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The Soul...
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Published Thursday, November 20, 2014 @ 9:54 PM EST
Nov 20 2014

A common concept of the soul is that the essence of a self lies in some spark of invisible light, a thing that cowers out of body, out of mind, and out of sight.... To look for our virtue in such thoughts seems just as wrongly aimed a search as seeking art in canvas cloths by scraping off the painter's works.
-Marvin Minsky

A consistent soul believes in destiny, a capricious one in chance.
-Benjamin Disraeli

A fella ain't got a soul of his own, just a piece of a big soul, the one that belongs to everybody.
-John Steinbeck

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

A good person will resist an evil system with his whole soul. Disobedience of the laws of an evil state is therefore a duty.
-Mohandas K. Gandhi

A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.
-Saul Bellow

A little righteous anger really brings out the best in the American personality. Our nation was born when 56 patriots got mad enough to sign the Declaration of Independence. We put a man on the moon because Sputnik made us mad at being number two in space. Getting mad in a constructive way is good for the soul- and the country.
-Lee Iacocca

A room without books is like a body without a soul.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero

A soul is a troublesome possession, and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden.
-W. Somerset Maugham

All humanity is one undivided and indivisible family, and each one of us is responsible for the misdeeds of all the others. I cannot detach myself from the wickedest soul.
-Mohandas K. Gandhi

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
-Iris Murdoch

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
-Pablo Picasso

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
-H.L. Mencken

Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.
-Plato

Be careless in your dress, if you must; but keep a tidy soul.
-Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.
-Alexander Pope

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.
-George Eliot

Books are the mirrors of the soul.
-Virginia Woolf

Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A house without books is like a room without windows.
-Horace Mann

But the world will never weary of watching that troubled soul in its progress from darkness to darkness.
-Oscar Wilde

Celebrity is a corrosive condition for the soul.
-Charlton Heston

Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.
-Alexander Pope

Confession is good for the conscience, but it usually bypasses the soul.
-Mignon McLaughlin

Confession is good for the soul in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff.
-Peter De Vries

Corporations cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicated, for they have no souls.
-Sir Edward Coke

Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.
-Agatha Christie

Defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.
-Edwin Markham

Difficulties break some men but make others. No axe is sharp enough to cut the soul of a sinner who keeps on trying, one armed with the hope that he will rise even in the end.
-Nelson Mandela

Do you, good people, believe that Adam and Eve were created in the Garden of Eden and that they were forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge? I do. The church has always been afraid of that tree. It still is afraid of knowledge. Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas. So does whiskey. I believe in the brain of man. I'm not worried about my soul.
-Clarence Darrow

Don't let your hearts grow numb. Stay alert. It is your soul which matters.
-Albert Schweitzer

Every human soul is of infinite value, eternal, free; no human being, therefore, is so placed as not to have within his reach, in himself and others, objects adequate to infinite endeavor.
-Arthur James Balfour

Every writer dips his brush into his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
-Henry Ward Beecher

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires,- Necessity and Free Will.
-Thomas Carlyle

Fame like a drunkard consumes the house of the soul.
-Malcolm Lowry

Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and 50 cents for your soul.
-Marilyn Monroe

How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?
-Carson McCullers

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
-William Butler Yeats

Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.
-Jimmy Carter

I believe that in our constant search for security we can never gain any peace of mind until we are secure in our own soul.
-Margaret Chase Smith

I believe that man will not merely endure, he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he, alone among creatures, has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
-William Faulkner

I belong to the Great Church which holds the world within its starlit aisles; that claims the great and good of every race and clime; that finds with joy the grain of gold in every creed, and floods with light and love the germs of good in every soul.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

I cannot believe that there is any being in this universe who has created a human soul for eternal pain. I would rather that every god would destroy himself; I would rather that we all should go to eternal chaos, to black and starless night, than that just one soul should suffer eternal agony.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
-Albert Einstein

I do not mind if I lose my soul for all eternity. If the kind of God exists Who would damn me for not working out a deal with Him, then that is unfortunate. I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person.
-Mary McCarthy

I don't actually take much stock in the collapsing culture bit. I'm beginning to see it instead as the conduct of life without input from your soul.
-Saul Bellow

I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.
-Maya Angelou

I have never yet met a healthy person who worries very much about his health or a really good person who worries much about his own soul.
-J.B.S. Haldane

I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul. (From the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes)
-Bill Watterson

I once loved a woman, a child I am told
I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul.
But don't think twice, it's all right.
-Bob Dylan

I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.
-Woody Allen

I would permit no man, no matter what his color might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
-Booker T. Washington

If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.
-James Herriot

If my soul exists without my body I am convinced all my clothes will be loose-fitting.
-Woody Allen

If we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls.
-Maya Angelou

If you are losing your leisure, look out; you may be losing your soul.
-Logan Pearsall Smith

If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.
-Charles Bukowski

Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.
-Virginia Woolf

Impropriety is the soul of wit.
-W. Somerset Maugham

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald

In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul.
-Albert Camus

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
-John Steinbeck

Invest in the human soul. Who knows, it might be a diamond in the rough.
-Mary McLeod Bethune

It does not matter so much what you do. What matters is whether your soul is harmed by what you do. If your soul is harmed, something irreparable happens, the extent of which you won't realize until it will be too late.
-Albert Schweitzer

It is by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it not for individual experiences which differ from those of others only in details seemingly trifling.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

It is only the souls that do not love that go empty in this world.
-Robert Hugh Benson

It is the still, small voice that the soul heeds, not the deafening blasts of doom.
-William Dean Howells

It is with narrow-souled people as with narrow-necked bottles; the less they have in them the more noise they make in pouring out.
-Alexander Pope

It will be a great thing for the human soul when it finally stops worshiping backwards.
-Charlotte Perkins Gilman

It's good for the soul to hear yourself as others hear you, and next time maybe, just maybe, you will not talk so much, so loudly, so brilliantly, so charmingly, so utterly shamelessly foolishly.
-Russell Baker

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.
-Stella Adler

Like body and soul theory and practice are one, and like body and soul they are for the most part at loggerheads.
-Marie Ebner von Ebner-Eschenbach

Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.
-Aristotle

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
-Zora Neale Hurston

Man has sold his soul for time, language, tools, weapons, and dominance.
-William S. Burroughs

Man has wrested from nature the power to make the world a desert or to make deserts bloom. There is no evil in the atom; only in men's souls.
-Adlai E. Stevenson II

Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.
-Robert Penn Warren

More men discover their souls in darkness than they do in light. This is not to invite darkness; it is only to be reminded that darkness need not go to waste when it is thrust upon us.
-Fulton J. Sheen

Most of the world's great souls have been lonely.
-Aiden Wilson Tozer

Most people sell their souls and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.
-Logan Pearsall Smith

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.
-Aldous Huxley

My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.
-James Joyce

My soul lives in a place where the passions have passed by and where I have known them all.
-Joseph Joubert

Never let a man imagine that he can pursue a good end by evil means, without sinning against his own soul. The evil effect on himself is certain.
-Robert Southey

Obscurity can be a fire of ambition in those who have stalwart souls.
-Taylor Caldwell

One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk. I was struck by that and meant to try it, but knew I shouldn't waste the milk.
-Alice Munro

Only the soul that suffers knows its suffering. Only the one who needs knows what need means.
-W.E.B. DuBois

Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
-Oscar Wilde

Our critics are the unpaid guardians of our souls.
-Corrie ten Boom

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.
-Carl Jung

Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
-Edward Abbey

Some day you will know that there is a beauty of the soul that is more important than worldly beauty. Remember this when you see worldly beauty.
-John P. Marquand

Suffering is not good for the soul, unless it teaches you to stop suffering.
-Jane Roberts

The eyes are the window to where the soul is supposed to be.
-Tina Fey

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it- basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.
-Charles Bukowski

The greatest battles in life are fought in the quiet chambers of the soul.
-David O. McKay

The happiest people I have known have been those who gave themselves no concern about their own souls, but did their uttermost to mitigate the miseries of others.
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The imagination is the eye of the soul.
-Joseph Joubert

The real lost souls don't wear their hair long and play guitars. They have crew cuts, trained minds, sign on for research in biological warfare, and don't give their parents a moment's worry.
-John Boynton Priestley

The Soul is born old, but it grows young; that is the comedy of life. The Body is born young and grows old; that is life's tragedy.
-Oscar Wilde

The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.
-Daniel Defoe

The soul may sleep and the body still be happy, but only in youth.
-Mignon McLaughlin

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.
-Emily Dickinson

There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.
-Elie Wiesel

There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.
-Victor Hugo

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
-Thomas Paine

They were trying to save their souls- and who but a fool could fail to see that all that was the matter with their souls was that they had not been able to get a decent existence for their bodies?
-Upton Sinclair

Violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.
-Robert F. Kennedy

Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.
-Walt Whitman

Whatever the soul knows how to seek, it cannot fail to obtain.
-Margaret Fuller

When one great passion seizes possession of the soul all other feelings are crowded out.
-Lucy Maud Montgomery

When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.
-Edward R. Murrow

You can lend them your talents, but don't give them your soul.
-Alan Alda

You do not 'have' a soul- you ARE a soul. You 'have' a body.
-C.S. Lewis

You got to decide what your soul can handle and how you want to be seen.
-Marc Maron

You start out giving your hat, then you give your coat, then your shirt, then your skin and finally your soul.
-Charles de Gaulle

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(November 21 is also the birthday of Voltaire )


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