Renaissance Souls Quotes

Start small.
Start now.
Start everything.
And don't bother to finish any of it. ~ Barbara Sher

We didn't speak our truest thoughts, and paraphrased our souls until we didn't know our feelings, and so were strangers to ourselves. ~ Adam Novy

I don't really care who's doing drugs in the NBA as long as the scene isn't adversely affecting my team and teammates. I've known enough drug users-going as far back as grade school and the streets of New York-not to view them as pariahs or lost souls. I've certainly smoked more than my quota of weed. ~ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

The average person puts only 25% of his energy and ability into his work. The world takes off its hat to those who put in more than 50% of their capacity, and stands on its head for those few and far between souls who devote 100%. ~ Andrew Carnegie

We almost made love with fire, fire in our eyes, fire in our souls, and even in our bones. ~ Tamara Stamenkovic

A great book does not have to be a literary masterpiece with complicated sentences and words no one has heard of. It has to touch it's readers souls and make them feel. Simple words with a story and characters that drizzle over and through you like warm honey and keep you turning the pages can be just as good. ~ Amanda Mackey

I think the soul must be heavy and smooth, Myrna: I deduce this from the buoyant, jerky movements of puppets, which lack souls. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

They made small effort to cover their raw souls with the mantle of commonplace words. ~ Susan Glaspell

It's been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul. ~ Niall Williams

There is nothing to be found in human eyes, and that is their terrifying and dolorous enigma, their abominable and delusive charm. There is nothing but that which we put there ourselves. That is why honest gazes are only to be found in portraits.

The faded and weary eyes of martyrs, expressions tortured by ecstasy, imploring and suffering eyes, some resigned, others desperate... the gazes of saints, mendicants and princesses in exile, with pardoning smiles... the gazes of the possessed, the chosen and the hysterical... and sometimes of little girls, the eyes of Ophelia and Canidia, the eyes of virgins and witches... as you live in the museums, what eternal life, dolorous and intense, shines out of you! Like precious stones enshrined between the painted eyelids of masterpieces, you disturb us across time and across space, receivers of the dream which created you!

You have souls, but they are those of the artists who wished you into being, and I am delivered to despair and mortification because I have drunk the draught of poison congealed in the irises of your eyes.

The eyes of portraits ought to be plucked out. ~ Jean Lorrain

Krishna children were taught that in the spiritual world there were no parents, only souls and hence this justified their being kept out of view from others, cloistered in separate buildings and sheltered from the evil material world. ~ Mary Garden

On the contrary, knowing I AM inspires us to excel in every area of life. Further, the power of this "I am not" message is that when we compete, and hopefully win, we can avoid the pitfall of gaining the whole world and yet losing our souls.2 As ~ Louie Giglio

Secrets are like the cancer of families. Like tumors, they grow ever larger, and if they are not removed, they suffocate the mind and spirit, and spawn madness. As long as they remain, they cast a shadow on every truth that is uttered, clouding it, constricting it, disporting it. Secrets hurt the secret keeper as much as the poor souls from whom the secret is kept. And even once the secret is out, its shadow echoes into the future, the remnants of its memory leaving us vigilant and fearful. ~ Patricia Falvey

This popular picture of Marx's 'materialism' - his anti-spiritual tendency, his wish for uniformity and subordination - is utterly false. Marx's aim was that of the spiritual emancipation of man, of his liberation from the chains of economic determination, of restituting him in his human wholeness, of enabling him to find unity and harmony with his fellow man and with nature. Marx's philosophy was, in secular, nontheistic language, a new and radical step forward in the tradition of prophetic Messianism; it was aimed at the full realization of individualism, the very aim which has guided Western thinking from the Renaissance and the Reformation far into the nineteenth century. ~ Erich Fromm

Let your cry be for free souls rather than for freedom. Moral liberty is the only important liberty. ~ Joseph Joubert

If this is possible - to have space and togetherness both - then the winds of heaven dance between you. Love one another, but make not a bond of love. It should be a free gift, given or taken, but there should be no demand. Otherwise, very soon you are together but you are as apart as faraway stars. No understanding bridges you; you have not left the space even for the bridge. Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Don't make it something static. Don't make it a routine. Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. If freedom and love together can be yours, you don't need anything more. You have got it - that for which life is given to you. ~ Osho

Ha Jin writes: 'Some great men and women are fortified and redeemed through their suffering, and they even seek sadness instead of happiness, just as Van Gogh asserted, 'Sorrow is better than joy,' and Balzac declared, 'Suffering is one's teacher.' But these dicta are suitable only for extraordinary souls, for the select few. For ordinary people like us, too much suffering can only make us meaner, crazier, pettier, and more wretched ~ David Sheff

The expansion of Europe had begun. Before it ended, in our own time, the greater part of the world, including the scattered islands of the Pacific, was to be seized by an insatiable civilization, greedy for spices or for realms of gold; for land, mere novelty, or for souls. ~ Keith Sinclair

Let us do those things that our heart is asking us to do and from this day forth allow all souls that leave our presence feeling honored and deeply loved. ~ Molly Friedenfeld

You can have that life," he told her. "It's right there for you to take."
"I love you," Eve quickly countered.
"Loving me hurts you, doesn't it?" Beckett asked, looking down. "No, you don't have to tell me. I know. I can smell it. I can smell the pain coming off of you," he said, looking at the floor. "You had love before and a future. What does loving me get you, Eve? What does it get you?" He stood, angry with himself.
"I don't need to get anything from you. It's the way it is. There's no changing that." She gripped the porch railing.
Beckett stepped close to Eve and tenderly tucked a lock of hair that had escaped her ponytail behind her ear.
"You're saying goodbye," she said, her eyes full of questions.
"Do you know there are other little girls out there like that one? I lived with a few of them. They would sell their souls for a mother like you."
At the word mother Eve's chin crumpled. She tried to hold back the tears, but they wouldn't obey.
"See that? It's what you need. You need that - a little kid calling you Mom." Beckett put his arms around her as she shattered.
The pain she kept hidden surfaced from where it had been smoldering. When he felt her knees weaken, he hugged her harder.
"That's right. It's okay. It's nothing to be ashamed of, baby. You want normal." He guided her to the chair he'd vacated. "There's a guy out there who'll hold your hand. There's a little girl out there. She's waiting for you. It'll be okay ~ Debra Anastasia

Now, God be praised, that to believing souls gives light in darkness, comfort in despair. ~ William Shakespeare

Santa Cruz is blessed not only with natural wonders, but also with gifted souls who can fashion nature's bounty into man-made treasures. ~ Clive Sinclair

No sadness, my soul's no more of this world. ~ Anna Akhmatova

I stood in the center of the Pantheon under the massive oculus, boiling. It was noon and the sun was right overhead, blinding everyone in the room.
"Not incredibly practical to cut a hole in the roof if you ask me," I deadpanned to the ten-year-old beside me.
She sighed heavily and rolled her eyes, walking away with Architecture of the Italian Renaissance shoved underneath her arm. Very cultured, these kids today. ~ R.S. Grey

George Pocock learned much about the hearts and souls of young men. He learned to see hope where a boy thought there was no hope, to see skill where skill was obscured by ego or by anxiety. He observed the fragility of confidence and the redemptive power of trust. ~ Daniel James Brown

Now having travelled from the pride of man in the High Renaissance and the Enlightenment down to the present despair, we can understand where modern people are. They have no place for a personal God. But equally they have no place for man as man, or for love, or for freedom, or for significance. This brings a crucial problem. Beginning only from man himself, people affirm that man is only a machine. But those who hold this position cannot live like machines! If they could, there would be no tensions in their intellectual position or in their lives. But even people who believe they are machines cannot live like machines, and thus they must "leap upstairs" against their reason and try to find something which gives meaning to life, even though to do so they have to deny their reason.
This was a solution Leonardo da Vinci and the men of the Renaissance never would have accepted, even if, like Leonardo they ended their thinking in despondency. They would not have done so, for they would have considered it intellectual suicide to separate meaning and values from reason this way. And they would have been right. Such a solution is intellectual suicide, and one may question the intellectual integrity of those who accept such a position when their starting point was pride in the sufficiency of human reason. ~ Francis A. Schaeffer

The old men from the charity hospital next door would come jerking past our rooms, making useless, disjointed leaps. They'd go from room to room, spitting out gossip between their decayed teeth, purveying scraps of malignant worn-out slander. Cloistered in their official misery as in an oozing dungeon, those aged workers ruminated the layer of shit that long years of servitude deposit on men's souls. Impotent hatreds grown rancid in the pissy idleness of dormitories. They employed their last quavering energies in hurting each other a little more. In destroying what little pleasure they had left.
Their last remaining pleasure! Their shriveled carcasses contained not one solitary atom that was not absolutely vicious! ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

I resolved, then, deep in my soul never to let him go. I'd be the one never to leave him. I'd prove to him that some things could be for always- that we could be. ~ Ann Aguirre

Long ago I was a teacher and then a writer, but now I am a tender of broken bodies and injured souls. ~ Gea Haff

Most women had the one thing in common: they had great pain when they gave birth to their children. This should make a bond that held them all together; it should make them love and protect each other against the man-world. But it was not so. It seemed like their great birth pains shrank their hearts and their souls. They stuck together for only one thing: to trample on some other woman ... whether it was by throwing stones or by mean gossip. It was the only kind of loyalty they seemed to have. Men were different. They might hate each other but they stuck together against the world and against any woman who would ensnare one of them. ~ Betty Smith

Let us realize that we can only fulfill our calling to bear much fruit by praying much. In Christ are hidden all the treasures that the people around us need. In Him, all God's children are blessed with all spiritual blessings. He is full of grace and truth. But, prayer, much prayer, strong believing prayer, is needed to bring about these blessings. And let us equally remember that we cannot appropriate the promise without first living a life given up for men. Many try to take the promise and then look around for what they can ask. This is not the way, but the very opposite. Get the heart burdened with the need of souls, and the command and power to save them will come to claim the promise. ~ Andrew Murray

So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Never underestimate the Power of Working-out!"-Serena Jade ~ Serena Jade

Funerals seem less about comforting the souls of these dearly departed than about
comforting the people they leave behind. ~ Rin Chupeco

You're so hungry for success, more. I can almost feel the crossroads looming... Do you know there's a legend that certain musicians sold their souls to the devil for their skill? Johnson. Paganini." Luiz laughed at the shift of Michael's hips, the grind of Michael's cock into his hand, released him to add, "And certain metal bands for money and fame. ~ Jae T. Jaggart

Neuroscience is fast developing the technical and conceptual wherewithal to reveal in fine, bare detail the neurobiological substrates of the mind. Perhaps it will despoil a sacred myth - the myth of selfhood and souls. And, if so, we may be wandering innocently into the opening phase of a dangerous game. Our ethics and systems of justice, our entire moral order, are founded on the notion of society as a collective of individual selves - autonomous, introspective, accountable agents. If this self-reflective, moral agent is revealed to be illusory, then what? ~ Paul Broks

We've got minds and souls as well as hearts; ambition and talents as well as beauty and accomplishments; and we want to live and learn as well as love and be loved. I'm sick of being told that is all a woman is fit for! I won't have anything to do with love until I prove that I am something beside a housekeeper and a baby-tender! ~ Louisa May Alcott