Thomas Moore Quotes

We have to start from the ground up and reconsider what education is. In my language, I'd like to see us educate the soul, and not just the mind. The result would be a person who could be in the world creatively, make good friendships, live in a place he loved, do work that is rewarding, and make a contribution to the community. People say that the word "educate" means to "draw out" a person's potential. But I like the "duc" - part in the middle of it. To be educated is to become a duke, a leader, a person of stature and color, a presence and a character.

I thought that the light-house looked lovely as hope,
That star on life's tremulous ocean.

DOST thou not hear the silver bell,
Through yonder lime-trees ringing?
'Tis my lady's light gazelle.
To me her love thoughts bringing,
All the while that silver bell
Around his dark neck ringing.

The conscious mind is small and weak compared to the emotional and spiritual power that we call daimonic. It may be the urge to create, take risks, and love. Life may be simple when you avoid the daimon of love, but it is also less passionate and meaningful.

It isn't comfortable to discover her place and her necessity. And yet what she has to offer is nothing less than the entire deep spiritual realm of the soul, the invisible, unchanging core.

Came but for friendship, and took away love.

And soon, too soon, we part with pain, To sail o'er silent seas again.

But anyone who deliberately tries to get himself elected to a public office is permanently disqualified from holding one.

Nicholas of Cusa said we have to be educated into our ignorance or else the full presence of the divine will be kept at bay. We have to arrive at that difficult point where we don't know what is going on or what we can do. That precise point is an opening to true faith. The

The life of the soul, as the structure of dreams reveals, is a continual going over and over of the material of life. In

She was lost in the breeziness of her secular existence and couldn't land anywhere. Nothing was sacred. Nothing could stop her long enough to reflect sufficiently on her life.

Soul' is not a thing, but a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves.

In her extraordinary book, Ordinarily Sacred, Lynda Sexson teaches us how to catch the appearance of the sacred in the most ordinary objects and circumstances.

Love doesn't demand perfection, but it does ask you to give yourself with less reserve than you'd prefer.

Sweet flowers alone can say what passion fears revealing.

To the soul, memory is more important than planning, art more compelling than reason, and love more fulfilling than understanding.

I feel like one
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garland's dead,
And all but he departed!

With what a deep devotedness of woe I wept thy absence - o'er and o'er again Thinking of thee, still thee, till thought grew pain, And memory, like a drop that, night and day, Falls cold and ceaseless, wore my heart away!

Your first task is to find the place where your soul is at home.

Good Demeter mothering keeps a child in the heat and passion of life which immortalize and establish soulfulness. Mothering involves not only physical survival and achievement - Demeter's grain and fruit - it is also concerned with guiding a child to his or her unknown depths and the mystery of fate.

The young May moon is beaming, love.
The glow-worm's lamp is gleaming, love.
How sweet to rove,
Through Morna's grove,
When the drowsy world is dreaming, love!
Then awake! - the heavens look bright, my dear,
'Tis never too late for delight, my dear,
And the best of all ways
To lengthen our days
Is to steal a few hours from the night, my dear!

It is not while beauty
And youth are thine own
And thy cheeks
Unprofaned by a tear
That the ferver and faith
Of a soul can be known
To which time will but
Make thee more dear
No the heart that has truly loved
Never forgets
But as truly loves
On to the close
As the sunflower turns
On her god when he sets
The same look which
She'd turned when he rose.

Although the making of a religion of one's own can be satisfying, it can progress further and faster with the aid of the spiritual traditions. Your own spiritual path risks being too personal and limited. What resources do you have compared to the traditions that have thought of things you will never consider? They have refined ideas and images and teachings and moral guidelines expressed in elegant and inspiring ways. They have produced spiritual beauty of a kind no single person could ever create. Read Emerson's journals and you find that he was reading Hafiz for months, and Thoreau's homespun spiritual insights come wrapped in references from the Western and Eastern traditions.

Often care of the soul means not taking sides when there is a conflict at a deep level. It may be necessary to stretch the heart wide enough to embrace contradiction and paradox.

As the religious authorities often say, the institution is human, while the substance of the religion is transcendent.

The heart that has truly loved never forgets, But as truly loves on to the close.

It might be better to be more of a skeptic than a believer, less open-minded and more critical. The problem in the modern spiritual

You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.

A pretty wife is something for the fastidious vanity of a roue to retire upon.

For our lives, incarnation means being focused on the spiritual and the eternal but bringing that focus deep into our life. … This is really the heart of the Christmas theological message: Live in two worlds that overlap but are distinct. Don't be materialistic, but don't sacrifice our ordinary physical life for any spiritual ideal. Be lowly and lofty.

In our prayer and meditation we hope for fulfilling ordinary life.

Every season hath its pleasure; Spring may boast her flowery prime, Yet the vineyard's ruby treasuries Brighten Autumn's sob'rer time.

A soul mate is someone to whom we feel profoundly connected, as though the communication and communing that take place between us were not the product of intentional efforts, but rather a divine grace. This kind of relationship is so important to the soul that many have said there is nothing more precious in life.

For great and horrible punishments be appointed for thieves, wheras much rather provision should have been made that there were some means they might get their living, so that no man should be driven to this necessity.

I said (while The moon's smile Played o'er a stream, in dimpling bliss,) "The moon looks "On many brooks, "The brook can see no moon but this;"[1]

Renaissance philosophers often said that it is the soul that makes us human. We can turn that idea round and note that it is when we are most human that we have greatest access to the soul.

A friendship that like love is warm; A love like friendship, steady.

Music, oh, how faint, how weak,
Language fades before thy spell!
Why should Feeling ever speak,
When thou canst breathe her soul so well?

Body exercise is incomplete if it focuses exclusively on muscle and is motivated by the ideal of a physique unspoiled by fat.

The light, that lies In woman's eyes, Has been my heart's undoing.

A few moments of silence may be all the meditation we need at times. Our homes could have a little space for withdrawal and quiet, and even a small garden could offer some distance from noise.

Love releases us into the realm of divine imagination, where the soul is expanded and reminded of its unearthly cravings and needs. We think that when a lover inflates his loved one he is failing to acknowledge her flaws - "Love is blind." But it may be the other way around. Love allows a person to see the true angelic nature of another person, the halo, the aureole of divinity. Certainly from the perspective of ordinary life this is madness and illusion. But if we let loose our hold on our philosophies and psychologies of enlightenment and reason, we might learn to appreciate the perspective of eternity that enters life as madness, Plato's divine frenzy.

What though youth gave love and roses, Age still leaves us friends and wine.

Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames.

I have made many mistakes and done a lot of foolish things, but when I look back on the person I was, I feel affection for him and laugh at him.

While mantling on the maiden's cheek Young roses kindled into thought.

To be grafted to soul means to be open to the life that pools deep inside you, allowing it to coalesce into a career or other kind of work.

An eternal question about children is, how should we educate them? Politicians and educators consider more school days in a year, more science and math, the use of computers and other technology in the classroom, more exams and tests, more certification for teachers, and less money for art. All of these responses come from the place where we want to make the child into the best adult possible, not in the ancient Greek sense of virtuous and wise, but in the sense of one who is an efficient part of the machinery of society. But on all these counts, soul is neglected.

The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided. The many divisions and polarizations that terrorize a disenchanted world find peaceful accord among mossy rock walls, rough stone paths, and trimmed bushes. Maybe a garden sometimes seems fragile, for all its earth and labor, because it achieves such an extraordinary delicate balance of nature and human life, naturalness and artificiality. It has its own liminality, its point of balance between great extremes.

Some early writing say that when people kiss, they exchange the soul, that it's between their mouths and tongues that the soul is exchanged. And so the kiss is more of a soulful connection maybe than intercourse and other ways of being together. A kiss asks a lot from you. I think it asks a lot from a person to really kiss.

According to the normal view, happiness is the summum bonum towards which we're naturally impelled by virtue - which in their definition means following one's natural impulses, as God meant us to do. But this includes obeying the instinct to be reasonable in our likes and dislikes. And reason also teaches us, first to love and reverence Almighty God, to Whom we owe our existence and our potential happiness, and secondly to get through life as comfortably and cheerfully as we can , and help all other members of our species to do so too.

Your challenge, then, is to create a religion of your own by being secular in a religious way, or religious in a secular way. You can learn how to see the secular from a religious angle, and vice versa.

The Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz once observed that a person cutting vegetables while preparing to cook food is full of daydreams and fantasies that nurture the life of the soul. Contemplation can be an absorption in work that is free of self-consciousness and yet rich with imagination. Serious

There's nothing half so sweet in life as love's young dream.

We display outrageously and obsessively that which we do not possess or have deeply at our disposal. If we are displaying sex with unseemly exaggeration and preoccupation then we have not found the heart of sex.

Spring and Autumn
Every season hath its pleasures;
Spring may boast her flowery prime,
Yet the vineyard's ruby treasures
Brighten Autumn's sob'rer time.

Let me define a garden as the meeting of raw nature and the human imagination in which both seek the fulfillment of their beauty. Every sign indicates that nature wants us and wishes for collaboration with us, just as we long for nature to be fulfilled in us. If our original state was to live in a garden, as Adam and Eve did, then a garden signals our absolute origins as well as our condition of eternity, while life outside the garden is time and temporality.

The devil ... the prowde spirite ... cannot endure to be mocked.

Rich and rare were the gems she wore, And a bright gold ring on her hand she bore.

We can return now to one of Plato's expressions for care of the soul, techne tou biou, the craft of life. Care of the soul requires craft (techne) - skill, attention, and art. To live with a high degree of artfulness means to attend to the small things that keep the soul engaged in whatever we are doing, and it is the very heart of soul-making.

It is only to the happy that tears are a luxury.

Bastard Freedom waves Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves.

Usually, the main problem with life conundrums is that we don't bring to them enough imagination

The whole area of religion and spirituality invites flimflam and is filled with

You might also understand the difference between force and strength, the former pressing too hard to achieve questionable ends, the latter a deep-seated power of soul. You might notice the difference between ego power and soul power, the former anxious and self-centered. Finally, you might appreciate the paradoxes involved, where being more vulnerable in a comfortable way gives you strength, and when you have some deep strength, you can finally feel vulnerable.

Go where we may, rest where we will,
Eternal London haunts us still.

A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.

Again, we can see the importance of imaginal practices such as journals, dream work, poetry, painting, and therapy aimed at exploring images in dream and life. These methods keep us actively engaged in the mythologies that are the stuff of our own lives. The

It's important to be heroic, ambitious, productive, efficient, creative, and progressive, but these qualities don't necessarily nurture soul. The soul has different concerns, of equal value: downtime for reflection, conversation, and reverie; beauty that is captivating and pleasuring; relatedness to the environs and to people; and any animal's rhythm of rest and activity.

If you are often angry, trace the roots in story and then apply your anger as a force and a sharp edge to whatever you do. Don't indulge in venting. Always convert and transform your anger into something worthwhile. Let people see and feel your anger, but don't explode every time you feel it.

A philosopher being asked what was the first thing necessary to win the love of a woman, answered, Opportunity!

... ongoing care for the soul rather than seek for a cure appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life.
I sees every fall into ignorance and confusion as an opportunity to discover that the beast residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel.
To approach this paradoxial point of tension where adjustment and abnormality meet is to move closer to the realization of our mystery-filled, star-born nature.
It is a beast this thing that stirs in the core of our being, but it is also the star of our innermost nature.
We have to care for this suffering with extreme reverence so that in our fear and anger at the beast, we do not overlock the star.
~Thomas Moore *Care of the Soul*

A piece of the sky and a chunk of the earth lie lodged in the heart of every human being.

Any writer who puts his words and thoughts out into the public is going to be criticized.

I'm interested in this humbler approach, one that is more accepting of human foibles, and indeed sees dignity and peace as emerging more from that acceptance than from any method of transcending the human condition.

The ordinary acts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest.

When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.

Fond memory brings the light of other days around me.

The past, the future: - two eternities!

Learn to live small and you will discover great pleasures. You will accomplish more in your life than you could ever predict if you were overly ambitious.

When Time who steals our years away Shall steal our pleasures too, The mem'ry of the past will stay, And half our joys renew.

Magine a trust in yourself, or another person, or in life itself, that doesn't need to be proved or demonstrated, that is able to contain uncertainty. People sometimes put their trust in a spiritual leader and are terribly betrayed if that person then fails to live up to ideals. But a real trust of faith would be to decide whether to trust someone, knowing that betrayal is inevitable because life and personality are never without shadow. The vulnerability that faith demands could be matched by an equal trust in oneself, the feeling that one can survive the pain of betrayal.

What's important is finding out what works for you.

The problem in narcissism is not the high ideals and ambitions, it's the difficulty one encounters when trying to give them body.

A man or a woman can inspire such deep fantasy and emotion that through the lovemaking embrace of a partners body we make break through the limits of the human condition to touch upon another level of reality.

Taking an interest in one's own soul requires a certain amount of space for reflection and appreciation.

There are places in this world that are neither here nor there, neither up nor down, neither real nor imaginary ...

Now is not the time to tolerate the religions of the world; it's time to seek them out and study them and be affected by them.

It's my conviction that slight shifts in imagination have more impact on living than major efforts at change ... deep changes in life follow movements in imagination.

Most of the people I know who are having trouble finding their life work are somewhat passive in style. They wait for something good to happen to them rather than make strong positive moves.

When you sense that your dark night is one of pregnancy and oceanic return, you could react accordingly and be still. Watch and wonder. Take the human embryo as your model. Assume the fetal position, emotionally and intellectually. Be silent. Float in your darkness as if it were the waters of the womb, and give up trying to fight your way out or make sense of it.

Technologies of the soul tend to be simple, bodily, slow and related to the heart as much as the mind. Everything around us tells us we should be mechanically sophisticated, electronic, quick, and informational in our expressiveness - an exact antipode to the virtues of the soul. It is no wonder, then, that in an age of telecommunications - which, by the way, literally means "distant connections" - we suffer symptoms of the loss of soul. We are being urged from every side to become efficient rather than intimate.

When soul is neglected, it doesn't just go away;
it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions,
violence, and loss of meaning.

An enchanted world is one that speaks to the soul, to the mysterious depths of the heart and imagination where we find value, love, and union with the world around us. As mystics of many religions have taught, that sense of rapturous union can give a sensation of fulfillment that makes life purposeful and vibrant ...

Growing old is one of the ways the soul nudges itself into attention to the spiritual aspect of life. The body's changes teach us about fate, time, nature, mortality, and character. Aging forces us to decide what is important in life.

Come o'er the sea,
Maiden with me,
Mine through the sunshine, storms and snows;
Seasons may roll,
But the true soul
Burns the same, where'er it goes.

In the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino put it as simply as possible. The mind, he said, tends to go off on its own so that it seems to have no relevance to the physical world. At the same time, the materialistic life can be so absorbing that we get caught in it and forget about spirituality. What we need, he said, is soul, in the middle, holding together mind and body, ideas and life, spirituality and the world.

Love is the means of entry and our guide. Love keeps us on the labyrinthine path. If we can honor love as it presents itself, taking shapes and directions we would never have predicted or desired, then we are on the way toward discovering the lower levels of soul, where meaning and value reveal themselves slowly and paradoxically.

This wretched brain gave way, and I became a wreck at random driven, without one glimpse of reason or heaven.

If you take Christmas to heart and get past the anxieties in arranging for gifts and parties, you will rediscover yourself every year at this time and experience a birth in yourself, just like the one so beautifully described in the Gospel stories. It will be a celebration of both the birth of Jesus and the birth of your soul