is neither in my heart nor upon my lips a sneer for the hopeful, loving and tender souls who believe that from all this discord will result a perfect harmony; that every evil will in some mysterious way become a good, and that above and over all there is a being who, in some way, will reclaim and glorify every one of the children of men; but for those who heartlessly try to prove that salvation is almost impossible; that damnation is almost certain; that the highway of the universe leads to hell; who fill life with fear and death with horror; who curse the cradle and mock the tomb, it is impossible to entertain other than feelings of pity, contempt and scorn.”

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

"The Gods" (1876) as published in The Gods and Other Lectures (1879).

Love , Life , Death , Men

“I admit, of course, that the artist does not see nature as the vulgar do. His emotion reveals to him the inner truths that underlie appearance. But the only principle In art is to copy what one sees. Every other method is ruinous. No one can embellish Nature. It is simply and solely a question of seeing. Doubtless a mediocre man, when he copies will never produce a work of art. He looks without seeing. No matter how minutely he observes, the result will be flat and without character. But the artist's trade is not for mediocre men, and no amount of training can supply them with talent. The artist sees - he sees with his heart. He sees deep into the heart of Nature. To the artist everything in Nature is beautiful.
The vulgarian imagines that what looks to him ugly In Nature is not material for the artist. He would forbid us to represent what displeases and offends him. He makes a grave mistake. What is commonly called ugliness in Nature may become a great beauty in art.
In the realm of realities, people regard as ugly everything that is deformed and diseased and that suggests sickness, weakness and suffering. They regard as ugly everything that defies regularity, which is to them the symbol and condition of health and strength. A hump is ugly, bow-legs are ugly, misery in rags is ugly. Ugly, again, are the soul and conduct of the immoral, the vicious, the criminal man, the abnormal man who is an enemy of society; ugly is the soul of the parricide, the traitor, the unscrupulous slave of ambition. And it is right that the lives and the of which we can expect only evil should be given an odious epithet.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Rodin on realism, 1910

Men , People , Health , Truth

“In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire,
Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned!
His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls
The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat
To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power,
On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry
He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more.
But when one, fearless, turned and clawed like bronze,
Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws,
And he would weigh the heavier on those after.
Who rests in God's mean flattery now? Your wealth
Is but his cunning to make death more hard.
Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking.
And he has made the market for your beauty
Too poor to buy, although you die to sell.
Only that he has never heard of sleep;
And when the cats come out the rats are sly.
Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn.
But he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots,
And in the morning some pale wonder ceases.
Things are not strange and strange things are forgetful.
Ah! if the day were arid, somehow lost
Out of us, but it is as hair of us,
And only in the hush no wind stirs it.
And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes,
And restlessness still shadows the lost ways.
The fingers shut on voices that pass through,
Where blind farewells are taken easily...
Ah! this miasma of a rotting God!”

Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) English poet

written 1916 or before
On Receiving News of the War (1914), God

Death , Women , Men , God

“Now from the broken tower, what solemn bell still tolls,
Mourning what piteous death? Answer, O saddened souls!
Who mourn the death of beauty and the death of grace.”

Lionel Johnson (1867–1902) English poet

The Age of a Dream (1890)

Death , Beauty

“Tis soothing, oh! most soothing to the heart,
To rove 'mid scenes where once we have been blest!
Each tree, each blossom, has a thrilling charm;
They seem memorials of those happier hours :
The very sigh that tells they are no more,
Is sweet unto the spirit; former days,
And former feelings, rise upon the soul,
Dear as they once have been.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Canto II, XII
The Fate of Adelaide (1821)

Feeling , Tree , Memory , Heart

“I work obstinately, and once in a while I catch a glimpse of the Promised Land. Am I to be like the great leader of the Hebrews, or will I really attain unto it?.. I have a large studio in the country. I can work better there than in the city. I have made some progress. Oh, why so late and so painful? Must art indeed be a priesthood, demanding that the faithful be bound to it body and soul?”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Quote from Cézanne's letter to Vollard - Aix, 9 January, 1903; as quoted in Cezanne, by Ambroise Vollard, Dover publications Inc. New York, 1984, p. 103
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900

Pain , Faith , Art , Country

“An officer corps, my West Point education emphasized, must have a code of ethics that tolerates no lying, no cheating, no stealing, no immorality, no killing other than that recognized under international rules of war and essential for military victory. Yet I also learned to my chagrin that there are those who fail the standards and that the code must be constantly policed. I saw failures at West Point, and for all my preventive efforts, I also saw failures among those who subsequently served under my command. Yet if an officer corps is to serve the nation as it should, firm dedication to a high moral code must always be the goal. One of the most exciting events of my plebe year was the commencement address by the Army Chief of Staff, General MacArthur, who was much as any man extolled such a code. Already a distinguished soldier even before World War II and the Korean War, General MacArthur spoke at a time when pacifism and economy imperiled the military services and the nation's security. While warning against misguided pacifism and politically inspired economy, he spoke of West Point as "the soul of the Army."”

William Westmoreland book A Soldier Reports

"The military code that you perpetuate," he said, "has come down to us from even before the age of knighthood and chivalry. It will stand the test of any code of ethics or philosophy."
Source: A Soldier Reports (1976), p. 11.

War , Age , World , Education

“We can dive to the bottom of the sea and some say NASA will fly us to the stars, and I have known men to plunge into the past—or the future—and drown. But there's one place where we can't go. We can't go where we are already. We can't go home, because our minds, and our hearts, and our immortal souls are already there there.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

"Kevin Malone", New Terrors (1980), ed. Ramsey Campbell, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Endangered Species (1989), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009)
Fiction

Men , Home , Star , Past

“After this He shewed a sovereign ghostly pleasance in my soul. I was fulfilled with the everlasting sureness, mightily sustained without any painful dread. This feeling was so glad and so ghostly that I was in all peace and in rest, that there was nothing in earth that should have grieved me.
This lasted but a while, and I was turned and left to myself in heaviness, and weariness of my life, and irksomeness of myself, that scarcely I could have patience to live. There was no comfort nor none ease to me but faith, hope, and charity; and these I had in truth, but little in feeling.
And anon after this our blessed Lord gave me again the comfort and the rest in soul, in satisfying and sureness so blissful and so mighty that no dread, no sorrow, no pain bodily that might be suffered should have distressed me. And then the pain shewed again to my feeling, and then the joy and the pleasing, and now that one, and now that other, divers times — I suppose about twenty times. And in the time of joy I might have said with Saint Paul: Nothing shall dispart me from the charity of Christ; and in the pain I might have said with Peter: Lord, save me: I perish!”

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

The Seventh Revelation, Chapter 15

Life , Pain , Truth , Peace

“Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses, the harmonious tones corresponding to the harmonies of sounds, but in painting, a unity is obtained which is not possible in music, where the accords follow one another, and the judgement experiences a continuous fatigue if one wants to reunite the end and the beginning. In the main, the ear is an inferior sense to the eye. The hearing can only grasp a single sound at one time, whereas the sight takes in everything and at the same time simplifies at its will.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

La peinture est le plus beau de tous les arts; en lui se résument toutes les sensations, à son aspect chacun peut, au gré de son imagination, créer le roman, d'un seul coup d'œil avoir l'âme envahie par les plus profonds souvenirs; point d'effort de mémoire, tout résumé en un seul instant. — Art complet qui résume tous les autres et les complète. — Comme la musique, il agit sur l'âme par l'intermédiaire des sens, les tons harmonieux correspondant aux harmonies des sons; mais en peinture on obtient une unité impossible en musique où les accords viennent les uns après les autres, et le jugement éprouve alors une fatigue incessante s'il veut réunir la fin au commencement. En somme, l'oreille est un sens inférieur à celui de l'œil. L'ouïe ne peut servir qu'à un seul son à la fois, tandis que la vue embrasse tout, en même temps qu'à son gré elle simplifie.
Quote of Gauguin from: Notes Synthéthiques (ca. 1884-1885), ed. Henri Mahaut, in Vers et prose (July-September 1910), p. 52; translation from John Rewald, Gauguin (Hyperion Press, 1938), p. 161.
1870s - 1880s

Beauty , Art , Music , Imagination

“A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakeable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habbit of the blood. At five years old, mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, to be stimulated by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into impartiality; and that prejudice in favour of milk with which we blindly begin, is a type of the way body and soul must get nourished at least for a time. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

Love , Life , Men , World

“The term "instrumentalism," which has largely superseded the broader term "pragmatism," emphasizes the subordination of the intellect to ends beyond itself. But the organic analogy does in fact point to quite a different conclusion. Most organic functions are interested in their own behalf. I may even breathe for the sake of breathing. I may identify my soul with my lungs. … Or consider the predatory instinct. This evidently has its place in the economy of life by virtue of providing food for carnivorous animals; but hunting is also an art and a pastime, which many have thought worth cultivating as an end in itself. What is true of respiration and huntsmanship can scarcely be denied of an activity so developed, so varied, so self-conscious, as that of the intellect. Nor in this case any more than the others, does the subordinate role contradict the autonomous role. The devotee of breathing or of hunting need not cease to breathe or hunt for vital purposes; nor need the intellectualist, the scientist, the speculative philosopher, because he has cultivated the art of knowing for its own sake, therefore cease to use his mind for the conduct of affairs.”

Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957) American philosopher

The Integrity of the Intellect (July 1920)

Life , Food , Art , Animals

“O for ten years, that I may overwhelm
Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed
That my own soul has to itself decreed.”

John Keats Sleep and Poetry

"Sleep and Poetry", st. 6
Poems (1817)

“No doubt, the poetry, overjoyed by swallowing the beverage of passionate thoughts, delights the mind. But she does not realize the sorrows and troubles of the poor. Forget depicting the beauty of passions and present your poetry as a necklace of thought gems to swell the soul.”

Manmohan Acharya (1967–2013) Poet, lyricist

Stanza-3, Verse-1
Song of the Bumblebee (2008)

Beauty , Passion , Forgetting

“The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul.”

Joseph Campbell book The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Epilogue
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949)

Light

““Stand up, stand up now, Tomlinson, and answer loud and high
“The good that ye did for the sake of men or ever ye came to die—
“The good that ye did for the sake of men in little earth so lone!”
And the naked soul of Tomlinson grew white as a rain-washed bone.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

Tomlinson, l. 7-10 (1891).
Other works

Men

“You evidently feel that brevity is the soul of widowhood.”

Saki The Chronicles of Clovis

"The Match Maker"
The Chronicles of Clovis (1911)

Feeling

“One always adds a little of one's soul to what one thinks.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Thinking

“To listen to someone is to put oneself in his place while he is speaking. To put oneself in the place of someone whose soul is corroded by affliction, or in near danger of it, is to annihilate oneself. It is more difficult than suicide would be for a happy child. Therefore the afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
That is why there is no hope for the vagrant as he stands before the magistrate. Even if, through his stammerings, he should utter a cry to pierce the soul, neither the magistrate nor the public will hear it. His cry is mute. And the afflicted are nearly always equally deaf to one another; and each of them, constrained by the general indifference, strives by means of self-delusion or forgetfulness to become deaf to his own self.”

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

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Human Personality (1943), p. 71

Hope , Suicide , Affliction , Cry

“All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

"Who says words with my mouth?" in Ch. 1 : The Tavern, p. 2
Disputed, The Essential Rumi (1995)

Idea , Thinking , Night

“For their doctrine is this: That bodies are corruptible, and that the matter they are made of is not permanent; but that the souls are immortal, and continue forever; and that they come out of the most subtile air, and are united to their bodies as to prisons, into which they are drawn by a certain natural enticement; but that when they are set free from the bonds of the flesh, they then, as released from a long bondage, rejoice and mount upward. And this is like the opinions of the Greeks, that good souls have their habitations beyond the ocean, in a region that is neither oppressed with storms of rain or snow, or with intense heat, but that this place is such as is refreshed by the gentle breathing of a west wind, that is perpetually blowing from the ocean; while they allot to bad souls a dark and tempestuous den, full of never-ceasing punishments. And indeed the Greeks seem to me to have followed the same notion, when they allot the islands of the blessed to their brave men, whom they call heroes and demi-gods; and to the souls of the wicked, the region of the ungodly, in Hades, where their fables relate that certain persons, such as Sisyphus, and Tantalus, and Ixion, and Tityus, are punished; which is built on this first supposition, that souls are immortal; and thence are those exhortations to virtue and dehortations from wickedness collected; whereby good men are bettered in the conduct of their life by the hope they have of reward after their death; and whereby the vehement inclinations of bad men to vice are restrained, by the fear and expectation they are in, that although they should lie concealed in this life, they should suffer immortal punishment after their death. These are the Divine doctrines of the Essens about the soul, which lay an unavoidable bait for such as have once had a taste of their philosophy.”

Josephus on the Essenes

Jewish War

Life , Death , Men , God

“It was as if by becoming a musician and Music Master he had chosen music as one of the ways toward man's highest goal, inner freedom, purity, perfection, and as though ever since making that choice he has done nothing but let himself be more and more permeated, transformed, purified by music — his entire self from his nimble, clever pianist's hands and his vast, well-stocked musician's memory to all the parts and organs of body and soul, to his pulses and breathing, to his sleep and dreaming — so that he was now only a symbol, or rather a manifestation, a personification of music.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Dreams , Music , Way , Sleep

“God have mercy on his miserable soul! and make him see and feel his guilt — I ask no other vengeance! If he could but fully know and truly feel my wrongs I should be well avenged, and I could freely pardon all.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXXIV : Concealment; Helen Graham

God , Feeling

“I listen to the wind
To the wind of my soul
Where I’ll end up well I think,
Only God really knows”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

The Wind
Song lyrics, Teaser and the Firecat (1971)

God , Thinking

“God grant that the reader, emboldened and having become at present as fierce as what he is reading, find, without loss of bearings, his way, his wild and treacherous passage through the desolate swamps of these sombre, poison-soaked pages; for, unless he should bring to his reading a rigorous logic and a sustained mental effort at least as strong as his distrust, the lethal fumes of this book shall dissolve his soul as water does sugar.”

Comte de Lautréamont book Les Chants de Maldoror

Les Chants de Maldoror, Canto 1 (1868)

God , Books , Way , Effort

“There is no evil in the atom, only in men's souls.”

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

Speech in Hartford, Connecticut (18 September 1952)

Men , Evil

“[I]f all people were to come by equal concepts and inclinations, without any difference whatsoever, all the souls of all the people would be regarded as one soul. Its value would be like the light of the sun: the light clothes in all the inhabitants of the world, yet we do not discern that there are separate forms in the sunlight. Similarly, one conceptual soul would robe many bodies, since places do not separate at all in spiritual matters if there are no separate forms in their qualities.”

Yehuda Ashlag (1886–1954) Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and Kabbalist

Selected Articles

People , World , Light , Sun

“Sun of my soul, Thou Saviour dear,
It is not night if Thou be near;
Oh, may no earth-born cloud arise
To hide Thee from Thy servant's eyes.”

John Keble (1792–1866) English churchman and poet, a leader of the Oxford Movement

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 90.

Sun , Night

“This mortal life is like a meadow where the serpent lies among the flowers and grass, and if anything we see there pleases our eyes, the result is to enlime our souls more deeply.”

Francesco Petrarca Il Canzoniere

Questa vita terrena è quasi un prato,
che 'l serpente tra' fiori et l'erba giace;
et s'alcuna sua vista agli occhi piace,
è per lassar piú l'animo invescato.
Canzone 99, st. 2
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Life

Life , Flowers , Grass

“To turn your face from clear proofs of deceit,
To drink poison as if it were a soothing liquor,
To disregard gain and delight in being injured.
To believe that heaven can lie contained in hell;
To devote your life and soul to being disillusioned;
This is love; whoever has tasted it, knows.”

Lope De Vega Desmayarse

Huir el rostro al claro desengaño,
beber veneno por licor süave,
olvidar el provecho, amar el daño;
creer que un cielo en un infierno cabe,
dar la vida y el alma a un desengaño;
esto es amor. Quien lo probó lo sabe.
Sonnet, "Desmayarse, atreverse, estar furioso", line 9, from Rimas (1602); cited from José Manuel Blecua (ed.) Lírica (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, [1981] 1999) p. 136. Translation from Eugenio Florit (ed.) Introduction to Spanish Poetry (New York: Dover, [1964] 1991) p. 65.

Love , Life , Lie , Hell