quotations about the soul
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 fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars.
GEORG LUKACS
attributed, "Can Poetry Change Your Life?", The New Yorker, July 31, 2017
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
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
If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Clockwork Angel
The soul of Man must quicken to creation.
T. S. ELIOT
The Rock
Reincarnation is essential to enable the soul to evolve to its Divine right.
R. F. GOUDEY
Reincarnation: A Universal Truth
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 me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.
MURIEL SPARK
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
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
I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on.
ROBERT BROWNING
In a Balcony
The soul that has conceived one wickedness can nurse no good thereafter.
SOPHOCLES
Philoctetes
How absurd it must seem for an immortal soul to be destined for Heaven or Hell, and yet be sitting in a kitchen, as a maid, or to see oneself objectified as a mechanic! how falsely the usual sunrise waked us, the clock dial, the city street the job! How wrongfully people find themselves in these systems--our time isn't there, our space isn't there, our space isn't even here, not even our name is there--the addressee for whom the alarm clock rings is identical to only a few, and the whole social story of waking, and certainly the day of the mechanic, is false.
ERNST BLOCH
Traces
All men's souls are immortal, but those of the righteous are both immortal and divine.
SOCRATES
attributed, Day's Collacon
The soul is the human being considered as having a value in itself.
SIMONE WEIL
Gravity and Grace
The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Discipline and Punish
You are a little soul carrying about a corpse.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
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
Trouble is, most times, when you go looking to sell your soul, nobody's buying.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance