quotations about the soul
I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on.
ROBERT BROWNING
In a Balcony
All men's souls are immortal, but those of the righteous are both immortal and divine.
SOCRATES
attributed, Day's Collacon
I do not mean that the soul is air, as has been supposed by some who could not conceive a spiritual nature; but, with much dissimilarity, the two things have a kind of likeness, which makes it suitable to say that the immaterial soul is illumined with the immaterial light of the simple wisdom of God, as the material air is irradiated with material light, and that, as the air, when deprived of this light, grows dark, (for material darkness is nothing else than air wanting light,) so the soul, deprived of the light of wisdom, grows dark.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
The soul of Man must quicken to creation.
T. S. ELIOT
The Rock
Christ asks for a home in your soul, where he can be at rest with you, where he can talk easily to you, where you and he, alone together, can laugh and be silent and be delighted with one another.
CARYLL HOUSELANDER
This War is the Passion
If I were a carpenter, I would build you a window to my soul. But I would leave that window shut and locked, so that every time you tried to look through it all you would see is your own reflection. You would see that my soul is a reflection of you.
COLLEEN HOOVER
Point of Retreat
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
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 human being considered as having a value in itself.
SIMONE WEIL
Gravity and Grace
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
Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
attributed, Albert Einstein: The Human Side
Feeble souls are like those tracks of land which have neither depth nor richness of soil.
DAVID THOMAS
The Homilist
I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of another boy.
WOODY ALLEN
Annie Hall
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"
Negativity is an addiction to the bleak shadow that lingers around every human form ... you can transfigure negativity by turning it toward the light of your soul.
JOHN O'DONOHUE
Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
The soul that has conceived one wickedness can nurse no good thereafter.
SOPHOCLES
Philoctetes
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
To find a noble human soul is gain; it is nobler to keep it; and the noblest and most difficult is to save that which is already lost.
JOHANN GOTTFRIED VON HERDER
Der gerettete Jüngling
No soul that aspires can ever fail to rise; no heart that loves can ever be abandoned. Difficulties exist only that in overcoming them we may grow strong, and only those who have suffered are able to save.
ANNIE BESANT
Some Problems of Life
Our souls, shame-wounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses