Religion

"—'Tis my soul That I thus hold erect as if with stays, And decked with daring deeds instead of ribbons, Twirling my wit as it were my moustache, The while I pass among the crowd, I make Bold truths ring out like spurs."

"Animus hoc habet argumentum divinitatis suæ, quod ilium divina delectant."

"Man who man would be Must rule the empire of himself."

"The soul is a fire that darts its rays through all the senses; it is in this fire that existence consists; all the observations and all the efforts of philosophers ought to turn towards this ME, the centre and moving power of our sentiments and our ideas."

"Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

"My soul is a dark ploughed field In the cold rain; My soul is a broken field Ploughed by pain."

"But this main-miracle that thou art thou, With power on thine own act and on the world."

"But while I breathe Heaven's air, and Heaven looks down on me, And smiles at my best meanings, I remain Mistress of mine own self and mine own soul."

"What profits now to understand The merits of a spotless shirt— A dapper boot—a little hand— If half the little soul is dirt."

"Her soul from earth to Heaven lies, Like the ladder of the vision, Wheron go To and fro, In ascension and demission, Star-flecked feet of Paradise."

"What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking."

"And keeps that palace of the soul serene."

"Were I so tall to reach the pole, Or grasp the ocean with my span, I must be measur'd by my soul: The mind's the standard of the man."

"My soul is all an aching void."

"A charge to keep I have, A God to glorify: A never-dying soul to save, And fit it for the sky."

"I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass."

"But who would force the Soul, tilts with a straw Against a Champion cased in adamant."

"For the Gods approve The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul."

"Lord of himself, though not of lands; And having nothing, yet hath all."

"The human soul is like a bird that is born in a cage. Nothing can deprive it of its natural longings, or obliterate the mysterious remembrance of its heritage."

"The universe, vast, beautiful, magnificent, as it is, cannot content the soul, but rouses it to more majestic thoughts. The wider view it takes of what is material, the more impatient it becomes of all material bonds. The sublimer the prospects which are opened by the universe, the more the spirit is impelled to ascend to a still sublimer being. Forever it aspires towards an infinite and immutable One as the ground of all finite and mutable existences. It can rest in His Omnipotence alone as the source, centre, sustainer, determiner of all forces."

"There is a remedy for every wrong and a satisfaction for every soul."

"The strongest love which the human heart has ever felt has been that for its Heavenly Parent. Was it not then constituted for this love?"

"As the flowers follow the sun, and silently hold up their petals to be tinted and enlarged by its shining, so must we, if we would know the joy of God, hold our souls, wills, hearts, and minds, still before Him, whose voice commands, whose love warns, whose truth makes fair our whole being.' God speaks for the most part in such silence only. If the soul be full of tumult and jangling voices, His voice is little likely to be heard."

"Oh! how seldom the soul is silent, in order that God may speak."

"Christ bounds and terminates the vast desires of the soul; He is the very Sabbath of the soul."

"Every thing here, but the soul of man, is a passing shadow. The only enduring substance is within. When shall we awake to the sublime greatness, the perils, the accountableness, and the glorious destinies of the immortal soul?"

"It is only when we see in human souls, taken as germs of power, a future magnitude and majesty transcending all present measures, that we come into any fit conception at all of Christ's mission to the world."

"Go and try to save a soul, and you will see how well it is worth saving, how capable it is of the most complete salvation. Not by pondering about it, nor by talking of it, but by saving it, you learn its preciousness."

"You can throw yourselves away. You can become of no use in the universe except for a warning. You can lose your souls. Oh, what a loss is that! The perversion and degradation of every high and immortal power for an eternity! And shall this be true of any one of you? Will you be lost when One has come from heaven, traveling in the greatness of His strength, and with garments dyed in blood, on purpose to guide you home—.home to a Father's house — to an eternal home?"

"Two things a master commits to his servant's care — the child and the child's clothes. It will be a poor excuse for the servant to say, at his master's return, " Sir, here are all the child's clothes, neat and clean, but the child is lost." Much so of the account that many will give to God of their souls and bodies at the great day. " Lord, here is my body; I am very grateful for it; I neglected nothing that belonged to its contents and welfare; but as for my soul, that is lost and cast away forever. I took little care and thought about it."

"We all dread a bodily paralysis, and would make use of every contrivance to avoid it; but none of us is troubled about a paralysis of the soul."

"The saddest of all failures is that of a soul, with its capabilities and possibilities, failing of life everlasting, and entering upon that night of death upon which morning never dawns."

"I'm down to sell records, but not my soul."

"Death, as the human consciousness understands it, pain and sorrow, loss and disaster, joy and distress, are only such because man, as yet, identifies himself with the life of the form and not with the life and consciousness of the soul..."

"The next two hundred years will see the abolition of death, as we now understand that great transition, and the establishing of the soul's existence. The soul will be known as an entity, as the motivating impulse, and the spiritual centre back of all manifested forms. . . . Our essential immortality will be demonstrated and realised to be a fact in nature."

"The relation of the soul to the Oversoul is that of the part towards the Whole, and it is this relation and its consequent recognitions, which develop into that sense of oneness with all beings and with the supreme Reality to which the mystics have always testified."

"Anima mea non sum ego."

"Antony ... used to say that it behooved a man to give all his time to his soul rather than his body, yet to grant a short space to the body through its necessities; but all the more earnestly to give up the whole remainder to the soul and seek its profit, that it might not be dragged down by the pleasures of the body, but, on the contrary, the body might be in subjection to the soul."

"Antony, however, according to his custom, returned alone to his own cell, increased his discipline, and sighed daily as he thought of the mansions in Heaven, having his desire fixed on them, and pondering over the shortness of man's life. And he used to eat and sleep, and go about all other bodily necessities with shame when he thought of the spiritual faculties of the soul. So often, when about to eat with any other hermits, recollecting the spiritual food, he begged to be excused, and departed far off from them, deeming it a matter for shame if he should be seen eating by others."

"The arts are a wonderful medicine for the soul."

"A mermaid has not an immortal soul, nor can she obtain one unless she wins the love of a human being. On the power of another hangs her eternal destiny. But the daughters of the air, although they do not possess an immortal soul, can, by their good deeds, procure one for themselves. We fly to warm countries, and cool the sultry air that destroys mankind with the pestilence. We carry the perfume of the flowers to spread health and restoration. After we have striven for three hundred years to all the good in our power, we receive an immortal soul and take part in the happiness of mankind. You, poor little mermaid, have tried with your whole heart to do as we are doing; you have suffered and endured and raised yourself to the spirit-world by your good deeds; and now, by striving for three hundred years in the same way, you may obtain an immortal soul."

"I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of another boy."

"In this fool's paradise, he drank delight."

"When we speak of "paradise," we must not fall into the trap of imagining it as a physical place with human or earthly characteristics. Paradise is not a place we can describe using the categories we use for our world, such as space, time, matter or energy. These are dimensions of reality that we know and study with science, but paradise goes beyond these limits. Science teaches us that the universe is governed by physical laws that regulate space, time, mass, energy and electrical charges. But what if there is a dimension or reality beyond these laws? We cannot rule out the possibility that a reality might exist outside the co-ordinates of space and time, a reality in which the notions of matter and energy, as we understand them, have no meaning. In the context of this reflection, paradise can be conceived as a reality that transcends all the physical laws of the universe. A reality that is not subject to the limitations of our earthly experience and that cannot be represented with human images or concepts. It is a dimension of existence that, by its very nature, is totally different from everything we know, and for this very reason we cannot imagine it as something anthropomorphic, that is, in our likeness."

"There is no expeditious road To pack and label men for God, And save them by the barrel-load. Some may perchance, with strange surprise, Have blundered into Paradise."

"The loves that meet in Paradise shall cast out fear, And Paradise hath room for you and me and all."

"Mahomet was taking his afternoon nap in his Paradise. An houri had rolled a cloud under his head, and he was snoring serenely near the fountain of Salsabil."

"Dry your eyes—O dry your eyes, For I was taught in Paradise To ease my breast of melodies."

"Unto you is paradise opened."