quotations about the soul
You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
attributed, Walking a Sacred Path: Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Practice
The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Discipline and Punish
Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney and then go on their way.
VINCENT VAN GOGH
letter, June 1880
If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Clockwork Angel
I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on.
ROBERT BROWNING
In a Balcony
And more than once in the course of time, the same theme reappears: among the mystics of the fifteenth century, it has become the motif of the soul as a skiff, abandoned on the infinite sea of desires, in the sterile field of cares and ignorance, among the mirages of knowledge, amid the unreason of the world -- a craft at the mercy of the sea's great madness, unless it throws out a solid anchor, faith, or raises its spiritual sails so that the breath of God may bring it to port.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
The soul that has conceived one wickedness can nurse no good thereafter.
SOPHOCLES
Philoctetes
Reincarnation is essential to enable the soul to evolve to its Divine right.
R. F. GOUDEY
Reincarnation: A Universal Truth
You are a little soul carrying about a corpse.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
There's no such thing as a soul. It's just something they made up to scare kids, like the boogeyman or Michael Jackson.
BART
The Simpsons
The soul of Man must quicken to creation.
T. S. ELIOT
The Rock
The soul is often hungrier than the body, and no shops can sell it food.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
How absurd it must seem for an immortal soul to be destined for Heaven or Hell, and yet be sitting in a kitchen, as a maid, or to see oneself objectified as a mechanic! how falsely the usual sunrise waked us, the clock dial, the city street the job! How wrongfully people find themselves in these systems--our time isn't there, our space isn't there, our space isn't even here, not even our name is there--the addressee for whom the alarm clock rings is identical to only a few, and the whole social story of waking, and certainly the day of the mechanic, is false.
ERNST BLOCH
Traces
Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Philosophy of Composition", The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 3
And unto them too, souls are born,
Those wondrous things, so slowly wrought,
That breathes a subtler thing in air,
And daily at the altar fare
Upon the living bread of thought.
CAROLINE SPENCER
"Humanity"
Trouble is, most times, when you go looking to sell your soul, nobody's buying.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul -- would you understand why that's much harder?
AYN RAND
The Fountainhead
The soul, then, lives by God when it lives well, for it cannot live well unless by God working in it what is good; and the body lives by the soul when the soul lives in the body, whether itself be living by God or no. For the wicked man's life in the body is a life not of the soul, but of the body.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
The soul is the connecting link between God and man, and between the spirit and the flesh, and has its earthly abode in the blood or life.
VAN BRUNT WYCKOFF
attributed, Day's Collacon
The human soul is God's treasury, out of which he coins unspeakable riches.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit