Soul Quotes

When a tree is polled, it will sprout new shoots nearer its roots. A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginnings and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree.

~ Hermann Hesse

... the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.

~ Josef Pieper

I felt like some part of my soul was ripped out and put under a microscope for criticizing.

~ Alysha Speer

We think to dance, and dance in thought. But to hibernate in the mind, is to bring upon us an apocalypse of the Soul.

~ Ilyas Kassam

The souls of heroes are forged by the gods and tempered with the pain of life.

~ Brian Rathbone

I would not have a god come in To shield me suddenly from sin, And set my house of life to rights; Nor angels with bright burning wings Ordering my earthly thoughts and things; Rather my own frail guttering lights Wind blown and nearly beaten out; Rather the terror of the nights And long, sick groping after doubt; Rather be lost than let my soul Slip vaguely from my own control -- Of my own spirit let me be In sole though feeble mastery.

~ Sara Teasdale

I could see her will leaving and death seeping through her skin to skewer her soul.

~ J.d. Stroube

And as for the vague something --- was it a sinister or a sorrowful, a designing or a desponding expression? --- that opened upon a careful observer, now and then, in his eye, and closed again before one could fathom the strange depth partially disclosed; that something which used to make me fear and shrink, as if I had been wandering amongst volcanic-looking hills, and had suddenly felt the ground quiver, and seen it gape: that something, I, at intervals, beheld still; and with throbbing heart, but not with palsied nerves. Instead of wishing to shun, I longed only to dare --- to divine it; and I thought Miss Ingram happy, because one day she might look into the abyss at her leisure, explore its secrets and analyse their nature.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Songs of myselfI am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul, The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into new tongue. I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,..

~ Walt Whitman

Past humanity is not only implicit in each new man born but is contained in him. Humanity is an ever-widening spiral and life is the beam that plays briefly on each succeeding ring. All humanity from its beginning to its end is already present but the beam has not yet played beyond you.

~ Flann O'brien

She discovered that underneath the aspect of the Rumpled Porcupine, a tortured Marxist was at war with an impossible, incurable Romantic - who forgot the candles, who broke the wine glasses, who forgot the ring. Who made love to her with a passion that took her breath away. She had always thought of herself as a somewhat uninteresting, thick-waisted, thick ankled girl. Not bad-looking. Not special. But when she was with Chacko, old limits were pushed back. Horizons expanded.She had never before met a man who spoke of the workd - of what it was, and how it came to be, or what he thought would become of it - in the way in which other men she knew discussed their jobs, their friends or their weekends at the beach.Being with Chacko made Margaret Kochamma feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country, into the vast extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them - as though it lay before thm like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.

~ Arundhati Roy

No matter how many leaves would the tree of your soul have in front of the intense heat in the words of Time in this world, they can never shade the eternity lost inside you.

~ Sorin Cerin

He didn't ask Where will you spend eternity? as religious the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?

~ Saul Bellow

The female is, as it were, a mutilated male, and the catamenia are semen, only not pure; for there is only one thing they have not in them, the principle of soul.

~ Aristotle

There are souls that can't encounter to each other.

~ Toba Beta

During the day I would move my body to the rhythm that only I could hear. I would try and connect with everything in my surroundings thinking that it somehow connected to who I was and was secretly sending me messages about what was in my soul.

~ The Hippie

Let us not believe that an external fast from visible food alone can possibly be sufficient for perfection of heart and purity of body unless with it there has also been united a fast of the soul. For the soul also has its foods that are harmful. Slander is its food and indeed one that is very dear to it. A burst of anger also supplies it with miserable food for an hour and destroys it as well with its deadly savor. Envy is food of the mind, corrupting it with its poisonous juices and never ceasing to make it wretched and miserable at the prosperity and success of another. Vanity is its food which gratifies the mind with a delicious meal for a time but afterward strips it clear and bare of all virtue. Then vanity dismisses it barren and void of all spiritual fruit. All lust and shift wanderings of heart are a sort of food for the soul, nourishing it on harmful meats but leaving it afterwards without a share of its heavenly bread and really solid food. If then, with all the powers we have, we abstain from these in a most holy fast our observance of the bodily fast will be both useful and profitable.

~ John Cassian

To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.

~ George Eliot

At that time, I well remember whatever could excite - certain accidents of the weather, for instance, were almost dreaded by me, because they woke the being I was always lulling, and stirred up a craving cry I could not satisfy. One night a thunder-storm broke; a sort of hurricane shook us in our beds: the Catholics rose in panic and prayed to their saints. As for me, the tempest took hold of me with tyranny: I was roughly roused and obliged to live. I got up and dressed myself, and creeping outside the basement close by my bed, sat on its ledge, with my feet on the roof of a lower adjoining building. It was wet, it was wild, it was pitch dark. Within the dormitory they gathered round the night-lamp in consternation, praying loud. I could not go in: too resistless was the delight of staying with the wild hour, black and full of thunder, pealing out such an ode as language never delivered to man - too terribly glorious, the spectacle of clouds, split and pierced by white and blinding bolts.

~ Charlotte Brontë

…for it is often to be observed of the shallower men, that they are the very last to despond. It is the glory of the bladder that nothing can sink it; it is the reproach of a box of treasure, that once overboard it must drown

~ Herman Melville

Guilt is the toothache of the soul.

~ Tommy Cotton

Evil surrounding can destroy a Good soul.

~ Udayveer Singh

Like most arts, the link between the mind and the pen can chain you like an enslaved workaholic. Even on an intended vacation you suddenly have this killer urge to record whatever the vacation may teach.

~ Criss Jami

The soul is a prolonged anniversary of our lives in this world.

~ Sorin Cerin

You're growing and that scares people, it frightens the shit out of them because they know if they don't step up within themselves you'll move forward with out them. When this happens, don't you dare settle to suit the mould - have courage to live without one.

~ Nikki Rowe

Smartass Disciple: Master, what will happen to the men right after their death ?Master of Stupidity: They live with a same or different part of their consciousness.

~ Toba Beta

One listens to the murmur of the soul only because of boredom.

~ Robert Walser

Always listen to your soul... it speaks to you, only if you listen!

~ Angie Karan

The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

~ Oscar Wilde

Seven times have I despised my soul: The sixth time when she despised the ugliness of a face, and knew not that it was one of her own masks.

~ Kahlil Gibran

If her soul ever leaks, I want it to land on me.

~ Markus Zusak

Where my soul went during that swoon I cannot tell. Whatever she saw, or wherever she travelled in her trance on that strange night she kept her own secret; never whispering a word to Memory, and baffling imagination by an indissoluble silence. She may have gone upward, and come in sight of her eternal home, hoping for leave to rest now, and deeming that her painful union with matter was at last dissolved. While she so deemed, an angel may have warned her away from heaven's threshold, and, guiding her weeping down, have bound her, once more, all shuddering and unwilling, to that poor frame, cold and wasted, of whose companionship she was grown more than weary.I know she re-entered her prison with pain, with reluctance, with a moan and a long shiver. The divorced mates, Spirit and Substance, were hard to re-unite: they greeted each other, not in an embrace, but a racking sort of struggle.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Christ knew that by bread alone you cannot reanimate man. If there were no spiritual life, no ideal of Beauty, man would pine away, die, go mad, kill himself or give himself to pagan fantasies. And as Christ, the ideal of Beauty in Himself and his Word, he decided it was better to implant the ideal of Beauty in the soul. If it exists in the soul, each would be the brother of everyone else and then, of course, working for each other, all would also be rich. Whereas if you give them bread, they might become enemies to each other out of boredom.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

At night I lay awake, her likeness casting dark shadows across my soul and senses, and my stomach throbbing away. I imagined her arms around me, lulling me into a phantom bliss, so frustrating, so unreal.

~ Stephen Mosley

A soul that becomes the place where divine grace is harbored and encouraged joins the class of the immortals and lives on into eternal greatness.

~ Garey Gordon

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.

~ Leo Tolstoy

The steady soul and the ego pretender / walk with their arms round each other's shoulders / through the mirage.

~ Jay Woodman

What a person has is of no consequence, whether much or little, when it comes to the deep satisfaction of the soul. Apart from Christ, the rich and beautiful, and the poor and unlovely, will all end up in precisely the same misery.

~ Kelly Minter

The sole/soul purpose of a book is to be read.

~ Dani J. Caile

But that did not stop her heart from shattering into countless pieces or her soul from shredding into slivers.

~ Farrah Naseem