Quotations about the Soul

Until you know that life is interesting - and find it so - you haven't found your soul. ~Geoffrey Fisher


The windows of my soul I throw
Wide open to the sun.
~John Greenleaf Whittier, My Psalm


The soul may sleep and the body still be happy, but only in youth. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


I simply believe that some part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to the laws of space and time. ~Carl Jung


Confession is good for the conscience, but it usually bypasses the soul. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other. ~Henry David Thoreau


A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways - by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognize that the same thing happens to the soul. ~Plato


What he had yearned to embrace was not the flesh but a downy spirit, a spark, the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939, translated from French by Lewis Galantière


Care I for the limb, the thews, the stature, bulk, and big assemblance of a man! Give me the spirit. ~William Shakespeare


I believe that the soul consists of its sufferings. For the soul that cures its own sufferings dies. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin


Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard. ~Anne Sexton


One certainly has a soul; but how it came to allow itself to be enclosed in a body is more than I can imagine. I only know if once mine gets out, I'll have a bit of a tussle before I let it get in again to that of any other. ~Lord Byron


Why do you hasten to remove anything which hurts your eye, while if something affects your soul you postpone the cure until next year? ~Horace


Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul. ~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations


When one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people's souls give off such a pungent smell of decay. ~Octave Mirbeau


How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver. ~Oscar Wilde


Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul. ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Following the Equator, 1897


When you do things from your soul you feel a river moving in you, a joy. When action come from another section, the feeling disappears. ~Rumi


Upturned toward the sun, eyes closed. That color and warmth I see and feel is the soul on fire. If only it remained when again my eyes opened. ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com


With all your science - can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul? ~Henry David Thoreau


Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth." Say not, "I have found the path of the soul." Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path." For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed. The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals. ~Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet, 1923


What is soul? It's like electricity - we don't really know what it is, but it's a force that can light a room. ~Ray Charles


Diseases of the soul are more dangerous and more numerous than those of the body. ~Cicero


Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time. ~Timothy Leary


Living is being born slowly. It would be a little too easy if we could borrow ready-made souls. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942


The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire. ~Ferdinand Foch


One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever come to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on the way. ~Vincent Van Gogh


You see, when weaving a blanket, an Indian woman leaves a flaw in the weaving of that blanket to let the soul out. ~Martha Graham


I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of another boy. ~Woody Allen