Quotes about Soul

But which should come first, grace or responsibility? The answer is that both come first. All we can do is get out of the way and then the soul takes its natural course.

Knowing without loving is frankly dangerous for the soul and for society. You'll critique most everything you encounter and even have the hubris to call this mode of reflexive cynicism "thinking

It is the struggle with darkness and grief that educates the male soul.

Governments encourage this pacification by various distractions, what used to be called "bread and circuses." They know it will keep us small, content, and uninterested in those "weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and good faith" (Matthew 23:23) that have attracted all great souls. A

The self that begins the journey is not the self that arrives at the Gospel. The self that begins is the self that we think ourselves to be, the superior self we want to be. This is the self that dies along the way— until 'no one' is left. This is the true self that all Great Religion talks about, the self bigger than death yet born of death, a different self than the private I, a self transformed by God and transformed in God.

In the second half of life, we are not demanding our American constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness or that people must have our same experiences; rather, simple meaning now suffices, and that becomes in itself a much deeper happiness. As the body cannot live without food, so the soul cannot live without meaning.

Begin with a concrete moment of encounter, based in this physical world, and the soul universalizes from there, so that what is true here becomes true everywhere else too.

One day the religion of Christ will take another step forward on earth. It will embrace the whole man [sic], all of him, not just half as it does now in embracing only the soul. —Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

St. John of the Cross taught that God has to work in the soul in secret and in darkness, because if we fully knew what was happening, and what Mystery/transformation/God/grace will eventually ask of us, we would either try to take charge or stop the whole process.8 No one oversees his or her own demise willingly, even when it is the false self that is dying.

Your false self is your role, title, and personal image that is largely a creation of your own mind and attachments. It will and must die in exact correlation to how much you want the Real.

Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events. This deeper discovery is largely what religious people mean by "finding their soul.

Unless religion leads us on a path to both depth and honesty, much religion is actually quite dangerous to the soul and to society.