quotations about the soul
Feeble souls are like those tracks of land which have neither depth nor richness of soil.
DAVID THOMAS
The Homilist
The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Discipline and Punish
I was brought up on a side street, listen now
I learned how to love before I could eat
I was educated from good stock
When I start lovin', oh, I can't stop
I'm a soul man, I'm a soul man
ISAAC HAYES & DAVID PORTER
"Soul Man"
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
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 of Man must quicken to creation.
T. S. ELIOT
The Rock
The history of a man's soul, even the pettiest soul, is hardly less interesting and useful than the history of a whole people; especially when the former is the result of the observations of a mature mind upon itself, and has been written without any egotistical desire of arousing sympathy or astonishment.
MIKHAIL LERMONTOV
A Hero of Our Time
It is common, even in the pulpit, to hear the phrase, "Man has a soul;" and it is scarcely possible to avoid embodying this same thought sometimes in the phrase "man's soul," which is only an abbreviation. This phrase, however, expresses a falsehood. It is not true that man has a soul. Man is a soul. It would be more accurate to say that man has a body. We may say that the body has a soul, or that the soul has a body; as we may say that the ship has a captain, or the captain has a ship; but we ought never to forget that the true man is the mental and spiritual; the body is only the instrument which the mental and the spiritual uses.
LYMAN ABBOTT
A Study in Human Nature
It is only God who can satisfy the soul.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
How can any man be free without a soul of his own, that he believes in and won't sell at any price?
D. H. LAWRENCE
Studies in Classic American Literature
Most men would gladly give their souls to the Devil, were he willing to accept them.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
The attributes of the spirit which we term the soul, bear a perfect correspondence to the physical senses of the body. That is, the soul bears exactly the same relation to the spirit as the physical senses to the human brain. Thus we have the physical and the spiritual senses. The physical are simply a reflection of the spiritual; they are two halves of the same attribute--the internal and the external. We see the intelligence, the mind, which at the back of the senses utilizes and tabulates the impressions it has received as the outer world, the world which it is itself powerless to penetrate. The mind is something above and beyond the senses, though it is absolutely dependent upon them. It is the same with the soul and the spirit. Evolve the states from within and without will take care of itself. Let us remember that the material life of man is only one second of his existence, and that it is one of the most unprofitable things in the world to be selfish. Purity is the great touchstone, and as Jesus has truly observed, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."
WALTER MATTHEWS
"The Soul", Human Life from Many Angles
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
Soul is a feeling, feeling deep within
Soul is not the colour of your skin
Soul is the essence, essence from within
It is where everything begins
VAN MORRISON
"Soul"
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 is often hungrier than the body, and no shops can sell it food.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
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
Well my soul Lord
My soul's got wings
My load is heavy
But I can still sing
JOHN MELLENCAMP
"My Soul's Got Wings"
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