Quotes About Spirit

Self-destructing – in rock, in public, in fact anywhere – is not good for the human spirit, not to mention the lungs, liver and kidneys. Artistically, it's best approached the way David Bowie did it in the mid-1970s. His cocaine addiction turned him into a withered stick-insect figure of a man but also inspired the best music of his entire career. Then he sorted himself out and became the golden-haired survivor we know and love today.

Although Postmodernism was certainly a fad, it was also a Zeitgeist, or spirit of the times. It meant something, despite its own best efforts, at least as a symptom. The disappearance of reality that it announced was itself real, as was the realm of simulation that replaced it.

The flesh is nearly burnt from your bones and the human from your heart. You're nothing but wyrd and ælf breath. Spend less time in the wind.

Breguswith taught her the gathering and drying of herbs, and began to spirit Hereswith away for mysterious lessons that, when her sister tried to share them with Hild, made no sense.

The lack was more in his soul than his body.

Poetry rescues things by reconciling matter and spirit in the metaphor.

Population growth disquiets the demographer only when he fears that it will impede economic progress or make it harder to feed the masses. But that man needs solitude, that human proliferation produces cruel societies, that distance is required between men so that the spirit might breathe, does not interest him. The quality of man does not matter to him.

It is upon the antinomies of reason, upon the scandals of the spirit, upon the ruptures in the universe, that I base my hope and my faith.

Let us respect the two poles of man: concrete individual, human spirit. But not the middle zone of an animal with opinions.

An aristocratic society is one where the desire for personal perfection is the animating spirit of the social institutions.

Generalizing extends our power and impoverishes our spirit.

Die Intellektuelle Geschichte Deutschlands lehrt uns, daß der Geist mit Vorliebe in den Seelen weht, die ihre Größe durch ein Leben der eintönigen Routine erkämpfen.

A revolutionary discovers the "true spirit of the revolution" only when he stands in front of a revolutionary tribunal sentencing him to death.

By fusing Neoplatonism and Zoroastrianism, by identifying evil with matter, the Gnostic automatically divinizes the spirit.

That day, I thought that I held something important and that my life would be changed. But nothing of this nature is acquired definitively. Like water, the world traverses you, and for a while, lends you its colours. It then draws back, leaving you once again to face the emptiness that one carries in oneself, to face that central insufficiency of the spirit that one must learn to live with, to fight, and which, paradoxically, is possibly our surest driving force.

Kathy Kerouac knew the power of her voice. It was, she said, her 'golden thing,' an amulet protecting her against all disorders of the spirit. Her voice was a charm that could stop violence and transform crudeness into curtesy, foolishness into finesse. So Kathy Kerouac was under the impression that nothing was ever altogether dangerous, the feeling that no word spoken could soil her world.

I don't believe fundamentally in anything but the awakening of spirit, hope, and freedom.

It does not need much wisdom to utter words of reproof; but much wisdom is needed to find such words as do not embitter a man's misfortune, but encourage him, restore to him his spirit, put spurs to the horse of his soul, refreshed by water.

There's a spirit to the western people, that is unique in the world.

The exercise of the charismata, in Tillich's terms, confronts the ambiguities of life from within the unity of nature and spirit driving toward the transcendent. In Pentecostals' terms, the charismata are the participation in the Spirit of the coming kingdom of God.

The joy of a spirit is the measure of its power.

Humanity's problem lies in the misuse of the mind only. All the treasures of nature and spirit are open to man who will use his mind rightly.

You cannot be alive, for you are life itself.

The name given to the body is not your name. What are you beyond the body and its name? For a moment, see that you are without the body and its name.' This is termed 'waiting at the doorstep of God for a moment'. Say what you are without considering the body and its name. Look at yourself without the body and its name. Understand this point and you understand everything.