Soul Man Quotes

I have increasingly become conversant with Pythagoras' and Goethe's idea of a primordial music, not perceptible to the sensuous ear, but sounding and soaring throughout the cosmos. Tracing it to such exalted origins, I begin to understand more deeply the essence of our art and its elemental power over the human soul. Man, being a creature of Nature and subject to the cosmic influences that inform all earthly beings, must needs have been under the sway of that music from his earliest days; his organism reverberated with its vibrations and received it's rhythmic impulses. ~ Bruno Walter

What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his "soul." Man wants his physical fulfillment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters. ~ D.H. Lawrence

[T]he recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain, not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing is to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. ~ Oscar Wilde

Prayer is beyond any question the highest activity of the human soul. Man is at his greatest and highest when upon his knees he comes face to face with God. ~ D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias. ~ Oscar Wilde

If the error is thrust deeply enough into the soul, man cannot but succumb to it. ~ Simone Weil

When life comes knockin', it's the heartbroken doo-wop singer who understands regret and the price of loving, the hard-living soul man who understands "I take what I want, I'm a bad go-getter, yeah..." and the Motown divas, men and women, who know you've got to play a little bit of the white man's/rich man's game. You have to make thoughtful compromises that don't sell out your soul, that let you reach just a little bit higher until your moment comes and then you set the rules. This was the credo all along Route 9 and you'd better understand it or else you would die an ugly musical death while risking bodily injury on Saturday night. ~ Bruce Springsteen

There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People. ~ Oscar Wilde

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. ~ Oscar Wilde

Even Ignatius Loyola wavered. That dark night of the soul, man. No one's immune. It would all be meaningless if you didn't wonder and doubt. That's what makes it real. That's what makes us people. God could have sent angels to flutter around like fairies, delivering rum punch and manna all day on a cosmic cruise ship. But what would that avail us? ~ Luis Alberto Urrea

Who can map out the various forces at play in one soul? Man is a great depth, O Lord. The hairs of his head are easier by far to count than his feeling, the movements of his heart. ~ Saint Augustine

What are the convulsions of a city in comparison with the insurrections of the soul? Man is a depth still greater than the people. ~ Victor Hugo

I'm riding my man Obama. I think he's a visionary. Actually, Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was 'Do the Right Thing.' I said, Thank God I made it. Otherwise you would have taken her to 'Soul Man.' Michelle would have been like 'What's wrong with this brother?' ~ Spike Lee

Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness. ~ C. G. Jung

Thank God our time is now when wrong comes up to meet us everywhere never to leave us till we take, the greatest stride of the soul man ever took. affairs are now soul size the enterprise is exploration unto God. Where are you making for? It takes so many thousand years to wake. But will you wake for pity's sake? ~ Christopher Fry

Religion! Is what you hear at church religion? Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion? Is that religion which is less scrupulous, less generous, less just, less considerate for man, than even my own ungodly, worldly, blinded nature? No! When I look for religion, I must look for something above me, and not something beneath. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The boughs of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul. ~ Wallace Stevens

There is a master way with words that cannot be learned but instead developed: a deaf man develops exceptional vision, a blind man exceptional hearing, a silent man, when given a piece of paper ... ~ Criss Jami

She reached for the milk and honey soap, then poured it into the puff, but when she started washing him with it, he chuckled.
"Uh, sweetheart?"
"Hmm?" Candice mumbled as she stared at some interesting spot on his arm.
"Real men don't use puffs," he said, amused and turned on by having Candice's undivided attention.
She finally managed to drag her gaze away from his forearm and stared at him as if he'd lost his mind. "You can't be serious?" When he only shrugged, she rolled her eyes. "What does it matter what I use, so long as you're clean?"
"It matters, believe me." Blade knew he sounded absurd but he couldn't help it. It was bad enough he'd let her put bandages on a few measly cuts; if word got out he'd let her use a peach-colored puff and milk-and-honey bath soap he'd never hear the end of it.
A man had to put his foot down somewhere. ~ Anne Rainey

You gonna do somethin'? Or are you just gonna stand there and bleed? ~ Kevin Jarre

Arthur Less is the first homosexual ever to grow old. That is, at least, how he feels at times like these. Here, in this tub, he should be twenty-five or thirty, a beautiful young man naked in a bathtub. Enjoying the pleasures of life. How dreadful if someone came upon naked Less today: pink to his middle, gray to his scalp, like those old double erasers for pencil and ink. He has never seen another gay man age past fifty, none except Robert. He met them all at forty or so but never saw them make it much beyond; they died of AIDS, that generation. Less's generation often feels like the first to explore the land beyond fifty. How are they meant to do it? Do you stay a boy forever, and dye your hair and diet to stay lean and wear tight shirts and jeans and go out dancing until you drop dead at eighty? Or do you do the opposite - do you forswear all that, and let your hair go gray, and wear elegant sweaters that cover your belly, and smile on past pleasures that will never come again? Do you marry and adopt a child? In a couple, do you each take a lover, like matching nightstands by the bed, so that sex will not vanish entirely? Or do you let sex vanish entirely, as heterosexuals do? Do you experience the relief of letting go of all that vanity, anxiety, desire, and pain? ~ Andrew Sean Greer

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. ~ Galileo Galilei

We have a soul at times.
No one's got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood's fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It's picky:
it doesn't like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren't two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we're sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won't say where it comes from
or when it's taking off again,
though it's clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too. ~ Wisława Szymborska

Marshall Shafter ... kept pasted in his desk drawer a piece of paper he looked at from time to time to remind himself of something. It said, A fool can put on his own clothes better than wise man can do it for him. ~ Jane Jacobs

Unbelief starves the soul; faith finds food in famine. ~ Richard Cecil

The enthusiasm of old men is singularly like that of infancy. ~ Gerard De Nerval

I've never seen myself as a pop singer. I grew up listening to gospel, soul and rock. My approach to pop is that, when I was doing my album, I wanted to have raw, genuine lyrics, but wanted it to be easy to process. ~ Tori Kelly

The heart is the door to our inner woman. The heart is the door to our inner world. The power chakra relates to the inner man. The power chakra relates to the outer world. Irrespective of if we are a man or a woman, the inner woman is the center of our consciousness. ~ Swami Dhyan Giten

Zurich in 1915, ... While the thunder of the batteries rumbled in the distance, we pasted, we recited, we versified, we sang with all our soul. We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the madness of these times. ~ Hans Arp

What is the thread of western civilization that distinguished its course in history? It has to do with the preoccupation of western man with his outward command and his sense of superiority. ~ Arthur Erickson

Was Chris a man?"
Now, there was something to ponder. Was he? He'd been strong and brave, and not stubborn. He'd killed other men, he'd saved other men's lives.
He kissed other men. And he'd cried and cried.
I closed my eyes. But then the dog said, "What makes a man not a man?"
Eyes open, I said, "Kissing another man."
"Why?"
"Why?"
"Yeah. Is there something unkissable about a man?"
I smirked at the black and white furry face. "No, stupid. Women kiss men."
"Was Chris a man? ~ Robin Reardon

A slippery thing lives inside of me...holds me hostage. It writhes and twists, tearing at my gut and soul. It is hatred...simple dark hatred...but I don't know how to live without it! ~ Detective Moses Byone The Shiver Men

Arrested personal growth serves industrial "growth". By suppressing the nature dimension of human development (through educational systems, social values, advertising, nature-eclipsing vocations and pastimes, city and suburb design, denatured medical and psychological practices, and other means), industrial growth society engenders an immature citizenry unable to imagine a life beyond consumerism and soul-suppressing jobs. ~ Bill Plotkin

Love is the sweetest melody of the soul and anything can be catalyst for that. ~ Amit Ray

I got a degree in sociology, didn't read much fiction in college, and I was a pretty political, left-wing type of guy. I wanted to do some kind of work in social change and make things better for the poor man, and I was very romantic and passionate about it. ~ Andre Dubus III

A man will be as much of a gentleman as a woman requires. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

I don't think anyone who has ever counted drinking amongst their hobbies has never kissed a man. ~ Dave Rowntree

It is certain that such a revolution in thought - that is, such an expansion of consciousness, such an evolution of intelligence - is not the result of a whim. It is in fact a question of a cosmic influence to which the earth, along with everything in it, is subjected. A phase in the gestation of the planetary particle of our solar system is completed. Gaston Bachelard observes, in this connection, what he calls "a mutation of Spirit." A new period must begin, and this is heralded by seismic movement, climate changes, and finally, above all, by the spirit that animates man. ~ Schwaller De Lubicz

Today I'm out wandering, turning my skull
into a cup for others to drink wine from.
In this town somewhere there sits a calm, intelligent man,
who doesn't know what he's about to do! ~ Rumi

Your soul is softened and ready to accept the responsibility of God's work. You will accomplish much and change many lives. ~ Paul Stefaniak

In the political, the social, the economic, even the cultural sphere, the revolutions of our time have been revolutions "against" rather than revolutions "for" ... On the whole throughout this period the man
or party
that stood for doing the positive has usually cut a pathetic figure; well meaning but ineffectual, civilized but unrealistic, he was suspect alike to [by both] the ultras of destruction and the ultras of preservation and restoration. ~ Peter Drucker

You've always had my heart, Emmy. I know I fucked up by leaving but I thought it was my only choice. It took me a long time to realize I had other options. And by then, I was afraid it was too late. That you'd moved on with your life. But the moment I saw you, I knew I had a chance to make it right. No man can ever make you happy because no other woman will ever make me whole. We're it for each other. ~ Devney Perry

But where the human form withdraws from photography, there for the first time display value gets the better of cultic value. And it is having set the scene for this process to occur that gives Atget, the man who captured so many deserted Parisian streets around 1900, his incomparable significance. Quite rightly it has been said of him that he recorded those streets like crime scenes. A crime scene, too, is deserted. Atget snaps clues. With Atget, photographs become exhibits in the trial that is history. ~ Walter Benjamin

Is Walt turning over in his grave? A man named Joe Roth runs Disney right now-he gave me the go-ahead and total freedom to do whatever I wanted to do. ~ Tim Robbins

Prometheus. The truth unknown to man is the madness of him who proclaims it. Proceed, and have done. ~ Machado De Assis

Each man believes only his experience. ~ Empedocles

It used to be I thought of death as a man something like Grandfather a friend of his a kind of private and particular friend like we used to think of Grandfather's desk not to touch it not even to talk loud in the room where it was. ~ William Faulkner

I walked in the dark, with a heart full of love.
I was carrying my soul, when Dior was enough! ~ Raisha Lalwani

He thought of the jungle, already regrowing around him to cover the scars they had created. He thought of the tiger, killing to eat. Was that evil? And ants? They killed. No, the jungle wasn't evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares. ~ Karl Marlantes

& she, armed with both & abandoning the joys of reason that had meant so much to her as well as me, made a suitably advantageous marriage with an ironmonger with a face like an anvil & a soul like a slag, & so I never saw her freckles fade, her auburn hair dull, never had to watch our love turn to that non-colour, white.
-pg 115 ~ Richard Flanagan

Very few men can be genuinely happy in a life involving continual self-assertion against the skepticism of the mass of mankind, unless they can shut themselves up in a coterie and forget the cold outer world. The man of science has no need of a coterie, since he is thought well of by everybody except his colleagues. The artist, on the contrary, is in the painful situation of having to choose between being despised and being despicable. ~ Bertrand Russell

Last week I lost my temper in my karate class. Man, I'm not doing that again until I'm a black belt. Because I can tell you there's a difference between taking karate and receiving karate. ~ Demetri Martin

Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men
men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write more from Underground. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Jay advanced. For the second time in his life, he didn't give a shit what anyone else said about his choice in a lover. He seized Lincoln by the waist and crushed his mouth to the other man's. Lincoln spread his lips and grabbed hold of Jay. No hesitation. No delay. Everything faded but the strength of that kiss, the power, the depth, the drive of man against man. ~ Sloan Parker

It's pretentious to say, but my art is like a little Zen story, a story with a question mark at the end. People can take from it what they need. If somebody says, "Your art is very funny," I say, "You are totally right." If somebody says, "Your art is very sad," I say, "You are totally right." In Japan they say, "Your art is very Japanese, you even look Japanese.Your great-grandfather was most surely a Japanese man." And I say, "You are totally right." ~ Christian Boltanski

Once again this unspeakable man had caused her to make a complete fool of herself, and the realization made her eyes blaze with renewed fury as she turned her head and looked at him.
Despite Ian's apparent nonchalance he had been watching her closely, and he stiffened, sensing instinctively that she was suddenly and inexplicably angrier than before. He nodded to the gun, and when he spoke there was no more mockery in his voice; instead it was carefully neutral. "I think there are a few things you ought to consider before you use that."
Though she had no intention of using it, Elizabeth listened attentively as he continued in that same helpful voice. "First of all, you'll have to be very fast and very calm if you intend to shoot me and reload before Jake there gets to you. Second, I think it's only fair to warn you that there's going to be a great deal of blood all over the place. I'm not complaining, you understand, but I think it's only right to warn you that you're never again going to be able to wear that charming gown you have on." Elizabeth felt her stomach lurch. "You'll hang, of course," he continued conversationally, "but that won't be nearly as distressing as the scandal you'll have to face first."
Too disgusted with herself and with him to react to that last mocking remark, Elizabeth put her chin up and managed to say with great dignity, "I've had enough of this, Mr. Thornton. I did not think anything could equal your swinish behavior at our prior mee ~ Judith McNaught

Nothing can change the past, including thought. However, dwelling on thoughts about the past does change our experience of the Now. When we drag the past into the present, everything else that belongs to the Now is marginalized and overlooked. All we see is the past or, more accurately, our story about it. All we can ever have of the past is our story about it, and that story is very unsatisfying. Our stories about the past don't feed our soul like the Now does. And worse, any story is usually a sad tale that keeps us caught up in negative feelings, and then those feelings become our current experience of life. ~ Gina Lake

I like that Helen Mirren has been saying the next doctor should be a woman. I would like to go on record and say that the queen should be played by a man. ~ Steven Moffat

Tranquility is a state of the mind, desired by the soul, to calm the spirit, and make the body free from stress. ~ Steven Redhead

Today is WOUND FREE WEDNESDAY! You start to feel it during the Holiday season; a tug in your heart, the friction within your soul, all the past complicated feelings that rise up. Choose to stay in the moment with the life you are living NOW instead of allowing the past to dictate you choices, feelings, and responses. Be love, be compassion, rise above the past and stay in the moment. BE the GRATITUDE that is within you. ~ Midge Noble

It is in the nature of man to want what he does not have. This modern concern for happiness seems a real testimony of its absence. ~ Criss Jami

A good man is a good thing, but there is nothing in the world better than a good woman. She can be your mother, your wife, your girlfriend, your sister, or somebody you work next to. Don't matter. You find one, stay there. You see a scary one, make tracks. ~ Toni Morrison

From the very beginning - from the first moment, I may almost say - of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry. ~ Jane Austen

his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad. ~ Herman Melville