quotations about the soul
Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul, and shows to people these secrets which are common to all.
LEO TOLSTOY
Diary
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"A Psalm of Life"
Human beings frequently speak of their soul without, however, having the slightest comprehension of what the soul and its attributes really are. Only those who possess spiritual illumination, who have attained to the degree of mastership in psychic unfoldment can speak authoritatively on this subject. In order to give my readers a slight comprehension of the soul and its attributes, I quote from a book titled "The Light of Egypt," by T. H. Burgoyne (now out of print): "The soul is formless and intangible, and constitutes the attributes of the divine spirit: therefore, we can only conceive and know the soul by learning the powers or attributes of the spirit. To illustrate, take a ray of light. What do we know concerning it? Nothing, except by its action upon something else. This action we term the attributes of light. In themselves the attributes of light are formless, but they may easily be rendered visible, either by their colors when refracted by the prism, or by their effects when concentrated upon material objects. This may be termed the soul of the ray of light. The organism of man gives us another example. Man possesses five external senses, viz: seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting and smelling. In reality he has seven senses which can be used externally. All our knowledge concerning external phenomena must come at present through the mediumship of one or more of the five physical senses. The organs through which the function of the senses become manifest are visible, but the senses themselves are invisible and formless. We know them only as the attributes of the body; while the mind, which is perfectly and absolutely dependent upon the senses for information, well represents the spiritual Ego in its relation to the soul. The soul is formless and intangible, and can only be defined as the attribute of spirit. One cannot exist without the other; they cannot be called the same; there is the same difference between them as between a ray of light and its action and between the body and its physical senses.
WALTER MATTHEWS
"The Soul", Human Life from Many Angles
If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Clockwork Angel
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
Whoever saw his own soul? No man. Yet what is there more present, or what to each man nearer, than his own soul?
EDWARD VI
attributed, Day's Collacon
The soul is more than what happens to us when death enters, it's living a full life now, regardless of the time that you have left.
CORINE GATTI
"Live the Life You Want According to Thomas Moore", Beliefnet, July 31, 2017
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
Trouble is, most times, when you go looking to sell your soul, nobody's buying.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
Dear Night! this world's defeat;
The stop to busy fools; care's check and curb;
The day of spirits; my soul's calm retreat
Which none disturb!
Christ's progress, and His prayer-time;
The hours to which high Heaven doth chime.
HENRY VAUGHAN
Silex Scintillans
Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.
ANATOLE FRANCE
attributed, Kinship with the Animals
The soul is healed by being with children.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Idiot
Life, with the Soul predominant,
Is a noble mosaic, a bewitching arabesque.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Song of the Soul"
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
The soul that has conceived one wickedness can nurse no good thereafter.
SOPHOCLES
Philoctetes
The soul of Man must quicken to creation.
T. S. ELIOT
The Rock
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"
All men's souls are immortal, but those of the righteous are both immortal and divine.
SOCRATES
attributed, Day's Collacon
To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.
MURIEL SPARK
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The wealth of a soul is measured by how much it can feel; its poverty, by how little.
WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER
The Solitudes of Nature and of Man: Or, The Loneliness of Human Life