Soul Development Quotes

Living is being born slowly. It would be a little too easy if we could borrow ready-made souls.

If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that it is given to us fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but that long and painful bringing forth.

Pain is the great teacher of mankind. Beneath its breath souls develop.

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love, but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday.

The church is the gym of the soul.

I was a young boy when I met the Surrealists and the Dadaists. I admired them, and that is what they taught me: to admire. Admiration is very important. People who are unable to admire others lose an important part of their soul. My soul developed from a very early age through encounters with admired people.

Life is the unfolding of the latent capacities of the soul.

You cannot train yourself. I feel the same way about Christianity and about what the church is: The church is the gym of the soul.

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

Railroads? Electric telegraphs? All honour to them in their place: but they are not progress; they are only the fruits of past progress. No outward and material thing is progress; no machinery causes progress; it merely spreads and makes popular the results of progress. Progress is inward, of the soul.

Your mind will be like its habitual thoughts; for the soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts. Soak it then in such trains of thoughts as, for example: Where life is possible at all, a right life is possible.

We must learn to love, learn to be kind, and this from the earliest youth; if education or chance give us no opportunity to practice these feelings, our soul becomes dry and unsuited even to understanding the tender inventions of loving people.

The soul is like a violin string: it makes music only when it is stretched.

Call the world if you please "the vale of soul-making." Then you will find out the use of the world.

I think it's important to keep moving forward so that the soul can grow.

A childish soul not inoculated with compulsory prayer is a soul open to any religious infection.

The aim of spiritual formation is not behavior modification but the transformation of all those aspects of you and me where behavior comes from...Circumcision of the heart.

The body grows by food and work, the mind by use, and the soul through joy and pain.

Soul development should take precedence over all things.

The challenges we face in life are always lessons that serve our soul's growth.

Do you have any idea how many lives we must have gone through before we even get the first idea that there is more to life than eating, or fighting, or power in the Flock? A thousand lives, Jon, ten thousand! And then another hundred lives until we began to learn that there is such a thing as perfection, and another hundred again to get the idea that our purpose for living is to find that perfection and show it forth... we choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.

It is not your outward appearance that you should beautify, but your soul, adorning it with good works.

What we usually call human evolution is the awakening of the divine nature within us.

I sing the progress of a deathless soul.

Fertilization of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art.