Quotes About Soul

That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.

The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said, a principal appetite of the soul.

Two great appetites of the soul - the urge to independence and self-determination and the urge to self-transcendence - were fused with, and interpreted in the light of, a third - the urge to worship

Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.

He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul.

He acted as if he could detect in her face nothing but its external beauties of form and texture. Whereas, of course, flesh is never wholly opaque; the soul shows through the walls of its receptacle.

Goodness needeth not to enter into the soul, for it is there already, only it is unperceived. Theologia Germanica

My soul is a pale, tenuous membrane... That was pleasing: a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right anatomical quality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy life. It was time for him to descend from the serene empyrean of words into the actual vortex. He went down slowly. My soul is a thin, tenuous membrane...

Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.

Partly on his interest being focussed on what he calls 'the soul,' which he persists in regarding as an entity independent of the physical environment, whereas, as I tried to point out to him . . .

The people who govern Brave New World may not be sane (in what may be called the absolute sense of that word); but they are not mad men, and their aim is not anarchy but social stability. It is in order to achieve stability that they carry out, by scientific means, the ultimate, personal really revolutionary revolution … This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings.

For the totalitarian of our more enlightened century there is no soul and no creator; there is merely a lump of physiological raw material moulded by conditioned reflexes and social pressures into what, by courtesy, is still called a human being.

The energy which wanted to expend itself in physical passion is diverted and turns the mills of the soul.

La mayoría de los hombres y las mujeres llevan vidas tan pobres y limitadas en el mejor, que el afán de escapar, el ansia de trascender de sí mismo aunque sólo sea por breves momentos es, y ha sido siempre, uno de los principales apetitos del alma

Something of the same kind may happen in the posthumous state. After having had a glimpse of the unbearable splendor of ultimate Reality, and after having shuttled back and forth between heaven and hell, most souls find it possible to retreat into that more reassuring region of the mind, where they can use their own and other people's wishes, memories and fancies to construct a world very like that in which they lived on earth.

La mayoría de los hombres y las mujeres llevan vidas tan penosas en el peor de los casos y tan monótonas, pobres y limitadas en el mejor, que el afán de escapar, el ansia de trascender de sí mismo aunque sólo sea por breves momentos es, y ha sido siempre, uno de los principales apetitos del alma.

El afán de trascender del autoconsciente es, como he dicho, un principal apetito del alma.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the departed soul is described as shrinking in agony from the Pure Light of the Void, and even from the lesser, tempered Lights, in order to rush headlong into the comforting darkness of selfhood as a reborn human being, or even as a beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen of hell. Anything rather than the burning brightness of unmitigated Reality—anything!

That art thou': 'Behold but One in all things' -God within and God without. There is a way to Reality in and through the soul, and there is a way to Reality in and through the world. Whether the ultimate goal can be reached by following either of these ways to the exclusion of the other is to be doubted. The third, best and hardest way is that which leads to the divine Ground simultaneously in the perceiver and in that which is perceived.

It is the inactivity of self-will and ego-centred cleverness that makes possible the activity within the emptied and purified soul of the eternal Suchness. And when eternity is known in the heights within, it is also known in the fullness of experience, outside in the world.

It seemed to her as if her body were altogether too heavy for her; she had the feeling so well known to opium- smokers, which they call clou'e 'a terre. It is as if the body clung desperately to the earth, by its own weight, and yet in the same way as a tired child nestles to its mother's breast. In this sensation there is a perfect lassitude mingled with a perfect longing. It may be that it is the counterpart of the freedom of the soul of which it is the herald and companion.

The Universe is the looking-glass of the soul.