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Quotes About Soul

From the moment of birth, the hunger of death feeds from an army of life. Day by day it creeps ever closer, a silent, merciless hunter, its endurance without end, its clemency non-existent. It chews on the mind, feeds on the body, digests the spirit, and regurgitates the soul. It is the single, inescapable, inevitable end of everyone, and
~ Thomas L. Scott
Modern literature is a north-east wind--a blight of the human soul. I take credit to myself for having helped to make it so. The way to produce fine fruit is to blight the flower. You call this a paradox. Marry, so be it.
~ Thomas Love Peacock
What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!
~ Thomas Mann
For he used to say...that knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.
~ Thomas Mann
But he immediately felt he did not really want to take that step. It would lead him back, give his soul back to himself; but when one is frantic, the last thing one desires is to be oneself again.
~ Thomas Mann
Bei einem Volk von der Art des unsrigen", trug ich vor, "ist das Seelische immer das Primäre und eigentlich Motivierende; die politische Aktion ist zweiter Ordnung, Reflex, Ausdruck, Instrument.
~ Thomas Mann
So long as we are, death is not; and when death is present, we are not. In other words, between death and us there is no rapport; it is something with which we have nothing to do - and only incidentally the world and nature.
~ Thomas Mann
l'homme, lui aussi, est un être dualiste. Le problème de son âme consiste dans le conflit entre le physique et le métaphysique, et tout ce qui est social demeure secondaire.
~ Thomas Mann
Now I know that it is not out of our single souls we dream. We dream anonymously and communally, if each after his fashion. The great soul of which we are a part may dream through us, in our manner of dreaming, its own secret dreams, of its youth, its hope, its joy and peace—and its blood-sacrifice. Here
~ Thomas Mann
Güzellik ve ruhun, heyecan ve coÅŸkuda birleÅŸmesi gibi, yaÅŸam ve ölüm de aÅŸkta birleÅŸir.
~ Thomas Mann
War! It is purification, liberation, an enormous hope. . . . The victory of Germany will be a paradox, nay, a wonder: a victory of the soul over numbers. . . . The German soul is opposed to the pacifist ideal of civilization, for is not peace the element, of civil corruption?
~ Thomas Mann
Every moment and every event of everyman's life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men.
~ Thomas Merton
The soul of man, left to its own natural level, is a potentially lucid crystal left in darkness. It is perfect in its own nature, but it lacks something that it can only receive from outside and above itself. But when the light shines in it, it becomes in a manner transformed into light and seems to lose its nature in the splendor of a higher nature, the nature of the light that is in it.
~ Thomas Merton
Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity, and love.
~ Thomas Merton
Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.
~ Thomas Merton
Contemplation means rest, suspension of activity, withdrawal into the mysterious interior solitude in which the soul is absorbed in the immense and fruitful silence of God and learns something of the secret of His perfections less by seeing than by fruitive love.
~ Thomas Merton
Hope is proportionate to detachment. It brings our souls into the state of the most perfect detachment. In doing so, it restores all values by setting them in their right order. Hope empties our hands in order that we may work with them. It shows us that we have something to work for, and teaches us how to work for it.
~ Thomas Merton
We do not hope for what we have. Therefore, to live in hope is to live in poverty, having nothing. And yet, if we abandon ourselves to economy of Divine Providence, we have everything we hope for. By faith we know God without seeing Him. By hope we possess God without feeling His presence. If we hope in God, by hope we already possess Him, since hope is a confidence which He creates in our souls as secret evidence that He has taken possession of us.
~ Thomas Merton
The life of the soul is not knowledge, it is love, since love is the act of the supreme faculty, the will, by which man is formally united to the final end of all his strivings—by which man becomes one with God.
~ Thomas Merton
Consequently, the truth of God lives in our souls more by the power of superior moral courage than by the light of an eminent intelligence. Indeed, spiritual intelligence itself depends on the fortitude and patience with which we sacrifice ourselves for the truth, as it is communicated to our lives concretely in the providential will of God
~ Thomas Merton
Just as bees are driven out by smoke, and their honey is taken away from them, so a life of ease drives out the fear of the Lord from man's soul and takes away all his good works.
~ Thomas Merton
It is good for the soul to be in solitude for a great part of the time. But if it should seek solitude for its own comfort and consolation, it will have to endure more darkness and more anguish and more trial. Pure prayer only takes possession of our hearts for good when we no longer desire any special light or grace or consolation for ourselves, and pray without any thought of our own satisfaction.
~ Thomas Merton
Ultimately the only way that I can be myself is to become identified with Him in Whom is hidden the reason and fulfillment of my existence.
~ Thomas Merton
CII ABBOT PASTOR said: Just as bees are driven out by smoke, and their honey is taken away from them, so a life of ease drives out the fear of the Lord from man's soul and takes away all his good works.
~ Thomas Merton