quotations about the soul
The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Discipline and Punish
There's no such thing as a soul. It's just something they made up to scare kids, like the boogeyman or Michael Jackson.
BART
The Simpsons
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
It has long seemed ridiculous to me to suppose that the nature of things has been so poor and stingy that it provided souls only to such a trifling mass of bodies on our globe, like human bodies, when it could have given them to all, without interfering with its other ends.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
letter to Johann Bernoulli, November 18, 1698
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"
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
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
ANNE SEXTON
attributed, The Words of Extraordinary Women
The soul is more than what happens to us when death enters, it's living a full life now, regardless of the time that you have left.
CORINE GATTI
"Live the Life You Want According to Thomas Moore", Beliefnet, July 31, 2017
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
Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.
ANATOLE FRANCE
attributed, Kinship with the Animals
It is only God who can satisfy the soul.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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"
And more than once in the course of time, the same theme reappears: among the mystics of the fifteenth century, it has become the motif of the soul as a skiff, abandoned on the infinite sea of desires, in the sterile field of cares and ignorance, among the mirages of knowledge, amid the unreason of the world -- a craft at the mercy of the sea's great madness, unless it throws out a solid anchor, faith, or raises its spiritual sails so that the breath of God may bring it to port.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
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
I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on.
ROBERT BROWNING
In a Balcony
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"
The soul, like the body, acquires vigor by the exercise of all its faculties. In the midst of the world, in overcoming difficulties, in conquering selfishness, indolence, and fear--in all the occasions of duty, it employs, and reveals by employing, energies that render it efficient and robust--that broaden its scope, adjust its powers, and mature it with a rich experience.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
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
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
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