Quotes About Spirit

Whether in the intellectual pursuits of science or in the mystical pursuits of the spirit, the light beckons ahead, and the purpose surging in our nature responds.

Great buildings that move the spirit have always been rare. In every case they are unique, poetic, products of the heart.

Does an architecture to assuage the spirit have a place?

The way of architecture is the quiet voice that underlies it and has guided it from the beginning.

There are no better cosmetics than a severe temperance and purity, modesty and humility, a gracious temper and calmness of spirit and there is no true beauty without the signatures of these graces in the very countenance.

Plotinus was also the most relentlessly antimaterialist thinker in history. He taught his disciples that everything we see or imagine to be real is actually only a series of faded images of a higher realm of pure ideas and pure spirit, intelligible only to the soul. According to his student Porphyry of Tyre, he was even sorry that his soul had to live inside a physical body.

By separating body from mind and spirit, Descartes was denying the dependence of the material world on God's will and His providence. "A God without dominion, providence, and final causes," Newton later wrote, "is nothing else but Fate.

If freedom in terms of political liberty was proving to be a dead end in Italy and elsewhere, Plato offered a different path to freedom: freedom through the creative spirit.

This would be Plotinus's great message to his own age and to the future. All of us, whether we know it or not, want to be one with perfection—or as later Neoplatonists will say, to be one with God. No one wants to live in the cave. We all want to see the light; and once we discover the true trail, we can retrace the path of the spirit back to whence it came. Of course, finding the trail is the great difficulty.

the first man to use Boethius and Aristotle to open the mind of the Dark Ages would become pope in 999 as Silvester II. Before assuming the papacy, Gerbert of Aurillac embodied the new spirit spreading across Europe as it approached the landmark date of 1000 CE, thanks in large part to Boethius.

The one principle Heraclitus did embrace was that of the Logos, which can be variously translated as the Word or the Spirit or the Reason or even the Way—in fact, the parallels between Heraclitus's Logos and the Chinese Tao are striking. By following the Logos, Heraclitus affirmed, which he saw as a kind of spark or breath (psyche in Greek) that resides in each of us as individuals and also permeates the world, we can achieve peace.

True criticism is the reflection of the thing criticized upon the spirit of the critic

I stood here, and saw before me the unutterable, the unthinkable gulf that yawns profound between two worlds, the world of matter and the world of spirit; I saw the great empty deep stretch dim before me, and in that instant a bridge of light leapt from the earth to the unknown shore, and the abyss was spanned.

With a touch I can bring them into play, with a touch, I say, I can set free the current, with a touch I can complete the communication between this world of sense and—we shall be able to finish the sentence later on. Yes, the knife is necessary; but think what that knife will effect. It will level utterly the solid wall of sense, and probably, for the first time since man was made, a spirit will gaze on a spirit-world. Clarke, Mary will see the god Pan!

And thus, as a closer and still intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom.

Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.

A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.

Reality is thought of as a duality, operating within the human world, in terms of natural/supernatural, spatio-temporal/the eternal, the order of nature/the realm of faith, the natural(or physical)/the historical, the physical-and-biological/mind-and-spirit.

Je finis par trouver sacré le désordre de mon esprit.

Terminé por encontrar sagrado el desorden de mi espíritu. Permanecía ocioso, presa de pesada fiebre: envidiaba la felicidad de las bestias —las orugas, que representan la inocencia de los limbos, los topos ¡el sueño de la virginidad!

This instant of awakening has conjured a vision of purity! The spirit leads us to God! Bitter misfortune!

Ghosts!—They exist, they exist! Dead things playing at being alive.

You will understand the true spirit neither of science nor of religion unless seeking is placed in the forefront.

Ours is peculiarly an age of irreverence, and as the consequence, the spirit of lawlessness, which brooks no restraint and which is desirous of casting off everything which interferes with the free course of self-will, is rapidly engulfing the earth like some giant tidal