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The Soul Quotes

Browse 61 quotes about The Soul.

The Soul Quotes

“EVERYDAY MAINTENANCE OF THE SOUL What does it mean to care for your soul? Care of the soul is the constant practice of bringing loving attention to the problems, conflicts, and longings of our lives. Emotional suffering is something to be attended to, not split off from. We can learn to read our life as a story, rather than as a clinical case. Moreover, if the story we have been telling ourselves is a melodrama or tragedy, we need to rewrite the story. Every human life, when seen from the perspective of the unrelenting Divine Mercy, is the story of grace unfolding. Love is revealing itself in the precise details of each human life, if only we do not impose the script of self-pity, bitterness, and fearfulness. The soul is where the divine attributes of God may be awakened from their latent state to be integrated into our character. These qualities are the soul's natural inheritance from the Divine. It is through communion with the Divine that the soul takes on the spiritual attributes of kindness, generosity, courage, forgiveness, patience, and freedom.”

MindfulnessEnlightenmentAwakeningSufi WayThe SoulLiving PresenceThe Tradition Of Rumi
Book:Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self
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“In Sufism we understand the human being to be composed of three aspects: self, heart, and spirit. Self is the experience of our personal identity, including our thoughts and emotions. Heart is something deeper, experienced through an inner knowing, often with a quality of compassion, conscience, and love. It can ultimately lead to the recognition of the deepest part of ourselves - our inmost consciousness, or Spirit, the reflection of God within us. If we simply say that soul is our inner being, then the quality of our inner being, or soul, is the result of the relationship between self and our innermost consciousness, Spirit. The self without the presence of spirit is merely ego, the false mask, which is governed by self-centered thoughts and emotions. The more the self becomes infused with spirit, the more „soulful“ it becomes. We use the words presence and remembrance to describe the conscious connection between self and Spirit. The more we live mindfully with presence, the more we remember God, and the more soulful we are, the more we drop the mask. Care of the soul, then, is always the cultivation of presence and remembrance. Presence includes all the ways we mindfully attend to our lives. Soul is the child of the union of self and spirit. When this union has matured, the soul acquires substance and structure. That is why it is said in some teachings that we do not automatically have a soul; we must acquire one through our spiritual work. (p. 75)”

MindfulnessSufismSufi WayThe SoulLiving PresenceThe Great Work
Book:Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self
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“It's a queer thing is a man's soul. It is the whole of him. Which means it is the unknown him, as well as the known. It seems to me just funny, professors and Benjamins fixing the functions of the soul. Why, the soul of man is a vast forest, and all Benjamin intended was a neat back garden. And we've all got to fit into his kitchen garden scheme of things. Hail Columbia ! The soul of man is a dark forest. The Hercynian Wood that scared the Romans so, and out of which came the white- skinned hordes of the next civilization. Who knows what will come out of the soul of man? The soul of man is a dark vast forest, with wild life in it. Think of Benjamin fencing it off! Oh, but Benjamin fenced a little tract that he called the soul of man, and proceeded to get it into cultivation. Providence, forsooth! And they think that bit of barbed wire is going to keep us in pound for ever? More fools they. ... Man is a moral animal. All right. I am a moral animal. And I'm going to remain such. I'm not going to be turned into a virtuous little automaton as Benjamin would have me. 'This is good, that is bad. Turn the little handle and let the good tap flow,' saith Benjamin, and all America with him. 'But first of all extirpate those savages who are always turning on the bad tap.' I am a moral animal. But I am not a moral machine. I don't work with a little set of handles or levers. The Temperance- silence-order- resolution-frugality-industry-sincerity - justice- moderation-cleanliness-tranquillity-chastity-humility keyboard is not going to get me going. I'm really not just an automatic piano with a moral Benjamin getting tunes out of me. Here's my creed, against Benjamin's. This is what I believe: 'That I am I.' ' That my soul is a dark forest.' 'That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.' 'Thatgods, strange gods, come forth f rom the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.' ' That I must have the courage to let them come and go.' ' That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women.' There is my creed. He who runs may read. He who prefers to crawl, or to go by gasoline, can call it rot.”

VirtuesThe SoulThe Unconscious
Book:Studies in Classic American Literature
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“The soul is life, it never touches death. Death is its illusion, its impression, death comes to something which it holds, not to the soul itself. The soul becomes accustomed to identify itself with the body it adopts, with the environment which surrounds it, with the names by which it is known, with its rank and possessions, which are only the outward signs that belong to the world of illusion. The soul absorbed in its childlike fancies, in things that it values and to which it gives importance, and in the beings to which it attaches itself, blinds itself by the veils of its illusion. Thus it covers its own truth with a thousand veils from its own eyes.”

EnlightenmentSpiritual AwakeningSufi WisdomThe SoulHazrat Inayat KhanThe Heart Of Sufism
Book:The Heart of Sufism: Essential Writings of Hazrat Inayat Khan
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“The picture of God and of souls is that of the sun and its rays. The rays are not different from the sun; the sun is not different from the rays. Yet there is one sun and many rays. The rays have no existence of their own; they are only an action of the sun. They are not separate from the sun, and yet the rays appear to be many different rays. The one sun gives the idea of one center. So it is with God and man. What is God? The Spirit which projects different rays; and each ray is a soul. Therefore the breath is that current which is a ray, a ray which comes from that Sun which is the spirit of God. And this ray is the sign of life. What is the body? The body is only a cover over this ray. When this ray has withdrawn itself from this cover, the body becomes a corpse.”

Sufi WisdomThe SoulSufi GnosisHazrat Inayat KhanThe Heart Of SufismThe One SpiritThe Spirit Of God
Book:The Heart of Sufism: Essential Writings of Hazrat Inayat Khan
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“There are two inevitable conditions of life, confronting all of us, which destroy its whole meaning; (1) death, which may at any moment pounce upon each of us; and (2) the transitoriness of all our works, which so soon pass away and leave no trace. Whatever we may do--found companies, build palaces and monuments, write songs and poems--it is all not for long time. Soon it passes away, leaving no trace. And therefore, however we may conceal it from ourselves, we cannot help seeing that the significance of our life cannot lie in our personal fleshly existence, the prey of incurable suffering and inevitable death, nor in any social institution or organization. Whoever you may be who are reading these lines, think of your position and of your duties--not of your position as landowner, merchant, judge, emperor, president, minister, priest, soldier, which has been temporarily allotted you by men, and not of the imaginary duties laid on you by those positions, but of your real positions in eternity as a creature who at the will of Someone has been called out of unconsciousness after an eternity of non-existence to which you may return at any moment at his will. Think of your duties-- not your supposed duties as a landowner to your estate, as a merchant to your business, as emperor, minister, or official to the state, but of your real duties, the duties that follow from your real position as a being called into life and endowed with reason and love.”

ExistentialismThe SoulSpiritual Seeker
Book:The Kingdom of God is Within You
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“We do not have a soul. Rather we are soul. Our soul is our innermost identity and synonymous with the most intimate level of "I" that we know to be the core of our personhood. Both God (Brahman) and soul (Atman) are of the nature of pure sentient consciousness. Thus, being spiritual, they both transcend matter itself, as well as all the limitations necessarily associated with matter.”

BrahmanAtmanThe SoulSanatana DharmaSelfrealizationThe Eternal Natural Way
Book:Sanatana Dharma: The Eternal Natural Way
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“The oldest Vedantic school, Advaita [‘Not two’], represents an extreme and purist position in arguing that Brahman alone is real. The self and the world are within Brahman, with any apparent difference arising from illusion [maya] and ignorance [avidya]. It is as with a rope, which seems to be a snake, or a seashell, which seems to be of silver. This world is like the foam on the sea, or a peacock’s egg, created simply for play [lila]. Since Brahman is all, Brahman is without attributes. When the mind, which is given to maya, tries to conceive of Brahman, it sees Ishvara in one of his many forms. If certain Upanishadic statements appear to be theistic, it is because their author (nominally, Brahman) is catering to his audience. Only in deep sleep, when we are no longer dreaming, might we experience something of the formlessness of Brahman. We are then pure, disengaged consciousness, like the sun after it has set. This is the experience of disembodied Atma, of death, of home.”

DeathSleepConsciousnessHinduismVedantaBrahmanAtmanVedasThe SoulUpanishads
Book:Indian Mythology and Philosophy: The Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Kama Sutra… And How They Fit Together
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