280 Soul Quotes

I do not want to frighten you by telling you about the temptations life will bring. Anyone who is healthy in spirit will overcome them. But there is something I want you to realize. It does not matter so much what you do. What matters is whether your soul is harmed by what you do. If your soul is harmed, something irreparable happens, the extent of which you won't realize until it will be too late.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

Crows pick out the eyes of the dead, when the dead have no longer need of them; but flatterers mar the soul of the living, and her eyes they blind.

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul When hot for certainties in this our life! - In tragic hints here see what evermore Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force, Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse, To throw that faint thin fine upon the shore!

Of the eternal incorporeal substance nothing is changed, is formed or deformed, but there always remains only that thing which cannot be a subject of dissolution, since it is not possible that it be a subject of composition, and therefore, either of itself or by accident, it cannot be said to die.

The wise soul feareth not death; rather she sometimes striveth for death, she goeth beyond to meet her. Yet eternity maintaineth her substance throughout time, immensity throughout space, universal form throughout motion.

The soul of man is larger than the sky, Deeper than ocean, or the abysmal dark Of the unfathomed center.

As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge.

A man sooner or later discovers that he is the master-gardener of his soul, the director of his life.

I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.

The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.

Great truths are portions of the soul of man; Great souls are portions of eternity.

No seed shall perish which the soul hath sown.

Prayer opens the heart to God, and it is the means by which the soul, though empty, is filled by God.

Only love makes fruitful the soul. The sense of form that both had in such high degree prevented much demonstration; but to be with him, do things for him, to admire, and credit him with perfection; and, since she could not exactly wear the same clothes or speak in the same clipped, quiet, decisive voice, to dislike the clothes and voices of other men - all this was precious to her beyond everything.

Untwisting all the chains that tie The hidden soul of harmony.

And looks commercing with the skies, Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.

Imagination is the eye of the soul.

Taste is the literary conscience of the soul.

What am I singing? A song of seeds The food of love. Eat the music.

My Soul gave me good counsel, teaching me to love what the people abhor and to show good will toward the one they hate. It showed me that Love is a property not of the lover but of the beloved. Before my Soul taught me, Love was for me a delicate thread stretched between two adjacent pegs, but now it has been transformed into a halo; its first is its last, and its last is its first. It encompasses every being, slowly expanding to embrace all that ever will be.

The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.

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

Hinduism is a living organism. One and indivisible at the root, it has grown into a vast tree with innumerable branches. Knowledge is limitless and so also the application of truth. Everyday we add to our knowledge of the power of Atman (soul) and we shall keep on doing so.

Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.

O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain!

If we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls.

I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.

Three kinds of souls, three prayers: 1) I am a bow in your hands, Lord. Draw me, lest I rot. 2) Do not overdraw me, Lord. I shall break. 3) Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break.

Every word is an adamantine shell which encloses a great explosive force. To discover its meaning you must let it burst inside you like a bomb and in this way liberate the soul which it imprisons.

Her soul's light shines through, But her soul cannot be seen. It is something elusive, whimsical, tender, wanton, infantile, wise And noble.

We raise our hats to the strange phenomena. Soul-birds of a feather flock together.

I feel so sorry for you, Believing because they control. And of all the guardian angels They chose me to save your soul! Oh, I'm just trying to explain, I'm a disbelieving angel.

Say not, 'I have found the path of the soul.' Say rather, 'I have found the soul walking upon my path.' For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed. The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

My Soul gave me good counsel, teaching me to touch what has never taken corporeal form or crystallized. It made me understand that touching something is half the task of comprehending it, and that what we grasp therein is part of what we desire from it.

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

Oh, God! it is a fearful thing To see the human soul take wing In any shape, in any mood.

Such is the aspect of this shore; 'T is Greece, but living Greece no more! So coldly sweet, so deadly fair, We start, for soul is wanting there.

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

Nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum, quandoquidem natura animi mortalis habetur.

Mercury has cast aside The signs of intellectual pride, Freely offers thee the soul: Art thou noble to receive? Canst thou give or take the whole, Nobly promise and believe? Then thou wholly human art, A spotless, radiant, ruby heart, And the golden chain of love Has bound thee to the realm above.

The day wears heavily, - why, then, ignore it; Peace is the soul's desire, - such thoughts restore it; The truth thou art, - it needs not implore it.

Every man has his own circle composed of trees, animals, men, ideas, and he is in duty bound to save this circle. He, and no one else. If he does not save it, he cannot be saved. These are the labors each man is given and is in duty bound to complete before he dies. He may not otherwise be saved. For his own soul is scattered and enslaved in these things about him, in trees, in animals, in men, in ideas, and it is his own soul he saves by completing these labors.

Her green eyes fluttered swiftly twice or thrice, then glazed, her mouth gaped open, bleating, then her jaws hung loose and retched up all her soul in lumps of clotting blood.

I've fought with men and gods, I've weighed them well and found the sea more firm than earth, the air more firm than sea, and man's impalpable soul still yet more firm than air!

How difficult, how extremely difficult for the soul to sever itself from its body the world: from mountains, seas, cities, people. The soul is an octopus and these are its tentacles. ... No force anywhere on earth is as imperialistic as the human soul. It occupies and is occupied in turn, but it always considers its empire too narrow. Suffocating, it desires to conquer the world in order to breathe freely.

Is it possible she had lost her soul inside his?

The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

The eyes which are the windows of the soul.

The revilement of the infinite in the finite, which is the motive of all creation, is not seen in its perfection in the starry heavens, in the beauty of the flowers. It is in the soul of man.

In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the earth and heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking forever the soul of God?

Why should we make account of time, or of magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows how to play with them as a young child plays with graybeards and in churches.

The soul has no assignments, neither cooks Nor referees: it wastes its time. It wastes its time. Here in this enclave there are centuries For you to waste: the short and narrow stream Of life meanders into a thousand valleys Of all that was, or might have been, or is to be. The books, just leafed through, whisper endlessly.

Man found that he was faced with the acceptance of 'spiritual' forces, that is to say such forces as cannot be comprehended by the senses, particularly not by sight, and yet having undoubted, even extremely strong, effects. If we may trust to language, it was the movement of the air that provided the image of spirituality, since the spirit borrows its name from the breath of wind (animus, spiritus, Hebrew: ruach = smoke). The idea of the soul was thus born as the spiritual principle in the individual ... Now the realm of spirits had opened for man, and he was ready to endow everything in nature with the soul he had discovered in himself.

In trying to understand her, we must not be distracted ... by considering how far, and at what points we agree or disagree. ... I cannot conceive of anybody's agreeing with all of her views, or of not disagreeing violently with some of them. But agreement and rejection are secondary: what matters is to make contact with a great soul.

There is surely a piece of Divinity within us, something that was before the Elements, and owes no homage unto the Sun.

My head was like an ardent coal, My heart as solid ice; My wretched, wretched soul, I knew, Was at the Devil's price: A dozen times I groaned: the dead Had never groaned but twice!

And it stoned me to my soul Stoned me just like Jelly Roll And it stoned me And it stoned me to my soul Stoned me just like goin home And it stoned me.

The soul, he said, is composed Of the external world.

Painting is an art, and the art in its whole is not a vain objets creation which get lost in the void, but a power which has a goal and must serve to the evolution and to the refinement of the human soul, to the moving of the Triangle. It is the language which speaks to the soul, in its proper form, of things which are the daily bread of the soul and which it can receive only under this form.

Is beautiful what proceeds from an inner necessity of the soul. Is beautiful what is inwardly beautiful.

Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with the strings. (Comparing Painting and Music)

My specter around me night and day Like a wild beast guards my way, My emanation far within Weeps incessantly for my sin.

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

I was an old man by the time I took that walk to the Public Library in San Francisco, because the years between birth and twenty are the years in which the soul travels farthest and swiftest.

Break free, my soul, good manners are thy tomb!

The Soul selects her own Society - Then - shuts the Door - To her divine Majority - Present no more -

Tony the Beat Poet says the words alone, lonely and lonliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language. I agree with Tony. Those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul

She knew he was telling his soul what it needed to hear so that he could gather his courage to go and go what he must

and nothing quite so least as truth -i say though hate were why men breathe- because my father lived his soul love is the whole and more than all

I believe in the sacredness of the human body, this transient dwelling place of a living soul,

In law we draw a line between the killing of human animals and non-human ones, setting the latter apart as brutes. This was founded on a general belief that humans have immortal souls and brutes none. Nowadays more and more people are refusing to make this distinction. They may believe in The Life Everlasting and The Life to Come; but they make no distinction between Man and Brute, because some of them believe that brutes have souls, whilst others refuse to believe that the physical materializations and personifications of The Life Everlasting are themselves everlasting. In either case the mystic distinction between Man and Brute vanishes; and the murderer pleading that though a rabbit should be killed for being mischievous he himself should be spared because he has an immortal soul and a rabbit has none is as hopelessly out of date as a gentleman duellist pleading his clergy. When the necessity for killing a dangerous human being arises, as it still does daily, the only distinction we make between a man and a snared rabbit is that we very quaintly provide the man with a minister of religion to explain to him that we are not killing him at all, but only expediting his transfer to an eternity of bliss.

There thou wilt show me That which my soul desired; And there Thou wilt give at once, O Thou, my life! That which Thou gavest me the other day. ~ 38

I have said that God is pleased with nothing but love; but before I explain this, it will be as well to set forth the grounds on which the assertion rests. All our works, and all our labours, how grand soever they may be, are nothing in the sight of God, for we can give Him nothing, neither can we by them fulfil His desire, which is the growth of our soul. As to Himself He desires nothing of this, for He has need of nothing, and so, if He is pleased with anything it is with the growth of the soul; and as there is no way in which the soul can grow but in becoming in a manner equal to Him, for this reason only is He pleased with our love. It is the property of love to place him who loves on an equality with the object of his love. Hence the soul, because of its perfect love, is called the bride of the Son of God, which signifies equality with Him. In this equality and friendship all things are common, as the Bridegroom Himself said to His disciples: I have called you friends, because all things, whatsoever I have heard of my Father, I have made known to you.

Most opportunely friends, has the time now come for me to leave life, which I rejoice to return to Nature, at her demand, like an honorable debtor, not (as some might think) bowed down with sorrow, but having learned much from the general conviction of philosophers how much happier the soul is than the body, and bearing in mind that whenever a better condition is severed from a worse, one should rejoice, rather than grieve...Considering, then that the aim of a just ruler is the welfare and security of its subjects, I was always, as you know, more inclined to peaceful measures, excluding from my conduct all license, the corrupter of deeds and of character:And therefore I thank the eternal power that I meet my end, not from secret plots, nor from the pain of a tedious illness, nor by the fate of a criminal, but that in the mid-career of glorious renown I have been founds worthy of so noble a departure from this world...

It would strip the structure of my soul forever. I had never believed I had a soul until then, when it laid bear a hurt more deep than any part of me could bear

Indeed, the realisation of the paramatman, the supreme soul, within our antaratman, our inner individual soul, is in a state of absolute completion. We cannot think of it as non- existent and depending on our limited powers for its gradual construction. If our relation with the divine were all a thing of our own making, how should we rely on it as true, and how should it lend us support? Yes, we must know that within us we have that where space and time cease to rule and where the links of evolution are merged in unity. In that everlasting abode of the ataman, the soul, the revelation of the paramatman, the supreme soul, is already complete. Therefore the Upanishads say: He who knows Brahman, the true, the all-conscious, and the infinite as hidden in the depths of the soul, which is the supreme sky (the inner sky of consciousness), enjoys all objects of desire in union with the all-knowing Brahman.

All that you see was and is for your sake. The numerous books, uncanny markings, and beautiful thoughts are the ghosts of souls who preceded you. The speech they weave is a link between you and your human siblings. The consequences that cause sorrow and rapture are the seeds that the past has sown in the field of the soul, and by which the future shall profit.

In calm retrospect we can appreciate better the disastrous effects of the poison of falsehood, whether officially, semi-officially, or privately manufactured. It has been rightly said that the injection of the poison of hatred into men's minds by means of falsehood is a greater evil in war-time than the actual loss of life. The defilement of the human soul is worse than the destruction of the human body. A fuller realization of this is essential.

The soul of man is like the rolling world, One half in day, the other dipt in night; The one has music and the flying cloud, The other, silence and the wakeful stars.

He gave them speech, and they became souls.

The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.

There is no real teacher who in practise does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.

In'ards, n. pl. The stomach, heart, soul, and other bowels.

Le peche, c'est ce qui obscurcit l'ame.

My soul is like this cloudy, flaming opal ring.

O my child, who wronged you first, and began First the dance of death that you dance so well? Soul for soul: and I think the soul of a man Shall answer for yours in hell.

A consistent soul believes in destiny, a capricious one in chance.

Not till then did his controllers allow him to suspect that death itself might not after all cure the illusion of being a soul--nay, might prove the entry into a world where that illusion raged infinite and unchecked. Escape for the soul, if not for the body, was offered him. He became able to know (and simultaneously refused the knowledge) that he had been wrong from the beginning, that souls and personal responsibility existed. He half saw: he wholly hated. The physical torture of the burning was not fiercer than his hatred of that.

You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.