Quotes About Soul

The soul needs meaning as much as the body needs food.

Once you have met your own soul, you know that you are being guided. You are being led from within, and even the inexorable wheel of life is your teacher. It is the cycle of failure and renewal that slowly lowers you into the arms of a very safe God.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our Life's Star Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness. And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy.2

We do not make or create our souls, we just grow them up.

your soul is who you are in God and who God is in you. You can never really lose your soul; you can only fail to realize it, which is indeed the greatest of losses: to have it but not have it (Matthew 16:26).

By the age of seven, almost all of us have separated our body and our soul from our mind, and we give all of our credence to our mind, disconnected from our bodies, disconnected from our souls, which abide and grow more in silence. Descartes

Having looked at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one, nor any particle of one, but has reference to the Soul. —Walt Whitman

The place which God takes in our soul he will never vacate, for in us is his home of homes, and it is the greatest delight for him to dwell there… The soul who contemplates this is made like the one who is contemplated. Lady Julian of Norwich, Showings On that day, you will know that you are in me and I am in you. John 14:20

The English poet Wordsworth put it so beautifully: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our Life's Star Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness. And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy.

There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life. It will sound an awful lot like the voices of risk, of trust, of surrender, of soul, of "common sense," of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of your deepest self, of soulful "Beatrice.

But which should come first, grace or responsibility? The answer is that both come first. All we can do is get out of the way and then the soul takes its natural course.

Knowing without loving is frankly dangerous for the soul and for society. You'll critique most everything you encounter and even have the hubris to call this mode of reflexive cynicism "thinking

It is the struggle with darkness and grief that educates the male soul.

Governments encourage this pacification by various distractions, what used to be called "bread and circuses." They know it will keep us small, content, and uninterested in those "weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and good faith" (Matthew 23:23) that have attracted all great souls. A

Every time you take in a breath, you are repeating the pattern of taking spirit into matter, and thus repeating the first creation of Adam. And every time you breathe out, you are repeating the pattern of returning spirit to the material universe. In a way, every exhalation is a "little dying" as we pay the price of inspiriting the world.

In the second half of life, we are not demanding our American constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness or that people must have our same experiences; rather, simple meaning now suffices, and that becomes in itself a much deeper happiness. As the body cannot live without food, so the soul cannot live without meaning.

Begin with a concrete moment of encounter, based in this physical world, and the soul universalizes from there, so that what is true here becomes true everywhere else too.

One day the religion of Christ will take another step forward on earth. It will embrace the whole man [sic], all of him, not just half as it does now in embracing only the soul. —Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

At this point, at least in the United States, it appears that our cultural meaning has pretty much shrunk down to this: it is all about winning. Then, once you win, it becomes all about consuming. I can discern no other underlying philosophy in the practical order of American life today. Of itself, such a worldview cannot feed the soul very well or very long, much less provide meaning and encouragement, or engender love or community.

St. John of the Cross taught that God has to work in the soul in secret and in darkness, because if we fully knew what was happening, and what Mystery/transformation/God/grace will eventually ask of us, we would either try to take charge or stop the whole process.8 No one oversees his or her own demise willingly, even when it is the false self that is dying.

Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events. This deeper discovery is largely what religious people mean by "finding their soul.

Unless religion leads us on a path to both depth and honesty, much religion is actually quite dangerous to the soul and to society.

Jung believed that humans produce in art the inner images the soul needs in order to see itself and to allow its own transformation.

In the many images of Mary, humans see our own feminine soul. We needed to see ourselves in her, and say with her, "God has looked upon me in my lowliness. From now on, all generations will call me blessed" (Luke 1:48).