Quotes About Soul

Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.

Monsieur Bienvenu was simply a man who accepted these mysterious questions...and who had in his soul a deep respect for the mystery which enveloped them.

On the one side blind force, on the other a soul.

He said to himself that he really had not suffered enough to deserve such radiant happiness, and he thanked God, in the depths of his soul, for having permitted that he, a miserable man, should be so loved by this innocent being. -Jean Valjean about Cossette-

If there is anything more heart-breaking than a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul which is dying from hunger for the light.

We say and exclaim within ourselves without breaking silence, in a tumult wherein everything speaks except our mouth. The realities of the soul are none the less real for being invisible and impalpable.

Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and grief! He who has not seen the things of this world, and the heart of men in this double light, has seen nothing, and knows noting of the truth.

To breath the air of Paris preserves the soul.

The night was starless and very dark. Without doubt, in the gloom some mighty angel was standing, with outstretched wings, awaiting the soul.

Quant au mode de prier, peu importe le nom, pourvu qu'il soit sincère. Tournez votre livre à l'envers et soyez à l'infini As for how you pray, the words do not matter if they are sincere. Turn your prayer book upside down and face the infinite.

The most beautiful of altars, he said, is the soul of an unhappy creature consoled and thanking God.

Strong and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always a stepmother, is sometimes a mother; privation gives birth to power of soul and mind; distress is the nurse of self-respect; misfortune is a good breast for great souls.

He did not seek to assume the mantle of Elijah, to shed a light of the future upon the misty turmoil of events or resolve the prevailing light into a single flame; there was in him nothing of the prophet or the mystic. He was a simple soul who loved, and that was all.

The soul does not give up to despair until it has exhausted all illusions.

To crush fanaticism and to venerate the infinite, such is the law. Let us not confine ourselves to prostrating ourselves before the tree of creation, and to the contemplation of its branches full of stars. We have a duty to labor over the human soul, to defend the mystery against the miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and reject the absurd, to admit, as an inexplicable fact, only what is necessary, to purify belief, to remove superstitions from above religion; to clear God of caterpillars.

The pupil dilates in the night, and at last finds day in it, even as the soul dilates in misfortune, and at last finds God in it.

One can no more prevent the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. In the case of the sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty, it is called remorse. God upheaves the soul as well as the ocean.

No temamos nunca ni a los ladrones ni a los asesinos: esos son los peligros exteriores, los pequeños peligros. Las preocupaciones, esas son los ladrones; los vicios, esos son los asesinos. Los grandes peligros existen dentro de nosotros. ¿Qué importa lo que amenaza a nuestra cabeza o a nuestra bolsa? Pensemos con preferencia en lo que amenaza a nuestra alma.

Let us never fear robbers not murderers. Those are dangers from without, petty dangers. Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves. What matters is what threatens our heads or our purse! Let us think only of that which threatens our soul.

In moments like these, offering up his heart at the hour that night flowers offer up their perfume, lit up like a lamp in the middle of the starry night, full of ecstasy in the middle of the universal radiance of creation, he could not perhaps have said himself what was happening in his spirit; he felt something soar up out of him and something fly down into him. Mysterious exchanges between the bottomless well of the soul and the bottomless well of the universe!

When we reach out to pluck a flower the stem trembles, seeming both to shrink and to offer itself. The human body has something of this tremor at the moment when the mysterious hand of death reaches out to pluck a soul.

Nothing is more real than those great seismic shocks that two souls give each other in exchanging that spark.

exquisite--such was Fantine; and beneath these feminine adornments and these ribbons one could divine a statue, and in that statue a soul.

Is there not in every human soul, was there not in the soul of Jean Valjean in particular, a first spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world, immortal in the other, which good can develop, fan, ignite, and make to glow with splendor, and which evil can never wholly extinguish?