A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul. Franz Kafka
Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. William Hazlitt
You may house their bodies but not their souls. Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet: ‘On Children’, 1923
The soul is healed by being with children. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul. Wassily Kandinksy
What I feel is the emptiness of my soul. Graham Young, the Teacup Poisoner
I sold my soul and I’ve been trying to buy it back ever since. Inside Man 2006 starring Denzel Washington & Clive Owen & Jodie Foster & Christopher Plummer & Willem Dafoe & Chiwetel Ejiofor & Carlos Andres Gomez & Kim Director & James Ransone & Bernie Rachelle et al, director Spike Lee, bank boss
Your soul is required in hell. New Jack City 1991 starring Wesley Snipes & Ice-T & Judd Nelson & Allen Paynes & Chris Rock & Bill Nunn & Russell Wong & Bill Cobbs & Christopher Williams et al, director Mario van Peebles, grandad shoots Nino
It costs money to have a soul. Bullitt 1968 starring Steve McQueen & Robert Vaughn & Jacqueline Bisset & Don Gordon & Simon Oakland & Norman Fell & Robert Duvall & Georg Stanford Brown et al, director Peter Yates
I’ve got scar tissue on my soul. Year of the Dragon 1985 starring Mickey Rourke & John Lone & Ariane Koizumi & Raymond J Barry & Caroline Kava & Eddie Jones & Victor Wong et al, director Michael Cimino, Rourke to rozzers
According to my fellow performers I lack soul. Star Trek: The Next Generation s3e2: The Ensigns of Command, Data
We gave him a soul, B’Elanna. Do we have the right to take it away now? Star Trek: Voyager s5e11: Latent Image, Janeway
Many people who come back from the brink of death tell a similar tale. Some are convinced their experiences prove the Soul exists; sceptics disagree. Conspiracy Test: Near-Death Experiences, 2007
Some had an out-of-body experience. Others saw deities or figures central to their faith. And some talked to long dead relatives. Many experienced a powerful spiritual feeling that has transformed their lives. But the key question remains unanswered: do near-death experiences prove that our Spirit or Soul live on after our bodies have died? ibid.
People who have gone through near-death experiences often retain a strong conviction that they felt their soul leaving their body. Although the detail of such experiences vary there are common threads: many feel they are being transported from their bodies, guided by a divine Being. Nearly all report seeing a tunnel of light. And feeling a sense of total love and serenity. But are these feelings and visions coming from the Soul? ibid.
But do the recalled sensations of seeing a tunnel of light, feeling a divine presence, talking with other spirits or even God, prove that human consciousness survives spiritual death? ibid.
In 1911 researchers at the University of Pennsylvania tried to capture images of the soul using the newly invented X-Ray machine. Four years earlier a doctor from Massachusetts declared that he had proved the existence of the soul with a scale – he claimed his subjects lost a small amount of weight at the instance of death. The legend that the human soul weighs twenty-one grams was born. ibid.
It is perfectly certain that the soul is immortal and imperishable, and our souls will actually exist in another world. Socrates
A man should feel confident concerning his soul, who has renounced those pleasures and fineries that go with the body, and being alien to him, and considering them to result more in harm than in good, but has pursued the pleasures that go with learning and made the soul fine with no alien but rather its own proper refinements, moderation and justice and courage and freedom and truth; thus he is ready for the journey to the world below, ready to go when Fate calls him. Socrates
We all flow from one fountain – Soul. All are expressions of one love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favoured races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all. John Muir, letter to Miss Catharine Merrill, from New Sentinel Hotel Yosemite Valley 9 June 1872; cited Badè’s Life and Letters of John Muir
There must be places for human beings to satisfy their souls. Food and drink is not all. There is the spiritual. John Muir
But if we are guided by me we shall believe that the soul is immortal and capable of enduring all extremes of good and evil, and so we shall hold ever to the upward way and pursue righteousness with wisdom always and ever, that we may be dear to ourselves and to the gods both during our sojourn here and when we receive our reward. Plato, The Republic
’Tis a thing impossible, to frame
Conceptions equal to the soul’s desires;
And the most difficult of tasks to keep
Heights which the soul is competent to gain. William Wordsworth, The Excursion
The gods approve
The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul. William Wordsworth, Leodamia, 1815
I know no disease of the soul but ignorance: a pernicious evil, the darkener of man’s life, the disturber of his reason, and common confounder of Truth. Ben Jonson
cf.
I know no easy cure for a sick sick soul that bleeds. esias, c.2002
The soul: perhaps the most famous thinker to tackle the question of the soul’s relationship to the body was Rene Descartes, the French philosopher ... Descartes tried to explain how the soul could somehow exist apart in the body yet remain separate from it ... The thing we now call Duallism. Professor Macus du Sautoy, Horizon: The Secret You, BBC 2009
My soul is an enchanted boat,
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
A full and powerful soul can not only cope with painful, even terrible losses, privations, dispossessions and disdain: from such hells it emerges fuller and more powerful and – the crucial thing – with a new growth in the blissfulness of love. I believe that the man who has sensed something of the deepest conditions of every growth in love will understand Dante when he wrote over the gates of his Inferno: ‘I too was created by eternal love’. Friedrich Nietzsche, Notebook 7, end 1886 to spring 1887
Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul. Friedrich Nietzsche
May my soul bloom in love for all existence. Rudolf Steiner
Poor intricated soul! Riddling, perplexed, labyrinthical soul! John Donne 1572-1631, LXXX Sermons, 1640
Nowhere can a man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations bk4
In 1907 Doctor Duncan MacDougall of Boston weighed patients as they died. When one lost an ounce and a half MacDougall argued that the weight lost was caused by the soul’s departure. Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World, ITV 1980
I am afraid to own a Body –
I am afraid to own a Soul –
Profound - precarious Property –
Possession, not optional – Emily Dickinson
Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are. José Saramago, Blindness
Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you, – and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you! Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre