Quotes about spirit
page 23

“There is not a man or woman, who violates the covenants made with their God, that will not be required to pay the debt. The blood of Christ will never wipe that out, your own blood must atone for it; and the judgments of the Almighty will come, sooner or later, and every man and woman will have to atone for breaking their covenants. To what degree? Will they have to go to hell? They are in hell enough now. I do not wish them in a greater hell, when their consciences condemn them all the time. Let compassion reign in our bosoms. Try to comprehend how weak we are, how we are organized, how the spirit and the flesh are continually at war.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses 3:247 (March 16, 1856)
1850s

God, War, Hell, Time

“Gsell: What astonishes me, is that your way is so different from that of other sculptors. They prose the model. Instead of that, you wait till a model has instinctively or accidentally taken an Interesting pose, and thon you reproduce It. Instead of your giving orders to the model, the model gives orders to you.
Rodin: I am not at the model's orders; I am at Nature's. Doubtless my confreres have their reasons for proceeding as they do. But when one constrains Nature in that way and treats human beings as mannikins, one runs a risk of getting nothing but dead, artificial results. A hunter of truth and a trapper of life. I am careful not to follow their example. I seize upon the movements I observe, but I don't dictate them. when a subject requires a predetermined pose, I merely Indicate It. For I want only what reality will afford without being forced. In everything I obey Nature. I never assume to command her. My sole ambition Is a servile fidelity.
Gsell : And yet, you take liberties with nature. You make changes.
Rodin : Not at all. I should be false to myself if I did.
Gsell : But you finished work is never like the plaster sketch
Rodin : That is so, but the sketch is far less true than the finished work. It would Impossible for a model to keep a living attitude during all the time it takes to shape the clay. Still, I retain a general idea of the pose and require the model to conform to it. But this is not all. The sketch reproduces only the exterior. I must next reproduce the spirit, which is every whit as essential a part of Nature. I see the whole truth — not merely the fraction of it that lies upon the surface. I accentuate tho lines that best express the spiritual state I am Interpreting.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Rodin on realism, 1910

Life, Truth, Way, Idea

“And for Incoherent Speech, it was amongst the Gentiles taken for one sort of Prophecy, because the Prophets of their Oracles, intoxicated with a spirit, or vapor from the cave of the Pythian Oracle at Delphi, were for a time really mad, and spake like mad-men; of whoose loose words a sense might be made to fit any event, in such sort, as all bodies are said to be made of Materia prima.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The Third Part, Chapter 36, p. 226 (See also: Glossolalia)
Leviathan (1651)

Men, Sense, Time, Madness

“Ascetic rigor? This doesn’t mean something like ‘renounce’ or even a ‘lack’ of something. No, it means, in philosophical manner (and especially in the historic Greek sense of ‘Askesis’), a special kind of internal yearning, a special power wherein, despite all depressions, defeats, and failures you develop a new power to ‘keep’ to something, to create something. It’s something like an obsession. Bach, Mozart, Schubert, they all (and their oeuvre) are filled from this phenomenon, and it’s this spirit which keeps this music so vivid and alive – and fashioned for all times and generations.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Music, Fashion, Failure, Sense

“It is all very well for intellectuals in their air-conditioned offices to bemoan the unbelievable impact of either mean-spirited or silly rumours in the genesis of communal riots among the common folk. But in this instance, in their own reports on and analysis of communal violence, factual data were just as shamelessly replaced with invention, rumours and conspiracy theories. In this respect, religious extremists such as the Shahi Imam have behaved themselves better than the secularist campaigners who pose as the guardians of modernity and the scientific temper. Arundhati Roy risked the international fame she so clearly cherishes by going public with blatant lies about atrocities against named Gujarati Muslim women who turned out to be either non-existent or abroad at the time of the riots. Perhaps a fiction writer can afford this, but the news media with their deontology of accuracy and objectivity made themselves guilty of similar howlers. Internationally influential media like the Washington Post copied from an Islamist website rumours about Hindu provocations behind the Godhra carnage, falsely claiming a Gujarati journalist as source, and never publishing a correction when the journalist in question denied ever having put out such a story. With such media, who needs rumors?”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Gujarat after Godhra: Real violence, selective outrage (2003)

Women, Communication, Question, Time

“You must remember what the concert of Europe is. The concert, or, as I prefer to call it, the inchoate federation of Europe, is a body which acts only when it is unanimous…remember this—that this federation of Europe is the embryo of the only possible structure of Europe which can save civilization from the desolating effects of a disastrous war. (Cheers.) You notice that on all sides the instruments of destruction, the piling up of arms, are becoming larger and larger. The powers of concentration are becoming greater, the instruments of death more active and more numerous, and are improved with every year; and each nation is bound, for its own safety's sake, to take part in this competition. These are the things which are done, so to speak, on the side of war. The one hope that we have to prevent this competition from ending in a terrible effort of mutual destruction which will be fatal to Christian civilization—the one hope we have is that the Powers may gradually be brought together, to act together in a friendly spirit on all questions of difference which may arise, until at last they shall be welded in some international constitution which shall give to the world, as a result of their great strength, a long spell of unfettered and prosperous trade and continued peace.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Speech at the Guildhall (9 November 1897), quoted in The Times (10 November 1897), p. 6
1890s

Death, War, World, Peace

“Just as one cannot study the Holocaust without becoming half Jewish in spirit, one cannot study the Famine and not become at least half Ukrainian.”

James Mace (1952–2004) American historian of the Ukraine

"Legacy of the Famine: Ukraine as a postgenocidal society" in The Day (February 18, 2003) http://www.day.kiev.ua/en/article/close/legacy-famine-ukraine-postgenocidal-society

Study

“Calm was the day, and through the trembling air
Sweet-breathing Zephyrus did softly play—
A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay
Hot Titan's beams, which then did glister fair”

Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) English poet

Source: Prothalamion (1596), Line 1

“When in the inmost Above all knowledge and science, we find within us a limitless ignorance when, passing beyond every name given to God or creatures, we expire and pass to an eternal Unnamable where we are lost Being the Soul follows the Divine drawing and gives itself up freely to the Spirit of God, it tastes infinite happiness impossible to comprehend, in which the whole being dissolves, caught and embraced between immense Love and unending Happiness, under the regard of Love Himself”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

Source: The Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual Love, p. 104

Love, God, Happiness, Soul

“In the face of a world where economic hardships often ground the best of the human spirit into the worst, love provided a pathway into hidden chambers of the spirit where nobility and compassion might be salvaged, resurrected, and made stronger.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(Love, Art, and Culture, p. 24).
Book Sources, The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois (2003)

Love, World

“When illusions are over, when the distractions of sense, the vagaries of fancy, and the tumults of passion have dissolved even before the body is cold, which once they so thronged and agitated, the soul merges into intellect, intellect into conscience, conscience into the unbroken, awful solitude of its own personal accountability; and though the inhabitants of the universe were within the spirit's ken, this personal accountability is as strictly alone and unshared, as if no being were throughout immensity but the spirit and its God.”

Henry Giles (1809–1882) Irish minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 2.

God, Soul, Sense, Solitude

“Religions are like lofty peaks rising high above the surrounding plains of our physical being, merging, as it were, into the distant domain of heaven itself, beckoning the human spirit with grandeur.”

Varadaraja V. Raman (1932) American physicist

page 171
Truth and Tension in Science and Religion

Religion, Distant

“In tribute to The Matrix trilogy, artificial superintelligence is the disruptive red pill that will help us to transcend our human limitations in mind, body, and spirit.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Help

“Perhaps heaven may not be so far away as we fancy; and if our eyes were not holden, we should see angels ascending and descending, and blessed spirits thronging all about us.”

Arthur Kenney (1776–1855) Irish dean

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 304.

Angels

“O Saviour pour upon me thy Spirit of meekness & love:
Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life!
Guide thou my hand which trembles exceedingly upon the rock of ages”

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

Source: 1800s, Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion (c. 1803–1820), Ch. 1, plate 5, lines 21-23 The Words of Blake

Love, Life, Age

“Consciously, distinctly, resolutely, habitually, we need to give ourselves, our business, our interests, our families, our affections, into the Spirit's hands, to lead and fashion us as He will. When we work with the current of that Divine will, all is vital, efficient, fruitful.”

Frederic Dan Huntington (1819–1904) American bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 322.

Family, Fashion, Business

“It is manifest… that every soul and spirit hath a certain continuity with the spirit of the universe, so that it must be understood to exist and to be included not only there where it liveth and feeleth, but it is also by its essence and substance diffused throughout immensity…”

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) Italian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer

Cause, Principle, and Unity (1584)
Context: It is manifest... that every soul and spirit hath a certain continuity with the spirit of the universe, so that it must be understood to exist and to be included not only there where it liveth and feeleth, but it is also by its essence and substance diffused throughout immensity... The power of each soul is itself somehow present afar in the universe... Naught is mixed, yet is there some presence.
Anything we take in the universe, because it has in itself that which is All in All, includes in its own way the entire soul of the world, which is entirely in any part of it.

Soul, Universe

“We bow our heads in respect for those Soviet women who displayed exceptional courage in the severe time of war. Never before but during the days of the war the grandeur of spirit and the invincible will of our Soviet women, their selfless dedication, loyalty and affection to their Homeland, their boundless persistence in work and their heroism on the front manifested themselves with such strength.”

Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

As quoted in V karǐni zdiǐsnenoǐ mriǐ (1979) by IE IU Kastelli, p. 54

Women, War, Courage, Time

“The Chartres apse is as entertaining as all the other Gothic apses together, because it overrides the architect. You may, if you really have no imagination whatever, reject the idea that the Virgin herself made the plan; the feebleness of our fancy is now congenital, organic, beyond stimulant or strychnine, and we shrink like sensitive plants from the touch of a vision or spirit; but at least one can still sometimes feel a woman's taste, and in the apse of Chartres one feels nothing else.”

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

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Feeling, Imagination, Idea

“I desired as many as could to join together in fasting and prayer, that God would restore the spirit of love and of a sound mind to the poor deluded rebels in America.”

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Journal entry (1 August 1777), published in The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley (1827), p. 104
General sources

Love, God

“The very hirelings of the press, whose trade it is to buoy up the spirits of the people … have uttered falsehoods so long, they have played off so many tricks, that their budget seems, at last, to be quite empty.”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

“The Last Ten Years,” Political Register (4 January 1812).

People

“A few friends that also drew manga gathered at the pub regardless of the fact did we drink any alcohol, we would talk excitedly about manga. We will get so preoccupied with the topic, that we always miss the last train. Although we all have the feeling, “We’re so old already, why are we still mucking around like this?” But whenever we hear something like “I want to draw this!!”, the passion from everybody, our spirits are refreshed with new enthusiasm. This time I even got Moritaishi Sensei to draw the omake for me. Wah!! (Happy)”

Hiromu Arakawa (1973) award winning Japanese manga artist

Interview with mobuta.com (2004)

Happiness, Alcohol, Feeling, Drink

“But there was sufficient spirit of toleration and candor amongst the Italian ecclesiastics to allow the subject to be canvassed with much freedom They entered warmly themselves into the controversy often favoring different sides of the question and however much we may deplore the loss of time and labor devoted to the defense of untenable positions it must be conceded that they displayed far less polemic bitterness than certain writers who followed them beyond the Alps two centuries and a half later”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.3, p. 28
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Question, Freedom, Loss, Time

“I beg the right hon. Gentleman to beware of what he is doing. After all, we stand for something in this country. Our traditions count, for our own people, for Europe and for the world. Europe is menaced and Germany is afflicted by this narrow, exclusive, aggressive spirit, by which it is a crime to be in favour of peace and a crime to be a Jew. That is not a Germany to which we can afford to make concessions. That is not a Germany to which Europe can afford to give the equality of which the Prime Minister spoke.”

Austen Chamberlain (1863–1937) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1933/apr/13/adjournment-easter-1 in the House of Commons (13 April 1933) 1930s

People, World, Peace, Affliction

“If this superstitious fear of Spirits were taken away, and with it, Prognostiques from Dreams, false Prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which, crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted then they are for civill Obedience.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The First Part, Chapter 2, p. 8
Leviathan (1651)

Men, People, Fear, Dreams

“Quite possibly this aesthetic contemplation coincides with religious feeling or with the uplift of the religious spirit, since in a work of art it is the deepest inwardness that expresses itself. It is necessary however, to bear in mind the essential distinction that the contemplation or uplift in art – i. e., the experience of pure art – contains nothing dreamy or vague. It is exactly the contrary; true artistic experience is altogether real and conscious”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote from 'Grundbegriffe der neuen Gestaltenden Kunst', essay by Van Doesburg (published between 1921-23 in De Stijl) - last Chapter; as quoted in 'Fifty Years of Accomplishment, From Kandinsky to Jackson Pollock', by Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co. 1964, p. 86
1920 – 1926

Art, Feeling

“In the world today many people think that one can do without religion, and that they themselves have outgrown religion by reason of their evolution. Many have no religious belief, and therefore the world has never been in a more chaotic condition. No doubt one finds in tradition and in history that in the name of religion the selfishness and ignorance of mankind have been given free reign. This is the reason why man, revolting against this state of things, has forsaken religion and forgotten that spirit which, in the name of religion, has also played its part in the world.”

Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927) Indian Sufi

The Unity of Religious Ideals, Part I : Seeking for the Ideal.
The Spiritual Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan

People, World, Religion, History

“We are testing popular government's capacity for self-defense. We are resolved to liberate the soul of American life and prove ourselves an American people in fact, spirit, and purpose, and consecrate ourselves anew and everlastingly to human freedom and humanity's justice. Realizing our new relationship with the world, we want to make it fit to live in, and with might and fright and wrathfulness and barbarity crushed by the conscience of a real civilization. Ours is a small concern about the kind of government any people may choose, but we do mean to outlaw the nation which violates the sacred compacts of international relationships. The decision is to be final.”

Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) American politician, 29th president of the United States (in office from 1921 to 1923)

1910s, The Republic Must Awaken (1917)

Life, People, World, Justice

“The devil…the prowde spirit…cannot endure to be mocked.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

Thomas More, quoted at the beginning of The Screwtape Letters
Misattributed

“The town hall has the spirit of representative democracy, the rally of autocracy.”

William Kristol (1952) American writer

Twitter post https://twitter.com/BillKristol/status/1036709871025049600 (3 September 2018) 2010s, 2018

Democracy

“Wouldst have the princely spirit bowed?
Whisper only, speak not loud,
Mark and leave him in the crowd.

Thou need'st not spies nor jailers have;
The free will serve thee like the slave,
Coward shrinking from the brave.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Life Without and Life Within (1859), The Captured Wild Horse

“To speak thus of the universal spirit is almost childishly anthropomorphic. For the life of such a spirit, if it exists at all, must be utterly different from human mentality, and utterly inconceivable to man. Nevertheless, since this childish symbolism did force itself upon me, I record it. In spite of its crudity, perhaps it does contain some genuine reflection of the truth, however distorted.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XV: The Maker and His Works; 2. Mature Creating (p. 177)

Life, Truth, Universe

“Winning depended to a large extent on the determination of the troops and the officers. The certainty that we were going to win kept up everyone's spirits, from privates to generals.”

Georgy Zhukov (1896–1974) Marshal of the Soviet Union

Quoted in "Memoirs" - Page 167 - by Andreĭ Andreevich Gromyko, Harold Shukman - 1990

Dependency

“There is little abstract art, today, and what there is is stammering and imperfect. It is an attempt to let the world speak for itself, instead of reporting the speech of mind excited by their picture of the world. The Greek, The Gothic, and the Renaissance artist set forth the world the way he saw it, felt it, and wished to have it; man wished above all to be nourished by art; he achieved his desire but sacrificed everything else to this one aim: to construct homunculus, to substitute knowledge for strength and skill for spirit. The ape aped his creator. He learned to put art itself to the ends of trade..”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

Source: 1915 - 1916, 100 Aphorisms', Franz Marc (1915), p. 445

World, Art, Way, Knowledge

“I could not deny that my spirit was amorally attracted to this ultimate temptation as my conscience was morally repelled by it.”

Norman Spinrad book The Void Captain's Tale

Source: The Void Captain's Tale (1983), Chapter 13 (p. 159)

“Popery is such a thing as cannot, but for want of a word to express it, be called a religion; nor is it to be mentioned with that civility which is otherwise decent to be used in speaking about the differences of human opinion about divine matters…There has now for divers years a design been carried on, to change the lawful government of England into an absolute tyranny, and to convert the established Protestant religion into downright Popery…If under his present Majesty we have as yet seen no more visible effects of the same spirit than the firing of London…it is not to be attributed to the good nature or better principles of that sect, but to the wisdom of his Holiness, who observes that we are not of late so dangerous Protestants as to deserve any special mark of his indignation, but that we may be made better use of to the wrecking of those that are of our religion, and that if he do not disturb us, there are those amongst ourselves that are leading us into a fair way of reconciliation with him.”

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) English metaphysical poet and politician

An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England [1677] (reprinted in State Tracts: Volume I (1692), pp. 69 ff.).

Wisdom, Religion, Law, Way

“The Spirit is a higher infinite of verities; life is a lower infinite of possibilities which seek to grow and find their own truth and fulfilment in the light of these verities. Our intellect, our will, our ethical and our aesthetic being are the reflectors and the mediators. The method of the West is to exaggerate life and to call down as much — or as little — as may be of the higher powers to stimulate and embellish life.
But the method of India is on the contrary to discover the spirit within and the higher hidden intensities of the superior powers and to dominate life in one way or another so as to make it responsive to and expressive of the spirit and in that way increase the power of life. Its tendency with the intellect, will, ethical, aesthetic and emotional being is to sound indeed their normal mental possibilities, but also to upraise them towards the greater light and power of their own highest intuitions.”

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

The Renaissance in India (1918)

Life, Truth, Way, Light

“Drink: the immortal waters quench the spirit's longing.
Art thou not now, bright one, all sorrow past, in elation,
Made young with joy, grown brother-hearted with the vast,
Whither thy spirit wending flits the dim stars past
Unto the Light of Lights in burning adoration.”

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

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Art, Star, Drink, Light

“There is a phenomenon in nature unknown, and therefore rejected by physiology and psychology in our age of unbelief. This phenomenon is a state of half-death. Virtually, the body is dead; and, in cases of persons in whom matter does not predominate over spirit and wickedness not so great as to destroy spirituality, if left alone, their astral soul will disengage itself by gradual efforts, and, when the last link is broken, it finds itself separated forever from its earthly body. Equal magnetic polarity will violently repulse the ethereal man from the decaying organic mass. The whole difficulty lies in that 1, the ultimate moment of separation between the two is believed to be that when the body is declared dead by science; and 2, a prevailing unbelief in the existence of either soul or spirit in man, by the same science.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume I, Chapter XII

Death, Age, Soul, Nature

“This is not to underestimate the historical obstacles to the development of democratic institutions and a democratic culture. Such problems nearly destroyed our country – and that should encourage a spirit of humility and a patience with others. Freedom is not merely a political menu option, or a foreign policy fad; it should be the defining commitment of our country, and the hope of the world. That appeal is proved not just by the content of people’s hopes, but a noteworthy hypocrisy: No democracy pretends to be a tyranny. Most tyrannies pretend they are democracies. Democracy remains the definition of political legitimacy. That has not changed, and that will not change.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2010s, 2017, Speech at "Spirit of Liberty: At Home, In the World" event (2017)

People, World, Hope, Democracy

“You know I've smoked a lot of grass
O' Lord, I've popped a lot of pills
But I never touched nothin'
That my spirit could kill.”

Hoyt Axton (1938–1999) American country singer

The Pusher (1968) · Steppenwolf version in Easy Rider (1969) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMqVrUSz62o · Axton version (1971) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0KcLVIldP4

Grass

“The first grand design of Christ Jesus is to destroy and consume His mortal enemy antichrist. This must be done by the breath of His mouth in His prophets and witnesses. Now, the nations of the world have impiously stopped this heavenly breath and stifled the Lord Jesus in His servants. Now, it shall please the civil state to remove the state bars set up to resist the holy spirit of God in His servants (whom yet finally to resist is not in all the powers of the world), I humbly conceive that the civil state has made a fair progress in promoting the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

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

The Hireling Ministry, None of Christ's (1652)

God, World, Christ

“64. The proof of apatheia is had when the spirit begins to see its own light, when it remains in a state of tranquility in the presence of the images it has during sleep and when it maintains its calm as it beholds the affairs of life.”

Evagrius Ponticus (345–399) Christian monk

The Praktikos

Life, Sleep, Light

“Although the '60s counterculture has been much maligned and discredited, it attempted to provide what we still desperately need: a spirited culture of refusal, a counter-life to the reigning corporate culture of death. We don't need to return to that counterculture, but we do need to take up its challenge again. If the work we do produces mostly bad, ugly, and destructive things, those things in turn will tend to re-create us in their image. We need to turn to good, useful, and beautiful work. We need to ask, as Thoreau and Ruskin did, What are the life-giving things? Such important questions are answered for us in the present by the corporate state, while we are left with the most trivial decisions: what programs to watch on TV and what model car to buy.”

Curtis White (1951) American academic

"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"

Life, Death, Beauty, Cars

“The most conspicuous characteristic of Hitler’s personality, which became through his influence the pervading spirit of the whole of National Socialist ‘law’ as well, was a complete lack of any sense of truth or any sense of right and wrong.”

Gustav Radbruch (1878–1949) German politician

"Statutory Lawlessness and Supra-Statutory Law" (1946)

Truth, Law, Sense, Personality

“Is thine a life of devotion, of meekness and humility, of supreme attachment to heavenly and divine things; of self-denial and of universal benevolence? If after candid examination you find reason to hope that you are one of God's dear children washed with His blood, sanctified by the Spirit, clothed with the righteousness of the Well Beloved — cherish that hope as the gift of heaven. Dismiss your fears; bind yourself to be the Lord's in an everlasting covenant; think less of yourself and more and more of the name, the cross, the glory of your Redeemer. Henceforth "let your light shine."”

Gardiner Spring (1785–1873) American clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 117.

Life, God, Children, Fear

“God needeth not the help of a material sword of steel to assist the sword of the Spirit in the affairs of conscience.”

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

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

God, Help

“We must not approach the observance and enforcement of this law in a vengeful spirit. Its purpose is not to punish. Its purpose is not to divide, but to end divisions — divisions which have all lasted too long. Its purpose is national, not regional.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Civil Rights Bill signing speech (1964)

Law

“A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal (1799).
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)

Fear, Feeling, Tree

“Objectification is above all exteriorization, the alienation of spirit from itself.”

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) Russian philosopher

Source: The Beginning and the End (1947), p. 63

“I think when you’re shooting on such a tight budget and schedule, the insanity and the energy and the sense of spirit is what makes the experience unique. Ten percent more isn’t going to make enough of a difference and anything that would — double the budget, triple the time — then you’re making a different kind of film.”

Olly Blackburn Film director and screenwriter

[Filmmaker Magazine, ”Donkey Punch” co-writer-director, Olly Blackburn, Jason, Guerrasio, 15 January 2008, 23 February 2012, http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/news/2008/01/donkey-punch-co-writer-director-olly-blackburn/, Independent Feature Project]

Thinking, Sense, Time

“I cannot imagine any boy of spirit who would not be delighted to play a drunkard — even to vomiting — in front of his Sunday school. Indeed, the vomiting might be the chief attraction of the role.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Forgotten Dialogues (1961).

School, Imagination, Boy

“I don't know what they call mysticism, it is in truth perhaps the interest of the spirit; that the work expresses the spirit, and not the formal aspect. While in the United States a lot of art production runs along the line of formalist art; what one could call the post-modernism, a kind of formalist intention like Don Judd, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and these.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Source: 1970's, Interview with Louwrien Wijers, 1979, p. 243; Also cited in: Louwrien Wijers (1996). Writing as Sculpture: 1978 - 1987. p. 38

Truth, Art

“Discontent goaded the spirit into fresh creation.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 161)

“Such as diligently search the Scripture shall find that true blessedness, happiness, and salvation is attributed to several signs: sometimes to the fear of God, sometimes to faith, sometimes to repentance, sometimes to love, sometimes to meekness, sometimes to humility, sometimes to patience, sometimes to poverty of spirit, sometimes to holy mourning, sometimes to hungering and thirsting after righteousness; so that if a godly man can find any one of those in himself, he may safely and groundedly conclude of his salvation and justification, though he cannot see all those signs in him.”

Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) English Puritan

A Cabinet of Jewels

Love, Hunger, God, Happiness

“The chroniclers of the early Turkish rulers of India take pride in affirming that Qutbuddin Aibak was a killer of lakhs of infidels. Leave aside enthusiastic killers like Alauddin Khalji and Muhammad bin Tughlaq, even the "kind-hearted" Firoz Tughlaq killed more than a lakh Bengalis when he invaded their country. Timur Lang or Tamerlane says he killed a hundred thousand infidel prisoners of war in Delhi. He built victory pillars from severed heads at many places. These were acts of sultans. The nobles were not lagging behind. One Shaikh Daud Kambu is said to have killed 20,000 with his dagger. The Bahmani sultans of Gulbarga and Bidar considered it meritorious to kill a hundred thousand Hindu men, women and children every year….. The rite of Jauhar killed the women, the tradition of not deserting the field of battle made Rajputs and others die fighting in large numbers. When Malwa was attacked (1305), its Raja is said to have possessed 40,000 horse and 100,000 foot.43 After the battle, "so far as human eye could see, the ground was muddy with blood"…. Under Muhammad Tughlaq, wars and rebellions knew no end. His expeditions to Bengal, Sindh and the Deccan, as well as ruthless suppression of twenty-two rebellions, meant only depopulation in the thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth century. For one thing, in spite of constant efforts no addition of territory could be made by Turkish rulers from 1210 to 1296; for another the Turkish rulers were more ruthless in war and less merciful in peace. Hence the extirpating massacres of Balban, and the repeated attacks by others on regions already devastated but not completely subdued….. Mulla Daud of Bidar vividly describes the war between Muhammad Shah Bahmani and the Vijayanagar King in 1366 in which "Farishtah computes the victims on the Hindu side alone as numbering no less than half a million." Muhammad also devastated the Karnatak region with vengeance….. Under Akbar and Jahangir "five or six hundred thousand human beings were killed," says emperor Jahangir. The figures given by these killers and their chroniclers may be a few thousand less or a few thousand more, but what bred this ambition of cutting down human beings without compunction was the Muslim theory, practice and spirit of Jihad, as spelled out in Muslim scriptures and rules of administration.”

K. S. Lal book Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India

Ch 3
Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India (1999)

Women, Men, War, Children

“Probably the respect or stigma attaching to particular classes of actions arose from the fact that these classes of actions were—or were thought to be—beneficial or injurious to the society of the time; but it is also clear that this good or bad name once created clings to the action long after the action has ceased in the course of social progress to be beneficial in the one case, or injurious in the other; and indeed long after the thinkers of the race have discovered the discrepancy. And so in a short time arises a great confusion in the popular mind between what is really good or evil for the race and what is reputed to be so—the bolder spirits who try to separate the two having to atone for this confusion by their own martyrdom.”

Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) British poet and academic

Defence of Criminals: A Criticism of Morality (1889)

Evil, Time

“The true love wherewith God loves other spirits is not the outpouring upon them of graces which are the unearned gift of his miraculous power; it is the love, on the contrary, which holds the individuality, the personal initiative, of its object sacred. As the true father desires that the son who, after him, is to be the head of the family shall have a method and policy of his own, by which the honours of the line shall be increased by new contributions, so he who is the Father of Spirits will have his image brought forth in every one of his offspring by the thought and conviction of each soul itself.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Right Relation of Reason to Religion, p.257

Love, God, Family, Soul

“When negotiations are at an impasse, when States dig their heels in, it is time to ‘undig’ them in a spirit of compromise. We all need to unlearn the predator in us, unlearn discrimination, unlearn privilege.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Statement by Alfred de Zayas statement on International Day of Peace, 21 September 2012 - http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=12557&LangID=E. 2012

Time

“We've already said that it's the Holy Spirit who gives us the ultimate assurance of Christianity's truth. Therefore, the only role left for argument and evidence to play is a subsidiary role. I think Martin Luther correctly distinguished between what he called the magisterial and ministerial uses of reason. The magisterial use of reason occurs when reason stands over and above the gospel like a magistrate and judges it on the basis of argument and evidence. The ministerial use of reason occurs when reason submits to and serves the gospel… Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter, not vice versa.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

Source: Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (1994), p. 36.

Truth, Faith, Thinking

“And what have our unions done? What do they aim to do? To improve the standard of life, to uproot ignorance and foster education, to instill character, manhood and independent spirit among our people; to bring about a recognition of the interdependence of man upon his fellow man. We aim to establish a normal work-day, to take the children from the factory and workshop and give them the opportunity of the school and the play-ground. In a word, our unions strive to lighten toil, educate their members, make their homes more cheerful, and in every way contribute an earnest effort toward making life the better worth living.”

Samuel Gompers (1850–1924) American Labor Leader[AFL]

Gompers, Samuel. "Gompers Speaks for Labor." McClure's Magazine, February 1912, p. 376 http://books.google.com/books?id=3Su0lykF-OMC&dq=%22And%20what%20have%20our%20unions%20done%3F%20What%20do%20they%20aim%20to%20do%3F%22&pg=PA376#v=onepage&q=%22And%20what%20have%20our%20unions%20done?%20What%20do%20they%20aim%20to%20do?%22&f=false

Life, Children, People, Education

“In America today there are many “colored” people who are designated “black” or “African.” Whereas they are mixed with the West—with the so-called whites who represent the West—in blood and spirit. This is a fateful, hidden matter though we do not see it as such. It may be partly responsible for deadly, one-sided polarizations in cultures around the globe that see themselves similarly locked into racial investitures.”

Wilson Harris (1921–2018) Guyanese writer

Interview with Wilson Harris (2003)

Fate, People, Color

“In addition to the poll-tax and public degradation in dress and demeanour imposed on them, the non-Muslims were subjected to various hopes and fears. Rewards in the form of money and public employment were offered to apostates from Hinduism. The leaders of Hindu religion and society were systematically repressed, to deprive the sect of spiritual instruction, and their religious gatherings and processions were forbidden in order to prevent the growth of solidity and a sense of communal strength among them. No new temple was allowed to be built nor any old one to be repaired, so that the total disappearance of all places of Hindu worship was to be merely a question of time. But even this delay, this slow operation of Time, was intolerable to many of the more fiery spirits of Islam, who tried to hasten the abolition of ‘infidelity’ by anticipating the destructive hand of Time and forcibly pulling down temples.”

Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1958) Indian historian

Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Volume III, Calcutta, 1928, pp. 164-67. Quoted in S.R.Goel, The Calcutta Quran Petition (1999) ISBN 9788185990583

Money, Fear, Religion, Hope

“You may ask what then will become of the fundamental principles of equity and fair play which our constitutions enshrine; and whether I seriously believe that unsupported they will serve merely as counsels of moderation. I do not think that anyone can say what will be left of those principles; I do not know whether they will serve only as counsels; but this much I think I do know — that a society so riven that the spirit of moderation is gone, no court can save; that a society where that spirit flourishes, no court need save; that in a society which evades its responsibility by thrusting upon the courts the nurture of that spirit, that spirit in the end will perish.”

Learned Hand (1872–1961) American legal scholar, Court of Appeals judge

"The Contribution of an Independent Judiciary to Civilization" (1942).
Extra-judicial writings

Thinking

“We each pay a fabulous price
For our visions of paradise
But a spirit with a vision is a dream
With a mission
-- Mission (1987)”

Neil Peart (1952–2020) Canadian-American drummer , lyricist, and author

Rush Lyrics

Dreams

“That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,
Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit's motive,
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,
The secret life of belly and bone.”

Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966) American poet

"The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me" http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-heavy-bear-who-goes-with-me/ Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)

Life, Secret, Stupidity, Motivation

“John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa. That's the kind of spirit that I have, too.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

Fox News interview, quoted in * Wrong John Wayne: Mix-up is opening day headache for Bachmann
2011-06-27
First Read
NBC News
Carrie
Dann
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/27/6958622-wrong-john-wayne-mix-up-is-opening-day-headache-for-bachmann-
2011-06-27
Michele Bachmann on John Wayne Gacy
YouTube
2011-06-27
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsLfL9vMaUY
2011-06-27
2010s, 2012 Presidential campaign

“I felt within me a boundless wealth of this almost mystic love, and a belief that this earthly chrysalis would come forth in another world a butterfly, which, detached from all earthly conditions would soar from planet to planet, till it became united to the spirit of All-Life. For the first time the thought crossed my mind that Aniela and I may pass away as bodies, but our love will survive and even be our immortality. "Who knows," I thought, "whether this be not the only existing form of immortality?" — because I felt distinctly that there is something everlasting in my feeling, quite distinct from the ever changing phenomena of life.”

Henryk Sienkiewicz book Without Dogma

15 July
Without Dogma (1891)

Love, Life, World, Feeling

“In all the social relations which I had during the three years of my work in Norway, I never once experienced the least trace of aversion or mistrust against woman's capabilities. To be sure, the healthy, democratic spirit of the Norwegian people greatly contributed to this. Thus the fact is to be confirmed that my work as official Russian representative in Norway was never, and in no wise, made difficult for the reason that I belonged "to the weaker sex."”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

Sex

“Before commencing this work I had begun to realize how children follow the Spirit.”

Fritz von Uhde (1848–1911) German artist

In reference to his perceptions on the work Suffer Little Children to Come Unto Me. As quoted by Gustav Stickley (1911). The Craftsman http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/DLDecArts/DLDecArts-idx?type=article&did=DLDecArts.hdv20n06.i0027&id=DLDecArts.hdv20n06&isize=text, Volume 20. United Crafts, p. 631

Children

“We soon put the enemy to the rout, and I had the pleasure to see them run in worse disorder than they did at the battle of Monniouth. Our troops behaved with great spirit; and the brigade of militia, under the command of General Lovell, advanced with great resolution and in good order, and stood the fire of the enemy with great firmness. Lieutenant-Colonel Livingston, Colonel Jackson, and Colonel Henry B. Livingston, did themselves great honor in the transactions of the day; but it's not in my power to do justice to Colonel Laurens, who acted both the General and the partisan. His command of regular troops was small, but he did every thing possible to be done by their numbers. He had two most excellent officers with him, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry and Major Talbot.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (August 1778)

Pleasure, Justice

“Every great national literature is a fruit of much foreign sustenance and refreshment, however capable the national spirit may prove of mastering the foreign element.”

Sidney Lee (1859–1926) English biographer and critic

"The French Renaissance in England" (1910), Preface

Literature

“The breaking-up of the power of China (no very improbable event) would occasion a complete subversion of the commerce, not only of Asia, but a very sensible change in the other quarters of the world. The industry and the ingenuity of the Chinese would be checked and enfeebled, but they would not be annihilated. Her ports would no longer be barricaded; they would be attempted by all the adventures of all trading nations, who would search every channel, creek, and cranny of China for a market, and for some time be the cause of much rivalry and disorder. Nevertheless, as Great Britain, from the weight of her riches and the genius and spirits of her people, is become the first political, marine, and commercial Power on the globe, it is reasonable to think that she would prove the greatest gainer by such a revolution as I have alluded to, and rise superior over every competitor.”

George Macartney (1737–1806) British statesman, colonial administrator and diplomat

Our First Ambassador to China (Biography, 1908)

People, World, Search, Thinking

“Charismatic Lithuanian baritone Vytautas Juozapaitis was a spirited, energetic Don Giovanni who held the audience's rapt attention whenever he was on stage. He had an authoritative sound that could be romantically enticing in an attempt to seduce a lady, but could change instantly into a commanding tone when anyone attempted to thwart his will.”

Vytautas Juozapaitis (1963) Lithuanian opera singer

Maria Nokin, "Mozart's 'Don Giovanni'". Ensemble (November 26, 2006) http://www.mvdaily.com/articles/2006/11/don-giovanni3.htm

Change

“I saw a feeding about a lion for plants,
I saw leaves of luxuriant growth.
I saw a branch with equal blossoms.
Did I not see a prince? most liberal his customs,
I saw the ruler of Cathraeth beyond the plains
Be my oak the gleaming spirit of the Cymry.”

Taliesin (534–599) Welsh bard

Book of Taliesin (c. 1275?), The Spoils of Taliesin, a Song to Urien

“The landscape painter, perhaps, goes even further. It is not only in living beings that he sees the reflection of the universal soul; it is in the trees, the bushes, the valleys, the hills. What to other men is only wood and earth appears to the great landscapist like the face of a great being. Corot saw kindness abroad in the trunks of the trees, in the grass of the fields, in the mirroring water of the lakes. But there Millet read suffering and resignation.
Everywhere the great artist hears spirit answer to his spirit. Where, then, can you find a more religious man?
Does not the sculptor perform his act of adoration when he perceives the majestic character of the forms that he studies? — when, from the midst of fleeting lines, he knows how to extricate the eternal type of each being? — when he seems to discern in the very breast of the divinity the immutable models on which all living creatures are moulded? Study, for example, the masterpieces of the Egyptian sculptors, either human or animal figures, and tell me if the accentuation of the essential lines does not produce the effect of a sacred hymn. Every artist who has the gift of generalizing forms, that is to say, of accenting their logic without depriving them of their living reality, provokes the same religious emotion; for he communicates to us the thrill he himself felt before the immortal verities.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Art, 1912, Ch. Mystery in Art

Men, Soul, Communication, Reality

“Now I saw braves hang themselves with amulets, leave tidbits for spirits, and still take an arrow in the neck. I, worshiping nothing and bribing nothing with prayers, rode among an enemy unscathed, scything them like summer wheat.”

Tanith Lee book Vazkor, Son of Vazkor

Book One, Part I “The Krarl”, Chapter 4 (p. 31)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

Summer

“How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.”

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing

As quoted in The Book of Positive Quotations (2007) by John Cook, p. 479

Fear

“I have just had my first lesson in Chinese brush from my friend and artist Teng Kwei. The tree is no more solid in the earth, breaking into lesser solids in the earth, breaking into lesser solids bathed in chiaroscuro. There is pressure and release. Each movement, like tracks in the snow, is recorded and often loved for itself. The Great Dragon is breathing sky, thunder and shadow; wisdom and spirit vitalized. All is in motion now... One step backward into the past and the tree in front of my studio in Seattle is all rhythm, lifting, springing upward.”

Mark Tobey (1890–1976) American abstract expressionist painter

Source: 1950's, In: Reminiscence and Reverie, 1951, p. 66

Love, Wisdom, Spring, Tree

“The fundamental importance of the inner self frees us from the conception of evolution as a purely natural process. The Spirit is not something, which evolves before our eyes, flowing as if it were a river. This is a naturalistic conception of the Spirit, which ignores the inner self as that centre through which everything passes, in whose moral conscience all reality is idealised.
If reality evolved by itself there would be no place to speak of duty and conscience. But God does not consist in being, but in choosing. We cannot define God because we can experience him only in the present and in the act which comes from our inner self.”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Hymn

God, Nature, Reality

“And when the devil hath seen that they have set so little by him, after certain essays, made in such times as he thought most fitting, he hath given that temptation quite over. And this he doth not only because the proud spirit cannot endure to be mocked, but also lest, with much tempting the man to the sin to which he could not in conclusion bring him, he should much increase his merit.”

Thomas More (1478–1535) English Renaissance humanist

Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation (1553), Book Two, Section XVI

Time

“The life-giving Spirit is the very one who slays you; the first thing the life-giving Spirit says is that you must enter into death, that you must die to – it is this way in order that you many not take Christianity in vain. A life-giving Spirit – that is the invitation; who would not willingly take hold of it! But die first – that is the halt!”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

1850s, For Self-Examination (1851), It Is the Spirit Who Gives Life

Life, Death, Way

“[Robinson Crusoe] is the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the trusty slave who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

James Joyce, “Daniel Defoe,” translated from Italian manuscript and edited by Joseph Prescott, Buffalo Studies 1 (1964): 24-25

Intelligence

“What has been the state of things since 1853? It is useless to blink the fact that not merely within the circle of the public departments and of Cabinets, but throughout the country at large, and within the precincts of this House—the guardians of the purse of the people—the spirit of public economy has been relaxed; charges upon the public funds of every kind have been admitted from time to time upon slight examination; every man's petition and prayer for this or that expenditure has been conceded with a facility which I do not hesitate to say you have only to continue for some five or ten years longer in order to bring the finances of the country into a state of absolute confusion.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1859/jul/21/financial-policy-of-the-late-government in the House of Commons (21 July 1859) against Benjamin Disraeli's Budget. 1850s

People, Time, Housing, Country

“My young friends, you are soldiers in the battle of freedom-freedom from want, fear, ignorance, frustration and helplessness. By a dint of hard work for the country, rendered in a spirit of selfless service, may you march ahead with hope and courage.”

Bidhan Chandra Roy (1882–1962) Former Chief Minister of West Bengal, India

Fear, Hope, Courage, Freedom

“That dualism of the Church and the Chapel taken together has been one of the most potent influences in the life of our country. The one fostering, perhaps, more than the other, the respect for authority and tradition and the sense of historical continuity; the other laying its main emphasis on individual obedience to eternal law. They both have defects of their qualities, but they have both been, and are, and will be great social forces with great political consequences. Both at their best penetrate life with serious purpose, and are in constant war with that spirit of secularism which finds its paradise in idleness and frivolity, with which no country can ever prosper.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Cornwall (23 June 1927), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), p. 55.
1927

Life, War, Law, Sense

“Xenophanes was the first person who asserted… that the soul is a spirit.”

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

Xenophanes, 3.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 9: Uncategorized philosophers and Skeptics

Soul, Personality

“Literature, outside of the masters, has given us but one idea of the mistress, the subtle, calculating siren who delights to prey on the souls of men. The journalism and the moral pamphleteering of the time seem to foster it with almost partisan zeal. It would seem that a censorship of life had been established by divinity, and the care of its execution given into the hands of the utterly conservative. Yet there is that other form of liaison which has nothing to do with conscious calculation. In the vast majority of cases it is without design or guile. The average woman, controlled by her affections and deeply in love, is no more capable than a child of anything save sacrificial thought—the desire to give; and so long as this state endures, she can only do this. She may change—Hell hath no fury, etc.—but the sacrificial, yielding, solicitous attitude is more often the outstanding characteristic of the mistress; and it is this very attitude in contradistinction to the grasping legality of established matrimony that has caused so many wounds in the defenses of the latter. The temperament of man, either male or female, cannot help falling down before and worshiping this nonseeking, sacrificial note. It approaches vast distinction in life. It appears to be related to that last word in art, that largeness of spirit which is the first characteristic of the great picture, the great building, the great sculpture, the great decoration—namely, a giving, freely and without stint, of itself, of beauty.”

Theodore Dreiser book The Financier

Source: The Financier (1912), Ch. XXIII

Love, Life, Men, Beauty

“It is because the spirit is inestimable that the lifeless body is so little valued.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Blithedale Romance

The Blithedale Romance, Chapter 28

“I know that the conquest of English America is an impossibility. You cannot, I venture to say it, you CANNOT conquer America… As to conquest, therefore, my Lords, I repeat, it is impossible. You may swell every expense, and every effort, still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German Prince, that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign country; your efforts are for ever vain and impotent— doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your enemies— to overrun them with the sordid sons of rapine and plunder; devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms, never! never! never!… I call upon the honour of your Lordships to reverence the dignity of your ancestors, and to maintain your own. I call upon the spirit and humanity of my country to vindicate the national character. I invoke the genius of the constitution. From the tapestry that adorns these walls, the immortal ancestor of this noble Lord frowns with indignation at THE DISGRACE OF HIS COUNTRY! In vain he led your victorious fleets against the boasted Armada of Spain; in vain he defended and established the honour, the liberties, the religion, the Protestant religion of his country, against the arbitrary cruelties of Popery and the Inquisition.”

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708–1778) British politician

Speech in the House of Lords (18 November, 1777), responding to a speech by Henry Howard, 12th Earl of Suffolk, who spoke in favour of the war against the American colonists. Suffolk was a descendant of Howard of Effingham, who led the English navy against the Spanish Armada. Effingham had commissioned a series of tapestries on the defeat of the Armada, and sold them to King James I. Since 1650 they were hung in the House of Lords, where they remained until destroyed by fire in 1834.
William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (London: Aylott & Jones, 1848), pp. 150-6.

Religion, Effort, Victory, Country

“Both anti-Semitism and the Ku Klux Klan are an insult to democracy and a contradiction of it. But faith honest, sincere, hopeful, opens a door to moving forward in this new and very difficult world in which our children must live. It opens the door into that world in a spirit inspired by something more than the merely human, the gain-seeking and the temporary. It brings us, our children and our grandchildren, in touch with the eternal verities which are the only possible foundation for a civilization and a life that are worthy of human ambition and human endeavor.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

Liberty-Equality-Fraternity (1942)

Life, Children, World, Faith

“Through artists mankind becomes an individual, in that they unite the past and the future in the present. They are the higher organ of the soul, where the life spirits of entire external mankind meet and in which inner mankind first acts.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Durch die Künstler wird die Menschheit ein Individuum, indem sie Vor welt und Nachwelt in der Gegenwart verknüpfen. Sie sind das höhere Seelenorgan, wo die Lebensgeister der ganzen 15 äussern Menschheit zusammentreffen und in welchem die innere zunächst wirkt.
“Selected Ideas (1799-1800)”, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #64 [cf. Heidegger]

Life, Soul, Past, Future

“Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated And let my cry come unto Thee.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

Sister, Suffering, Cry, Sea

“I cannot believe that the gentry of England will be made mere drumheads to be sounded upon by a Prime Minister to give forth unmeaning and empty sounds, and to have no articulate voice of their own. No! You are the gentry of England who represent the counties. You are the aristocracy of England. Your fathers led our fathers: you may lead us if you will go the right way. But, although you have retained your influence with this country longer than any other aristocracy, it has not been by opposing popular opinion, or by setting yourselves against the spirit of the age. In other days, when the battle and the hunting-fields were the tests of manly vigour, why, your fathers were first and foremost there. The aristocracy of England were not like the noblesse of France, the mere minions of a court; nor were they like the hidalgoes of Madrid, who dwindled into pigmies. You have been Englishmen. You have not shown a want of courage and firmness when any call has been made upon you. This is a new era. It is the age of improvement, it is the age of social advancement, not the age for war or for feudal sports. You live in a mercantile age, when the whole wealth of the world is poured into your lap. You cannot have the advantages of commercial rents and feudal privileges; but you may be what you always have been, if you will identify yourselves with the spirit of the age. The English people look to the gentry and aristocracy of their country as their leaders. I, who am not one of you, have no hesitation in telling you, that there is a deep-rooted, an hereditary prejudice, if I may so call it, in your favour in this country. But you never got it, and you will not keep it, by obstructing the spirit of the age.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in the House of Commons http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1845/mar/13/effects-of-corn-laws-on-agriculturists (13 March 1845). 1840s

War, People, Age, World

“O, for a voice of power to arouse the human spirit from its death in life of animality, to quicken it with a fit consciousness of its own nature, to lift it to an adequate comprehension of the purposes for which the sublime thoughts of God, of duty, of disinterested love, of heaven are opened within!”

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

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 317

Love, Life, Death, God

“I purpose now, while the impression is more pure and clear within me, to mark down the main things I can recollect of my father. To myself, if I live to after-years, it may be instructive and interesting, as the past grows ever holier the farther we leave it. My mind is calm enough to do it deliberately, and to do it truly. The thought of that pale earnest face which even now lies stiffened into death in that bed at Scotsbrig, with the Infinite all of worlds looking down on it, will certainly impel me. It is good to know how a true spirit will vindicate itself with truth and freedom through what obstructions soever; how the acorn cast carelessly into the wilder-ness will make room for itself and grow to be an oak. This is one of the cases belonging to that class, "the lives of remarkable men," in which it has been said, "paper and ink should least of all be spared." I call a man remarkable who becomes a true workman in this vineyard of the Highest. Be his work that of palace-building and kingdom-founding, or only of delving and ditching, to me it is no matter, or next to none. All human work is transitory, small in itself, contemptible. Only the worker thereof, and the spirit that dwelt in him, is significant. I proceed without order, or almost any forethought, anxious only to save what I have left and mark it as it lies in me.”

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

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

Death, Men, Truth, World

“He cut himself off from the Spirit of God. Whether or not we get around to holding a court doesn't matter that much; he has cut himself off from the Spirit of the Lord.”

Henry D. Moyle (1889–1963) Member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles

Conversation with President w:Boyd K. Packer of the Quorum of the Twelve driving back from Arizona and talking about a man who destroyed the faith of young people from the vantage point of a teaching position, but who had not yet been formally excommunicated. Reported in The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than The Intellect, a talk given by Pres. Packer at the Fifth Annual Church Educational System Religious Educators' Symposium, 22 August, 1981, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. For an official transcript see Brigham Young University Studies, Summer 1981.
Quotes as an apostle

God

“It's hard to believe a spirit could die
Of such generous glow”

Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972) English poet

Birthday Poem for Thomas Hardy (1949)

“Let’s not give up on faith and the human spirit in accomplishing the impossible – world peace, universal rights, and human longevity to name a few.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

World, Peace, Faith, Universe

“[A]ll the non-Stalinist versions concur in the following: the generals did indeed plan a coup d'état… The main part of the coup was to be a palace revolt in the Kremlin, culminating in the assassination of Stalin. A decisive military operation outside the Kremlin, an assault on the headquarters of the G. P. U., was also prepared. Tukhachevsky was the moving spirit of the conspiracy… He was, indeed, the only man among all the military and civilian leaders of that time who showed in many respects a resemblance to the original Bonaparte and could have played the Russian First Consul. The chief political commissar of the army, Gamarnik, who later committed suicide, was initiated into the plot. General Yakir, the commander of Leningrad, was to secure the co-operation of his garrison. Generals Uberovich, commander of the western military district, Kork, commander of the Military Academy in Moscow, Primakow, Budienny's deputy in the command of the cavalry, and a few other generals were also in the plot.”

Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967) British historian

Isaac Deutscher in his Stalin: A Political Biography, second edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 360-361. Quote from Ludo Martens's Another view of Stalin, pp. 176.

Decision, Suicide, Time, Parting

Quotes about spirit page 23

Quotes about spirit
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