Soul quotes
9.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside soul — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Great Love has many attributes, and shrines For varied worshippers, but his force divine Shows most its many-named fulness in the man Whose nature multitudinously mixed-- Each ardent impulse grappling with a thought-- Resists all easy gladness, all content Save mystic rapture, where the questioning soul Flooded with consciousness of good that is Finds life one bounteous answer."
"O the anguish of that thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the light answers we returned to their plaints or their pleadings, for the little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God had given us to know!"
"Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul: There, 'mid the throng of hurrying desires That trample o'er the dead to seize their spoil, Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible As exhaltations laden with slow death, And o'er the fairest troop of captured joys Breathes pallid pestilence."
"The soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof."
"Quick souls have their intensest life in the first anticipatory sketch of what may or will be, and the pursuit of their wish is the pursuit of that paradisiacal vision which only impelled them, and is left farther and farther behind, vanishing forever even out of hope in the moment which is called success."
"When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant's bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think, there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope."
"... it is one of the gains of advancing age that the good of young creatures becomes a more definite intense joy to us. With that renunciation for ourselves which age inevitably brings, we get more freedom of soul to enter into the life of others; what we can never learn they will know, and the gladness which is a departed sunlight to us is rising with the strength of morning to them."
"To the receptive soul the river of life pauseth not, nor is diminished."
"To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul."
"Prison house for the soul"
"Tattoos to me are the outward symbol of the inward change within my soul."
"Progress, in the sense of acquisition, is something; but progress in the sense of being, is a great deal more. To grow higher, deeper, wider, as the years go on; to conquer difficulties, and acquire more and more power; to feel all one's faculties unfolding, and truth descending into the soul,--this makes life worth living."
"I have an unshakable belief that mankind's higher nature is on the whole still dormant. The greatest souls reveal excellencies of mind and heart which their lesser fellows possess-hidden, it is true, but there all the same."
"Love bade me welcome, but my soul drew back."
"Only a sweet and virtuous soul, Like season'd timbered, never gives; But though the whole world turn to coal, Then chiefly lives."
"God's breath in man returning to his birth, The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage."
"Sorrow was all my soul; I scarce believed, Till grief did tell me roundly, that I lived."
"When something really comes from the soul, I think it has a truth that you cannot find in politics."
"What is important is not the length of life, but the depth of life. What is important is not to make life longer, but to take your soul out of time, as every sublime act does."
"He was afraid of defiling the love which filled his soul."
