soul Quotes

“The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye.”

“I have little left in myself -- I must have you. The world may laugh -- may call me absurd, selfish -- but it does not signify. My very soul demands you: it will be satisfied, or it will take deadly vengeance on its frame.”

“Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?”

“By my soul I swear, there is no power in the tongue of man to alter me.”

“Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul But I do love thee! and when I love thee not, Chaos is come again.”

“This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best. Night, sleep, and the stars.”

“Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.”

“But I should be false in the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence.”

Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.

“In my soul and in my heart, I’m convinced I’m wrong!”

“Ferreting in one’s soul, one often ferrets out something that might have lain there unnoticed.”

“She realized that the landscape of a woman’s soul could change as quickly as a world at war.”

“But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe.”

“My soul is in the sky.”

“Thus I die. Thus, thus, thus. Now I am dead, Now I am fled, My soul is in the sky. Tongue, lose thy light. Moon take thy flight. Now die, die, die, die.”

“There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul.”

“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.”

My body is but the lees of my better being.

“Perfume is the soul of the flower, and sea-flowers have no soul.”

“An evil soul producing holy witness Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, A goodly apple rotten at the heart. O what a goodly outside falsehood hath!”

″‘Your soul is a beautiful thing, child.’ replied the grave man’s voice, ‘and I thank you. No emperor received so fair a gift. The angels wept to-night.”

“Oh, to-night I gave you my soul, and I am dead!”

“No need my unlucky one, to grieve here any longer, no, don’t waste your life away. Now I am willing heart and soul to send you off at last.”

“Whatever life you lead, you must put your soul into it--to make any sort of success of it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be romance, I assure you; it becomes reality!”

“I am lost without you. I am soulless, a drifter without a home, a solitary bird in a flight to nowhere. I am all these things, and I am nothing at all. This, my darling, is my life without you. I long for you to show me how to live again.”

“To become a happy person have a clean soul, eyes that see romance in the commonplace, a child’s heart, and spiritual simplicity.”

“It is significant that the word ‘holiness’ derives from a word meaning ‘wholeness’ and the word ‘meditation,’ usually used in a religious sense, closely resembles the root meaning of the word ‘medication.’ The affinity of the two words is startlingly evident when we realize that sincere and practical meditation upon God and His truth acts as a medication for the soul and body.”

“He had started to suspect that his venerable father and his other teachers, that the wise Brahmans had already revealed to him the most and best of their wisdom, that they had already filled his expecting vessel with their richness, and the vessel was not full, the spirit was not content, the soul was not calm, the heart was not satisfied.”

“I am nothing special; of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I’ve led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I’ve loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough.”

“The reason it hurts so much to separate is because our souls are connected. Maybe they always have been and will be. Maybe we’ve lived a thousand lives before this one and in each of them we’ve found each other. And maybe each time, we’ve been forced apart for the same reasons. That means that this goodbye is both a goodbye for the past ten thousand years and a prelude to what will come.”

“That’s my point. Body and soul. Two different things, in my case.”

“I held you in my hand, Wanderer. And you were so beautiful.”

“Perhaps without the lows, the highs could not be reached. Were the souls the exception to that rule? Could they have the light without the darkness of the world?”

“Because he was a soul, by nature he was all things good: compassionate, patient, honest, virtuous, and full of love.”

“I have found that the platonic affection in friendships and familial love for children can be relied upon with certainty to lift the bruised soul and repair the wounded spirit.”

“Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it.”

“I stared at the brick as it slid across the clean, worn, wooden floor, and at the glass that scattered about my feet. Outside I could hear jeers and shouts. For one moment I glimpsed howling, sweating, red-and-white faces, distorted into hideous masks of hatred and cruelty, a sea of demon heads that bobbed restlessly outside our store. I could not understand the words they were growling out, but their intention was plain. They wanted to burn and loot and hurt. Looking into that huge mass of faces was like looking into the ugliest depths of the human soul.”

There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.

“Your soul is the priestess of memory, selecting, sifting, and ultimately gathering your vanishing days toward presence.”

“All through your life your soul takes care of you...your soul is alive and awakened, gathering, sheltering and guiding your ways and days in the world. In effect, your soul is your secret shelter.”

“May you recognize in your life the presence, power, and light of your soul. May you realize that you are never alone, that your soul in its brightness and belonging connects you intimately with the rhythm of the universe. May you have respect for your own individuality and difference. ”

“The secret and the sacred are sisters. When the secret is not respected, the sacred vanishes. Consequently, reflection should not shine too severe or aggressive a light on the world of the soul.”

“Your soul knows the geography of your destiny.”

“Yes, all our souls are written in our eyes!”

“The soul has wants which must be satisfied; and whatever pains be taken to divert it from itself, it soon grows weary, restless, and disquieted amidst the enjoyments of sense.”

“‘This is where you can find your soul, if you dare. Where you can touch that part of you that you’ve never dared look at before.’”

“The psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved and being removed, questing and resting, creating and incubating, being of the world and returning to the soul-place.”

“Though her soul requires seeing, the culture around her requires sightlessness. Though her soul wishes to speak its truth, she is pressured to be silent.”

“No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”

“Body and soul ... fit so well together yet they are eternally in contention.”

“We need never shout across the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than our most secret thoughts”

“When the eyes of the soul looking out meet the eyes of God looking in, heaven has begun right here on this earth.”

“Expectation. That is the true soul of art. If you can give a man more than he expects, then he will laud you his entire life. If you can create an air of anticipation and feed it properly, you will succeed.”

“It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such things as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls.”

“Two souls live in me, alas, Irreconcilable with one another.”

“As to moral philosophy, they have the same disputes among them as we have here. They examine what are properly good, both for the body and the mind; and whether any outward thing can be called truly good, or if that term belong only to the endowments of the soul.”

“It is high time for thee to understand the true nature both of the world, whereof thou art a part; and of that Lord and Governor of the world, from whom, as a channel from the spring, thou thyself didst flow: and that there is but a certain limit of time appointed unto thee, which if thou shalt not make use of to calm and allay the many distempers of thy soul, it will pass away and thou with it, and never after return.”

“Every man’s happiness depends from himself, but behold thy life is almost at an end, whiles affording thyself no respect, thou dost make thy happiness to consist in the souls, and conceits of other men.”

“There is nothing more wretched than that soul, which in a kind of circuit compasseth all things, searching (as he saith) even the very depths of the earth; and by all signs and conjectures prying into the very thoughts of other men’s souls; and yet of this, is not sensible, that it is sufficient for a man to apply himself wholly, and to confine all his thoughts and cares to the tendance of that spirit which is within him, and truly and really to serve him.”

“Philosophy doth consist in this, for a man to preserve that spirit which is within him, from all manner of contumelies and injuries, and above all pains or pleasures; never to do anything either rashly, or feignedly, or hypocritically: wholly to depend from himself and his own proper actions: all things that happen unto him to embrace contentedly, as coming from Him from whom he himself also came; and above all things, with all meekness and a calm cheerfulness, to expect death, as being nothing else but the resolution of those elements, of which every creature is composed.”

“You must not wonder that those who attain to this beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell; which desire of theirs is very natural, if our allegory may be trusted.”

“[My father] taught me with silence. . .to look into myself, to find my own strength, to walk around inside myself in company with my soul. . . . One learns of the pain of others by suffering one’s own pain … by turning inside oneself. . . . It makes us aware of how frail and tiny we are and of how much we must depend upon the Master of the Universe.”

“The masculine heart needs a place where nothing is prefabricated, modular, non fat, ziplock, franchised, on-line, microwavable. Where there are no deadlines, cellphones, or committee meetings. Where there is room for the soul.”

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”

“The lust for comfort murders the passions of the soul.”

“How will I teach this mind what it is to have a soul? How will I teach this mind to understand pain? How will I teach it to want to take on another person’s suffering?”

“A traveler I am, and a navigator, and every day I discover a new region within my soul.”

“Have you never observed how invincible and unconquerable is spirit and how the presence of it makes the soul of any creature to be absolutely fearless and indomitable?”

“No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty.”

“A mess of beautiful contradictions make her whole, she wears fire for skin but a storm lives in her soul.”

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

“The man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.”

“By Human Excellence we mean not that of man’s body but that of his soul; for we call Happiness a working of the Soul.”

“We praise the Reason or Rational part of the Soul, because it exhorts a right and to the best course: but clearly there is in them, beside the Reason, some other natural principle which fights with and strains against the Reason.”

“Prosperity has little to do with temporal success and more to do with spiritual resilience and the fortitude of the soul.”

“It may be that without a vision men shall die. It is no less true that, without hard practical sense, they shall also die. Without Jefferson the new nation might have lost its soul. Without Hamilton it would assuredly have been killed in body.”

“Jasnah held up a finger to quiet her. ‘All things have three components: the soul, the body, and the mind. That place you saw, Shadesmar, is what we call the Cognitive Realm—the place of the mind.‘”

“Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. ”

“The fruit of Soothfastness is true and sweet; The fruit of lusts is pain and toil; the fruit Of Ignorance is deeper darkness The elements, the conscious life, the mind, The unseen vital force, the nine strange gates Of the body, and the five domains of sense; Desire, dislike, pleasure and pain, and thought Deep-woven, and persistency of being; These all are wrought on Matter by the Soul!”

“She ruled in beauty o’er this heart of mine, A noble lady in a humble home, And now her time for heavenly bliss has come, ’Tis I am mortal proved, and she divine. The soul that all its blessings must resign, And love whose light no more on earth finds room Might rend the rocks with pity for their doom, Yet none their sorrows can in words enshrine; They weep within my heart; no ears they find Save mine alone, and I am crushed with care, And naught remains to me save mournful breath. Assuredly but dust and shade we are; Assuredly desire is mad and blind; Assuredly its hope but ends in death.”

“When Love doth those sweet eyes to earth incline, And weaves those wandering notes into a sigh With his own touch, and leads a minstrelsy Clear-voiced and pure, angelic and divine,— He makes sweet havoc in this heart of mine, And to my thoughts brings transformation high, So that I say, ‘My time has come to die, If fate so blest a death for me design.’ But to my soul, thus steeped in joy, the sound Brings such a wish to keep that present heaven, It holds my spirit back to earth as well. And thus I live: and thus is loosed and wound The thread of life which unto me was given By this sole Siren who with us doth dwell.”

“Dreams bore my fancy to that region where She dwells whom here I seek, but cannot see. ’Mid those who in the loftiest heaven be I looked on her, less haughty and more fair. She took my hand, she said, ‘Within this sphere, If hope deceive not, thou shalt dwell with me: I filled thy life with war’s wild agony; Mine own day closed ere evening could appear. My bliss no human thought can understand; I wait for thee alone, and that fair veil Of beauty thou dost love shall yet retain.’ Why was she silent then, why dropped my hand Ere those delicious tones could quite avail To bid my mortal soul in heaven remain?”

“Those eyes, ’neath which my passionate rapture rose, The arms, hands, feet, the beauty that erewhile Could my own soul from its own self beguile, And in a separate world of dreams enclose, The hair’s bright tresses, full of golden glows, And the soft lightning of the angelic smile That changed this earth to some celestial isle,— Are now but dust, poor dust, that nothing knows. And yet I live! Myself I grieve and scorn, Left dark without the light I loved in vain, Adrift in tempest on a bark forlorn; Dead is the source of all my amorous strain, Dry is the channel of my thoughts outworn, And my sad harp can sound but notes of pain.”

“Gentle severity, repulses mild, Full of chaste love and pity sorrowing; Graceful rebukes, that had the power to bring Back to itself a heart by dreams beguiled; A tender voice, whose accents undefiled Held sweet restraints, all duty honoring; The bloom of virtue; purity’s clear spring To cleanse away base thoughts and passions wild; Divinest eyes to make a lover’s bliss, Whether to bridle in the wayward mind Lest its wild wanderings should the pathway miss, Or else its griefs to soothe, its wounds to bind; This sweet completeness of thy life it is Which saved my soul; no other peace I find.”

“O ye who trace through scattered verse the sound Of those long sighs wherewith I fed my heart Amid youth’s errors, when in greater part That man unlike this present man was found; For the mixed strain which here I do compound Of empty hopes and pains that vainly start, Whatever soul hath truly felt love’s smart, With pity and with pardon will abound. But now I see full well how long I earned All men’s reproof; and oftentimes my soul Lies crushed by its own grief; and it doth seem For such misdeed shame is the fruitage whole, And wild repentance and the knowledge learned That worldly joy is still a short, short dream.”

“but bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical dilemma/ i havent conquered yet/ do you see the point my spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of soul & gender/ my love is too delicate to have thrown back on my face my love is too delicate to have thrown back on my face my love is too beautiful to have thrown back on my face my love is too sanctified to have thrown back on my face my love is too magic to have thrown back on my face my love is too saturday nite to have thrown back on my face my love is too complicated to have thrown back on my face my love is too music to have thrown back on my face”

″ War don’t ennoble men. It turns them into dogs... poisons the soul.”

“That which is within you and directs your life knows already. It’s good to realize that within us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we ourselves.”

“Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”

“Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.”

“First of all, a soul is not something that you have. It is what you are.”

“So I will always lean my heart as close to your soul as I can.”

“Your soul once sat on an easel on my knee. For ages I have been sketching you With myriad shapes of sounds and light;”

“Her soul is Alive. And we are drawn to her.”

“The soul is the prison of the body.”

“Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.”

“I have suffered a loss, Forrest, far greater than my legs. It’s my spirit, my soul if you will. There is only a blank there now- medals where my soul used to be.”

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”

“In the inner stillness where meditation leads, the Spirit secretly anoints the soul and heals our deepest wounds.”

“Never give up prayer, and should you find dryness and difficulty, persevere in it for this very reason. God often desires to see what love your soul has, and love is not tried by ease and satisfaction.”

“In the dark night of the soul, bright flows the river of God.”

“I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to takes its flight from my body.”

“Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole! To Mary Queen the praise be given! She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven, That slid into my soul.”

“Idleness is the enemy of the soul; and therefore the brethren ought to be employed in manual labor at certain times, at others, in devout reading.”

“Our grounding in the soul means that regardless of how badly we think of ourselves, there is a wholesomeness in us that no one has ever been able to damage.”

“I am a soul who likes the concept of forgiveness . . . until I am a hurting soul who doesn’t.”

“How terribly tragic is it that someone’s heart can be so shattered that they no longer even find the beauty in existing? That they’d rather endure the split-second pain of a bullet wound to release a lifetime of aching in their soul.”

“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I’m two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren’t attached.”

“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”

“I have every useless thing in the world in my house there. The only thing wanting is the necessary thing, a great patch of open sky like this. Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life, little boy,” he added, turning to me. “You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist’s nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.”

“On earth, Sky Mother created humans, her children of blood and bone. In the heavens she gave birth to the gods and goddesses. Each would come to embody a different fragment of her soul.”

“Why do I not have an immortal soul! […] I would give all my three hundred years of life for only one day as a human being if, afterward, I should be allowed to live in the heavenly world

“If a man should fall so much in love with you that you were dearer to him than his mother and father… and he let a priest take his right hand and put it in yours, while he promised to be eternally true to you, then his soul would flow into your body and you would be able to partake of human happiness. He can give you a soul and yet keep his own”

“Now, with the message sent, the words said, she wanted to call them back, to censor, to rearrange them, to make a prettier sentence, a fairer explanation of her soul.”

“You’re in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.”

“here lie the raw, unpolished & mostly disjointed pieces of my soul.”

“I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”

“Her soul is Alive. And we are drawn to her.”

“I struggled no more, but the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long, and final scream of despair.”

“I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.”

“When we buried the dog in the garden on the grave we put a cross and the tall man next door was cross. ‘Animals have no soul, he said. ‘They must have animal souls,’ we said.”

“I was winding it up one night, when suddenly it gave a little gasp and a long sigh, like a soul departing from the body; and it wouldn’t go after that. Sometimes, from force of habit, I take it out at night and start to wind it. Then I miss its genial tick, and I feel as if I am looking at the face of a dead friend.”

“Ralph, my dearest child, always remember in the hour of danger to look to your Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. He alone is both able and willing to save your body and your soul.”

“You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose.”

“His mother used to say that a person without hope was a body without a soul.”

I felt my soul receding into some pleasant and vicious region; and there again I found it waiting for me.

Without question, she is equally in the dark as to her soul, its present depravity, and future destiny!

“They grew out of his heart, and typify, it may be, some hideous secret that was buried with him, and which he had done better to confess during his lifetime.”

“A strange sympathy betwixt soul and body!

“It may be, that, when we forgot our God,—when we violated our reverence each for the other’s soul,—it was thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion.

“Here! and here!” replied Catherine, striking one hand on her forehead, and the other on her breast: “in whichever place the soul lives. In my soul and in my heart, I’m convinced I’m wrong!”

“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever.”

“Because, without intending it, I have put into it some expression of all this curious artistic idolatry, of which, of course, I have never cared to speak to him. He knows nothing about it. He shall never know anything about it. But the world might guess it, and I will not bare my soul to their shallow prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope. There is too much of myself in the thing, Harry—too much of myself!”

“I understand what you mean, and I believe in this girl. Any one you love must be marvellous, and any girl who has the effect you describe must be fine and noble. To spiritualize one’s age—that is something worth doing. If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world. This marriage is quite right. I did not think so at first, but I admit it now. The gods made Sibyl Vane for you. Without her you would have been incomplete.”

“Don’t, Harry. The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect. There is a soul in each one of us. I know it.”

That’s why they so dislike the living process of life; they don’t want a living soul!

It hurt her to stir up these feelings, but yet she knew that that was the best part of her soul, and that that part of her soul would quickly be smothered in the life she was leading.

“Alas!” said the other, “it was love; love, the comfort of the human species, the preserver of the universe, the soul of all sensible beings, love, tender love.”

“I was easily led by the sympathy which he evinced to use the language of my heart, to give utterance to the burning ardour of my soul and to say, with all the fervour that warmed me, how gladly I would sacrifice my fortune, my existence, my every hope, to the furtherance of my enterprise.”