A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes.
We are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleeps, and the slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul. It is the litigation of sense, but the liberty of reason; and our waking conceptions do not match the fancies of our sleeps.--_Sir T. Browne._
Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.
Sincerity is the face of the soul, as dissimulation is the mask.
It is not a circumscribed situation so much as a narrow vision that creates pedants; not having a pet study or science, but a narrow, vulgar soul, which prevents a man from seeing all sides and hearing all things; in short, the intolerant man is the real pedant.--_Richter._
The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, / Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.
We that acquaint ourselves with every zone, / And pass the tropics, and behold each pole; / When we come home, are to ourselves unknown, / And unacquainted still with our own soul.
O blessed rest! When we rest not day and night, saying, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty!"--when we shall rest from sin, but not from worship; from suffering and sorrow, but not from joy! O blessed day, when I shall rest with God; when I shall rest in knowing, loving, rejoicing, and praising; when my perfect soul and body shall together perfectly enjoy the most perfect God; when God, who is love itself, shall perfectly love me, and rest in His love to me, and I shall rest in my love to Him; when He shall rejoice over me with joy, and joy over me with singing, and I shall rejoice in Him!--=Baxter.=
My soul will find yours.
The soul is like the sun, which, to our eyes, seems to set in night; but it has in reality only gone to diffuse its light elsewhere.
I often observed to my brother, You see now how little nature requires to be satisfied. Felicity, the companion of content, is rather found in our own breasts than in the enjoyment of external things; And I firmly believe it requires but a little philosophy to make a man happy in whatsoever state he is. This consists in a full resignation to the will of Providence; and a resigned soul finds pleasure in a path strewed with briars and thorns.
I have seen the truth; I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at. But how can I help believing it? I have seen the truth — it is not as though I had invented it with my mind, I have seen it, seen it, and the living image of it has filled my soul for ever.
The one thing of value in the world is the active soul.
Immortality will come to such as are fit for it; and he who would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now.
There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not sooner or later responded.
And keeps the palace of the soul.
There is a tendency to class such men with toreadors and gamblers. People extol their contempt for death. But I would not give a fig for anybody’s contempt for death. If its roots are not sunk deep in an acceptance of responsibility, this contempt for death is the sign either of an impoverished soul or of youthful extravagance.
My Father, I am coming. Nothing on the mean plain shall keep me away from the holy heights. Help me to climb fast, and keep Thou my foot, lest it fall upon the hard rock! At Thy bidding I come, so Thou wilt not mock my heart. Bring with Thee honey from heaven, yea, milk and wine, and oil for my soul's good, and stay the sun in his course, or the time will be too short in which to look upon Thy face, and to hear Thy gentle voice.
You can dwarf a soul just as you can dwarf a plant, by depriving it of a full environment. Such a soul for a time may have a "name to live." Its character may betray no sign of atrophy. But its very virtue somehow has the pallor of a flower that is grown in darkness, or as the herb which has never seen the sun, no fragrance breathes from its spirit. Natural Law, p. 173.
No words suffice the secret soul to show, For truth denies all eloquence to woe.
The light by which we see in this world comes out from the soul of the observer.
I count life just a stuff / To try the soul's strength on.
The worship of beauty apart from the soul becomes an idolatry enkindling desire instead of a reverence awakening devotion.
It has been well said that "earthly cares are a heavenly discipline," but they are even something better than discipline; they are God's chariots, sent to take the soul to its high places of triumph. In the Canticles we are told of "a chariot paved with love." We cannot always see the love lining to our own particular chariot--it often looks very unlovely; but every chariot sent by God must necessarily be paved with love, since God is love. It is His love, indeed, that sends the chariot.
Would you damn your precious soul?
When brothers part for manhood's race, / What gift may most endearing prove / To keep fond memory in her place, / And certify a brother's love? / ... No fading frail memorial give / To sooth his soul when thou art gone, / But wreathes of hope for aye to live, / And thoughts of good together done.
Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good.
Ethics makes man's soul mannerly and wise, but logic is the armoury of reason, furnished with all offensive and defensive weapons.
How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!
Only a sweet and virtuous soul, / Like seasoned timber, never gives: / But when the whole world turns to coal, / Then chiefly lives.
Is there a parson much bemused in beer, A maudlin poetess, a rhyming peer, A clerk foredoom'd his father's soul to cross, Who pens a stanza when he should engross?
Il faut avoir une ame=--It is indispensable that we should have a soul.
Before this century shall run out journalism will be the whole press. Mankind will write their book day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will spread abroad with the rapidity of light; instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood at the extremities of the earth; it will spread from Pole to Pole, suddenly burning with the fervor of soul which made it burst forth; it will be the reign of the human mind in all its plenitude; it will not have time to ripen, to accumulate in the form of a book; the book will arrive too late; the only book possible from day to day is a newspaper.--_Lamartine._
The problem of uniting the invisible and visible worlds presented itself under three principal aspects. The first was the problem of creation, or how the invisible Primal Cause could ever come in contact with visible matter and impart to it form and meaning. The second problem was the relation between God and the individual soul. The third problem was the return of the soul from the visible to the invisible world, from the prison of its mortal body to the freedom of a heavenly paradise. The individual soul as dwelling in a material body forms part of the created world, and the question of the return of the soul to God is therefore closely connected with that of its creation by, or its emanation from, God.
To refuse to deny one's self is just to be left with the self undented. When the balance of life is struck, the self will be found still there. The discipline of life was meant to destroy this self, but that discipline having been evaded--and we all to some extent have opportunities, and too often exercise them, of taking the narrow path by the shortest cuts--its purpose is baulked. But the soul is the loser. In seeking to gain its life it has really lost it. Natural Law, Mortification, p. 196.
The forests in summer days are full of birds' nests. They are hidden among the leaves. The little birds know where they are; and when a storm arises, or when night draws on, they fly, each to his own nest. So the promises of God are hidden in the Bible, like nests in the great forests; and thither we should fly in any danger or alarm, hiding there in our soul's nest until the storm be overpast. There are no castles in this world so impregnable as the words of Christ.--_J. R. Miller._
A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.
Let fortune empty her whole quiver on me, / I have a soul that, like an ample shield, / Can take in all, and verge enough for more.
Persons are love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul, wandering here in nature to the power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts.
An upright intention is the soul of our actions. It gives them life, and makes them good.--ST. ALPHONSUS.
Visions of glory, spare my aching sight! Ye unborn ages, crowd not on my soul!
When the soul has once reached that union with God, nay, when it lives in the constant presence of God, evil becomes almost impossible. We know that most of the evil deeds to which human nature is prone are possible in the dark only. Before the eyes of another human being, more particularly of a beloved being, they become at once impossible. How much more in the real presence of a real and really beloved God, as felt by the true mystic, not merely as a phrase, but as a fact? As long as there is no veil between him and God, evil thoughts, evil words, and evil deeds are simply impossible to one who feels the actual presence of God. Nor is he troubled any longer by questions, such as how the world was created, how evil came into the world. He is satisfied with the Divine Love that embraces his soul; he has all that he can desire, his whole life is hid through Christ in God, death is swallowed up in victory, the mortal has become immortal, neither death nor life, nor things present, nor things to come, is able to separate his soul from the love of God.
L'excellence et la grandeur d'une ame brille et eclate d'avantage dans le mepris de richesse=--The excellence and greatness of a soul are most conspicuously and strikingly displayed in the contempt of riches.
Every age hath its own problem, and every soul its particular aspiration. The remedy the world needeth in its present-day afflictions can never be the same as that which a subsequent age may require. Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in, and centre your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements.
Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that it may be uttered and acted. The more profound the thought, the more burdensome. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done.
The dome of thought, the palace of the soul.
Not in nature, but in man is all the beauty and the worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for its pride.
The immortality of the soul is a matter of so great moment to us, it touches us so deeply, that we must have lost all feeling if we are careless of the truth about it. Our every action and our every thought must take such different courses, according as there are or are not eternal blessings for which to hope, that it is impossible to take a single step with sense or judgment, save in view of that point which ought to be our end and aim.
Art does not imitate nature, but it founds itself on the study of nature--takes from nature the selections which best accord with its own intention, and then bestows on them that which nature does not possess, namely, the mind and the soul of man.--_Bulwer-Lytton._
In proportion as the love of God increases in our soul, so does also the love of suffering.--ST. VINCENT DE PAUL.
Ignorance is mere privation, by which nothing can be produced; it is a vacuity in which the soul sits motionless and torpid for want of attraction.--_Johnson._
Non satis est pulchra esse poemata; dulcia sunto, / Et quocumque volent animum auditoris agunto=--It is not enough that poems be beautiful; they must also be affecting, and move at will the hearer's soul.
What though our eyes with tears be wet? The sunrise never failed us yet. The blush of dawn may yet restore Our light and hope and joy once more. Sad soul, take comfort, nor forget That sunrise never failed us yet!
The soul's armour is never well set to the heart unless a woman's hand has braced it.
"I know not who has sent me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am; I am terribly ignorant of every thing; I know not what my body is, nor my senses, nor my soul, nor even that part of me which thinks what I say, which reflects on all and on itself, yet is as ignorant of itself as of all beside. I see those dreadful spaces of the universe which close me in, and I find myself fixed in one corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am set in this place rather than elsewhere, nor why this moment of time given me for life is assigned to this point rather than another of the whole Eternity which was before me or which shall be after me. I see nothing but infinities on every side, which close me round as an atom, and as a shadow which endures but for an instant and returns no more. I know only that I must shortly die, but what I know the least is this very death which I cannot avoid.
Tho' world on world in myriad myriads roll / Round us, each with different powers, / And other form of life than ours, / What know we greater than the soul?
Negligence is the rust of the soul, that corrodes through all her best resolves.
You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
J. C. Ryle observed, “A man may preach from false motives. A man may write books, and make fine speeches, and seem diligent in good works, and yet be a Judas Iscariot. But a man seldom goes into his closet, and pours out his soul before God in secret, unless he is serious.
He wanted a woman to hope for happiness through all the pain. Deep, soul-searing pain was his kink.
It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.
Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.
To smell to a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the body; no less are thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul.
You left pieces of your soul inside me,
The body of a sensualist is the coffin of a dead soul.
"Knowest thou not that our soul is composed of harmony, and harmony can only be begotten in the moments when the proportions of objects are simultaneously visible and audible? Seest thou not that in thine art there is no harmony created in a moment, and that, on the contrary, each part follows from the other in succession, and the second is not born before its predecessor dies. For this reason I consider thy creation to be considerably inferior to that of the painter, simply because no harmonious concord ensues from it. It does not satisfy the mind of the spectator or the listener, as the harmony of the perfect features which compose the divine beauty of this face which is before me; for the features united all together simultaneously afford me a pleasure which I consider to be unsurpassed by any other thing on the earth which is made by man."
Flowers never emit so sweet and strong a fragrance as before a storm. Beauteous soul! when a storm approaches thee be as fragrant as a sweet-smelling flower.--_Richter._
The object of true religion should be to impress the principles of morality deeply in the soul.
I cannot help thinking that the souls towards whom we feel drawn in this life are the very souls whom we knew and loved in a former life, and that the souls who repel us here, we do not know why, are the souls that earned our disapproval, the souls from whom we kept aloof, in a former life. But let us remember that if our love is the love of what is merely phenomenal, the love of the body, the kindness of the heart, the vigour and wisdom of the intellect, our love is the love of changing and perishable things.... But if our love, under all its earthly aspects, was the love of the true soul, of what is immortal and divine in every man and woman, that love cannot die, but will find once more what seems beautiful, true, and lovable in worlds to come, as in worlds that have passed.... What we truly love in everything is the eternal _âtman_, the immortal self, and as we should add, the immortal God, for the immortal self and the immortal God must be one.
The sublime produces a beautiful calmness in the soul which, entirely possessed by it, feels as great as it ever can feel. When we compare such a feeling with that we are sensible of when we laboriously harass ourselves with some trifle, and strain every nerve to gain as much as possible for it, as it were, to patch it out, striving to furnish joy and aliment to the mind from its own creation, we then feel sensibly what a poor expedient, after all, the latter is.
Man is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man Commands all light, all influence, all fate. Nothing to him falls early, or too late. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.
The infinite was not discovered behind the veil of nature only, though its manifestation in physical phenomena was no doubt the most primitive and the most fertile source of mythological and religious ideas. There were two more manifestations of the infinite and the unknown, which must not be neglected, if we wish to gain a complete insight into the theogonic process through which the human mind had to pass from its earliest days. The infinite disclosed itself not only in nature but likewise in man, looked upon as an object, and lastly in man looked upon as a subject. Man looked upon as an object, as a living thing, was felt to be more than a mere part of nature. There was something in man, whether it was called breath or spirit or soul or mind, which was perceived and yet not perceived, which was behind the veil of the body, and from a very early time was believed to remain free from decay, even when illness and death had destroyed the body in which it seemed to dwell. There was nothing to force even the simplest peasant to believe that because he saw his father dead, and his body decaying, therefore what was known as the man himself, call it his soul or his mind or his person, had vanished altogether out of existence. A philosopher may arrive at such an idea, but a man of ordinary understanding, though terrified by the aspect of death, would rather be inclined to believe that what he had known and loved and called his father or mother must be somewhere, though no longer in the body.... It is perhaps too much to say that such a belief was universal; but it certainly was and is still very widely spread. In fact it constitutes a very large portion of religion and religious worship.
Gravity is the ballast of the soul, which keeps the mind steady.
Mon c?ur aux dames, / Ma vie au roi, / A Dieu mon ame, / L'honneur pour moi=--My heart to the ladies, my life to the king, and my soul to God, but my honour is my own. _On a shield in the Royal Schloss, Berlin._
Poor the raiment you may wear, / Scanty fare at best be thine; / Let the soul within be clothed / With a majesty divine.
I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house, Wherein at ease for aye to dwell.
The truth of faith alone, deeply graven in the soul, is sufficient to encourage us to very perfect works; for it strengthens man and increases his charity.--ST. TERESA.
La conscience est la voix de l'ame, les passions sont la voix du corps=--Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body.
Der Gott, der mir im Busen wohnt, / Kann tief mein Innerstes erregen; der uber allen meinen Kraften thront, er kann nach aussen nichts bewegen=--The God who dwells in my breast can stir my inmost soul to its depths; he who sits as sovereign over all my powers has no control over things beyond.
Digressions incontestably are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading.
Each under his borrowed guise the actor belongs to himself. He has put on a mask, beneath it his real face still exists; he has thrown himself into a foreign individuality, which in some sense forms a shelter to the integrity of his own character; he may indeed wear festive attire, but his mourning is beneath it; he may smile, divert, act, his soul is still his own; his inner life is undisturbed; no indiscreet question will lift the veil, no coarse hand will burst open the gates of the sanctuary.--_Countess de Gasparin._
And yet, as angels in some brighter dreams Call to the soul when man doth sleep, So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes, And into glory peep.
There are sorrows / Where of necessity the soul must be / Its own support.
_Diversion._--Is not the royal dignity itself so truly great as to make its possessor happy by the mere contemplation of what he is? Must he be diverted from this thought like ordinary people? I see well enough that a man may be made happy by diverting him from the thought of his domestic sorrows so that he apply all his care to excel in dancing. But will it be the same with a king, and will he be happier if he devote himself to these idle amusements rather than to the contemplation of his greatness? And what more satisfactory object can he offer to his mind? Might it not be to lessen his content that he occupy his soul in thinking how to suit his steps to the cadence of an air, or how to throw a bar skilfully, rather than allow it to enjoy peacefully the contemplation of the majesty which wraps him round? Let us make the experiment, let us leave a king all alone, without any gratifications of sense, or any occupation for the mind, without companions, reflecting on himself at leisure, and it will be seen that a king without diversion is a man full of miseries. This is therefore carefully avoided, and there are always about the persons of kings a great number of people who watch to see that diversion succeeds to business, and look after their every hour of leisure to furnish them with pleasures and games, so that no vacancy may be left in life; that is, they are surrounded with persons who take wonderful pains that the king is never alone and able to think of self, knowing well that he will be miserable, king though he is, if he think of self.
The falsity of those philosophers who do not discuss the immortality of the soul. The falsity of their dilemma in Montaigne.
The largest soul of any country is altogether its own.
Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.
...you can hate a place with all your heart and soul and still be homesick for it.
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.
Whatever energy the soul expends must first be "taken into it from without." We are not Creators, but creatures; God is our refuge AND STRENGTH. Communion with God, therefore, is a scientific necessity; and nothing will more help the defeated spirit which is struggling in the wreck of its religious life than a common-sense hold of this biological principle that without Environment he can do nothing. Natural Law, Environment, p. 267.
Our Lord's ascension will have to be understood as a sublime idea, materialised in the language of children. Is not a real fact that happened, in a world in which nothing can happen against the will of God, better than any miracle? Why should we try to know more than we can know, if only we firmly believe that Christ's immortal spirit ascended to the Father? That alone is true immortality, divine immortality; not the resuscitation of the frail mortal body, but the immortality of the immortal divine soul. It was this rising of the Spirit, and not of the body, without which, as St. Paul said, our faith would be vain. It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing.