quotations about the soul
What use do I put my soul to? It is a serviceable question this, and should frequently be put to oneself. How does my ruling part stand affected? And whose soul have I now? That of a child, or a young man, or a feeble woman, or of a tyrant, of cattle or wild beasts.
MARCUS AURELIUS
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Meditations
Human beings frequently speak of their soul without, however, having the slightest comprehension of what the soul and its attributes really are. Only those who possess spiritual illumination, who have attained to the degree of mastership in psychic unfoldment can speak authoritatively on this subject. In order to give my readers a slight comprehension of the soul and its attributes, I quote from a book titled "The Light of Egypt," by T. H. Burgoyne (now out of print): "The soul is formless and intangible, and constitutes the attributes of the divine spirit: therefore, we can only conceive and know the soul by learning the powers or attributes of the spirit. To illustrate, take a ray of light. What do we know concerning it? Nothing, except by its action upon something else. This action we term the attributes of light. In themselves the attributes of light are formless, but they may easily be rendered visible, either by their colors when refracted by the prism, or by their effects when concentrated upon material objects. This may be termed the soul of the ray of light. The organism of man gives us another example. Man possesses five external senses, viz: seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting and smelling. In reality he has seven senses which can be used externally. All our knowledge concerning external phenomena must come at present through the mediumship of one or more of the five physical senses. The organs through which the function of the senses become manifest are visible, but the senses themselves are invisible and formless. We know them only as the attributes of the body; while the mind, which is perfectly and absolutely dependent upon the senses for information, well represents the spiritual Ego in its relation to the soul. The soul is formless and intangible, and can only be defined as the attribute of spirit. One cannot exist without the other; they cannot be called the same; there is the same difference between them as between a ray of light and its action and between the body and its physical senses.
WALTER MATTHEWS
"The Soul", Human Life from Many Angles
The wealth of a soul is measured by how much it can feel; its poverty, by how little.
WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER
The Solitudes of Nature and of Man: Or, The Loneliness of Human Life
Every soul is a battlefield.
LYMAN ABBOTT
Problems of Life: Selections from the Writings of Rev. Lyman Abbott
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
The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter -- often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter -- in the eye.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Jane Eyre
A soul. A soul is nothing. Can you see it, smell it, touch it? No.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENET
"The Devil and Daniel Webster"
The human soul is God's treasury, out of which he coins unspeakable riches.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Emotions are the colors of the soul.
WM. PAUL YOUNG
The Shack
I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on.
ROBERT BROWNING
In a Balcony
Dear Night! this world's defeat;
The stop to busy fools; care's check and curb;
The day of spirits; my soul's calm retreat
Which none disturb!
Christ's progress, and His prayer-time;
The hours to which high Heaven doth chime.
HENRY VAUGHAN
Silex Scintillans
Trouble is, most times, when you go looking to sell your soul, nobody's buying.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
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 is the human being considered as having a value in itself.
SIMONE WEIL
Gravity and Grace
The soul is the connecting link between God and man, and between the spirit and the flesh, and has its earthly abode in the blood or life.
VAN BRUNT WYCKOFF
attributed, Day's Collacon
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"
The soul of Man must quicken to creation.
T. S. ELIOT
The Rock
For our soul is so preciously loved of him that is highest, that it over-passeth the knowing of all creatures.
JULIAN OF NORWICH
Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love
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
There is one argument commonly employed for the immateriality of the soul, which seems to me remarkable. Whatever is extended consists of parts; and whatever consists of parts is divisible, if not in reality, at least in the imagination. But it is impossible anything divisible can be conjoined to a thought or perception, which is a being altogether inseparable and indivisible. For supposing such a conjunction, would the indivisible thought exist on the left or on the right hand of this extended divisible body? On the surface or in the middle? On the back or fore side of it? If it be conjoined with the extension, it must exist somewhere within its dimensions. If it exist within its dimensions, it must either exist in one particular part; and then that particular part is indivisible, and the perception is conjoined only with it, not with the extension: Or if the thought exists in every part, it must also be extended, and separable, and divisible, as well as the body; which is utterly absurd and contradictory. For can any one conceive a passion of a yard in length, a foot in breadth, and an inch in thickness? Thought, therefore, and extension are qualities wholly incompatible, and never can incorporate together into one subject.
DAVID HUME
"Of the Immateriality of the Soul", A Treatise of Human Nature