quotations about the soul
Abandon all those precious things
One soul now
Carry only what twilight brings
One soul now
Watch the color drain from the sky
One soul now
COWBOY JUNKIES
"One Soul Now"
No theory of the soul, as we know the soul in philosophy, is entitled to respect, which ignores or diminishes the reality of the personal union into which it has taken the body with itself, a union the most consummate and absolute of which we know, or of which we can conceive, infinitely transcending the completeness of the most perfect mechanical and chemical unions--a union so complete that, though two distinct substances are involved in it, it makes them, through a wide range of observations, as completely one to us as if they were one substance; so that we can say the human body does nothing proper to it without the soul, the human soul does nothing proper to it without the body.
GEORGE BERKELEY
A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
The soul may be immortal because she is fitted to rise towards that which is neither born nor dies, towards that which exists substantially, necessarily, invariably, that is to say towards God.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Why should the soul ever repose? God, its Principle, reposes never.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Lucretia; or, The children of Night
I held my breath, for to me there is nothing more awe-inspiring than when a man discovers to you the nakedness of his soul.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
"The Pool", Collected Short Stories
All those who write either explicitly or by insinuation against the dignity, freedom, and immortality of the human soul, may so far forth be justly said to unhinge the principles of morality, and destroy the means of making men reasonably virtuous.
GEORGE BERKELEY
The Works of George Berkeley
The soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
Laughter is the sound of the soul dancing. My soul probably looks like Fred Astaire.
JAROD KINTZ
This Book Is Not For Sale
The soul has, living apart from its corporeal envelope, a profound habitual meditation which prepares it for a future life.
THEODOR GOTTLIEB HIPPEL
attributed, Day's Collacon
It has long seemed ridiculous to me to suppose that the nature of things has been so poor and stingy that it provided souls only to such a trifling mass of bodies on our globe, like human bodies, when it could have given them to all, without interfering with its other ends.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
letter to Johann Bernoulli, November 18, 1698
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
Imagination is the eye of the soul.
JOSEPH JOUBERT
Pensées
In this way the Soul deliberately labours for growth; deliberately it works at itself, purifying always the lower nature with unceasing effort and with untiring demand; for ever it is comparing itself not with those who are below it but with Those who are above it, ever it is raising its eyes towards Those who have achieved.
ANNIE BESANT
In the Outer Court
The soul is a thing so impalpable, so often useless and sometimes so embarrassing that I suffered, upon losing it, a little less emotion than if I had mislaid, while out on a stroll, my calling-card.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Le Joueur généreux", Le Spleen de Paris
I am always confused by the language that claims, "I have a soul." Who is the "I" who possesses this soul? Perhaps I should say, "I am a soul." Or, "I am a union of body and soul."
CROW
"Do we have a soul? The concept can be confusing", Winston-Salem Journal, August 5, 2017
A man's soul ought to be as the heavens were on the night when the shepherds looked up, and saw them full of angels as well as stars.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The soul is too great to know itself, yet each individual portion of the soul seeks this knowledge, and in the seeking creates new possibilities of development, new dimensions of actuality. The individual self at any given moment can connect with its soul.
JANE ROBERTS
Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness
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
A fiery soul, which, working out its way,
Fretted the pygmy-body to decay,
And o'er-inform'd the tenement of clay.
JOHN DRYDEN
Absalom and Achitophel
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