Soul

The soul, according to many religious and philosophical traditions, is a self aware ethereal substance particular to a unique living being.

Sourced

• A blow to the head will confuse a man, whereas a blow to the foot has no such effect: this cannot be the result of an immaterial soul. - Heraclitus c. 500 BCE

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

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

• "For of the soule the bodie forme doth take; For the soule is forme, and doth the bodie make." ~ An Hymne in Honour of Beautie, Edmund Spenser

• "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

• "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

• "I believe that the soul consists of its sufferings. For the soul that cures its own sufferings dies." ~ Voces (1943), Antonio Porchia

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

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

• "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." ~ Flight to Arras (1942), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

• "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

• "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

• "One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it? They also believed the world was flat." ~ Mark Twain

• "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." ~ The Prophet (1923), Kahlil Gibran

• "Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning." ~ Albert Einstein

• "The happiest people I have known have been those who gave themselves no concern about their souls, but did their uttermost to mitigate the miseries of others." ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

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

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

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

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

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

• "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." ~ Jalal ad-Din Rumi

• "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

• "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 have a soul. I see patterns" ~ Leoben (Battlestar Galactica, "Reimagining")

• "A man can be compelled to do anything, but his soul cannot be forced." ~ "Parenting for Everyone" (1989), Simon Soloveychik

• "'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." ~ The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (1994), Francis Crick

• "For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?" ~ Jesus Christ in the Bible, Mark 8:36

• "The soul that walks in love neither tires others nor grows tired" ~ Sayings of Light and Love (1581), # 97, John of the Cross (translation by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodríguez, 1991)

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).

• The human soul is like a bird that is born in a cage. Nothing can deprive it of its natural longings, or obliterate the mysterious remembrance of its heritage.
  • Epes Sargent, p. 558.

• The universe, vast, beautiful, magnificent, as it is, cannot content the soul, but rouses it to more majestic thoughts. The wider view it takes of what is material, the more impatient it becomes of all material bonds. The sublimer the prospects which are opened by the universe, the more the spirit is impelled to ascend to a still sublimer being. Forever it aspires towards an infinite and immutable One as the ground of all finite and mutable existences. It can rest in His Omnipotence alone as the source, centre, sustainer, determiner of all forces.
  • William Ellery Channing, p. 558.

• There is a remedy for every wrong and a satisfaction for every soul.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 559.

• The strongest love which the human heart has ever felt has been that for its Heavenly Parent. Was it not then constituted for this love?
  • William Ellery Channing, p. 559.

• As the flowers follow the sun, and silently hold up their petals to be tinted and enlarged by its shining, so must we, if we would know the joy of God, hold our souls, wills, hearts, and minds, still before Him, whose voice commands, whose love warns, whose truth makes fair our whole being.' God speaks for the most part in such silence only. If the soul be full of tumult and jangling voices, His voice is little likely to be heard.
  • Alexander Maclaren, p. 559.

• Oh! how seldom the soul is silent, in order that God may speak.
  • François Fénelon, p. 559.

• Christ bounds and terminates the vast desires of the soul; He is the very Sabbath of the soul.
  • John Flavel, p. 559.

• Every thing here, but the soul of man, is a passing shadow. The only enduring substance is within. When shall we awake to the sublime greatness, the perils, the accountableness, and the glorious destinies of the immortal soul?
  • William Ellery Channing, p. 559.

• It is only when we see in human souls, taken as germs of power, a future magnitude and majesty transcending all present measures, that we come into any fit conception at all of Christ's mission to the world.
  • Author unidentified, p. 559.

• Go and try to save a soul, and you will see how well it is worth saving, how capable it is of the most complete salvation. Not by pondering about it, nor by talking of it, but by saving it, you learn its preciousness.
  • Phillips Brooks, p. 560.

• You can throw yourselves away. You can become of no use in the universe except for a warning. You can lose your souls. Oh, what a loss is that! The perversion and degradation of every high and immortal power for an eternity! And shall this be true of any one of you? Will you be lost when One has come from heaven, traveling in the greatness of His strength, and with garments dyed in blood, on purpose to guide you home—.home to a Father's house — to an eternal home?
  • Mark Hopkins, p. 560.

• Two things a master commits to his servant's care — the child and the child's clothes. It will be a poor excuse for the servant to say, at his master's return, " Sir, here are all the child's clothes, neat and clean, but the child is lost." Much so of the account that many will give to God of their souls and bodies at the great day. " Lord, here is my body; I am very grateful for it; I neglected nothing that belonged to its contents and welfare; but as for my soul, that is lost and cast away forever. I took little.care and thought about it."
  • John Flavel, p. 560.

• We all dread a bodily paralysis, and would make use of every contrivance to avoid it; but none of us is troubled about a paralysis of the soul.
  • Epictetus, p. 560.

• The saddest of all failures is that of a soul, with its capabilities and possibilities, failing of life everlasting, and entering upon that night of death upon which morning never dawns.
  • Herrick Johnson, p. 560.

• As ravens rejoice over carrion, so infernal spirits exult over the soul that is dead in sin.
  • Christian Scriver, p. 561.