Quotes About Soul

After a short time, she was not very much interested in being good. Her soul was in quest of something, which was not just being good, and doing one's best. No, she wanted something else: something that was not her ready-made duty. Everything seemed to be merely a matter of social duty, and never of her self. They talked about her soul, but somehow never managed to rouse or implicate her soul. As yet her soul was not brought in at all.

Is there not the massive brilliant, out-flinging recklessness in the male soul, summed up in the sudden word: Andiamo! Andiamo! Let us go on. Andiamo!—let us go hell knows where, but let us go on. The splendid recklessness and passion that knows no precept and no school-teacher, whose very molten spontaneity is its own guide

Hope had become almost a curse to her. She wished there need be no such thing. Ha, the torment of hoping, and the insult to one's soul.

The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy, -- the age when half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and tramps and thieves, and millionaires and -- sometimes -- Negroes, became throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we half gasped with surprise, crying, Thou too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow and the dull waters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life?

the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission.

In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil;

One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body

But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the higher against the lower races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and

men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

My laps-meter, the first caliper of the soul and the first hope of bridging the dread chasm that has rent the soul of Western man ever since the famous philosopher Descartes ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own house.

At the end of an age, the denizens of the age still profess to believe that they can understand themselves by the theory of the age, yet they behave as if they did not believe it. The surest sign that an age is coming to an end is the paradoxical movement of the most sensitive souls of the age, the artists and writers first, then the youth, in a direction exactly opposite to the direction laid down by the theory of the age.

The key to peace within my soul, he said, was to cast aside my bitterness and resentment

Argue not concerning God,…re-examine all that you have been told at church or school or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your soul…

Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson     done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the     themes thou lovest best, Night, sleep, death and the stars. — Walt Whitman, "A Clear Midnight," Leaves of Grass. Originally published: July 4, 1855.

Clear and sweet is my soul, clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.

I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's-self is

What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the words I have read in my life.

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul, The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue.

I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls. -from Song of the Open Road

The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happiness, I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times, Now it flows unto us, we are rightly charged.

Songs of myself I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul, The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into new tongue. I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,..