Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as strong to think.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Learn your theories well but put them aside when you confront the mystery of the living soul.
—Carl Jung
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
—John Keats
The real challenge is not simply to survive. Hell, anyone can do that. It’s to survive as yourself, undiminished.
—Elia Kazan
He who would be a great soul in the future, must be a great soul now.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Be nice. Funny. Smart. Generous. Kind. Feed your body with good food. Your soul with good friends. And your mind with new things.
—Jillian Dodd in Love Me
Whoever said it got easier with time was wrong, death never got easier. The pain dulls around your heart, numbing the spot the deceased inhabited in your chest—but it was never easier. Loss was still loss—a physical pain, a hurt that reaches deep inside you and smothers your soul, forever indenting their memory.
—Kelsie Leverich in The Valentine’s Arrangement
Accustom yourself continually to make many acts of love, for they enkindle and melt the soul.
—Saint Teresa of Avila
My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever; it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt.
—George Bernard Shaw
It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have, it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.
—D. H. Lawrence
Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
—Edward Abbey
I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again.… The future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.
—J. G. Ballard
Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.
—Stella Adler
Independence? That's a middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
—George Bernard Shaw
Try not to be a man or woman of success, but rather a man or woman of inspiration. If you're successful, they will flock to you for money or fame, but if you're inspirational, they will flock to you because they love your soul and how you change theirs.
—Shannon L. Alder