Reality has become much scarier than any, even tasteless, imagination. And it should be shown that way. The human soul is measured to its full extent, and such that the world did not even suspect. Books and films about our truth, about our people must crackle with horror, suffering, anger and the unheard-of power of the human spirit.
A completely dead human soul, deprived of its natural work, is like muddy and stinking water, confined in a tight space.
— Hryhoriy Skovoroda
If it is a great thing to rule over bodies, it is even greater to rule over souls.
— Hryhoriy Skovoroda
The human soul is a cup of grief. When the cup is full, no matter how much you pour, it won't hold anymore.
— Oleksandr Dovzhenko
To see a wallet and not know what is in it means, seeing, not seeing. Obviously, it is necessary to look twice everywhere: take one into the soul, and the other into the mind.
— Hryhoriy Skovoroda
On January 31, 1944, I was brought to the Kremlin. There I was cut to pieces and the bloodied parts of my soul were scattered for shame and slaughter in all the gatherings. Everything that was evil, unkind, vengeful, trampled and defiled me. I held on for a year and fell. My heart could not bear the burden of lies and evil.
— Oleksandr Dovzhenko
The human soul is the same, that of a Cossack and that of a woman: once you destroy it, you will not get another.
Cheerfulness is the health of a harmonious soul. A soul affected by some vice cannot be cheerful.
— Hryhoriy Skovoroda
Strive, O my soul, to maintain and keep alive impressions, first, of the constant presence of a holy, omniscient, omnipotent, but infinitely merciful and gracious God, of Christ our almighty shepherd, of the Holy Spirit, of the evil one, and the invisible world in general.
—William Wilberforce
For the Holy Spirit comes in the Father’s and in the Son’s name and authority, to put the last hand to the work of our salvation, by bringing all the fruits of election and redemption home to our souls in this work.
—John Flavel
In the evening, the hand of faith seemed to be strengthened in God; my soul seemed to rest and acquiesce in him; was supported under my burdens, reading the 125th Psalm; and found that it was sweet and comfortable to lean on God.
—David Brainerd
The soul takes nothing with her to the next world but her education and her culture.
At the beginning of the journey to the next world, one’s education and culture can either provide the greatest assistance, or else act as the greatest burden, to the person who has just died.
—Plato
The application of Christ to the soul effectually, though it be so far wrought in the first saving work of the Spirit, as truly to unite the soul to Christ: yet it is a work gradually advancing in the believer’s soul, whilst it abides on this side heaven and glory.
—John Flavel
The schematicism by which our understanding deals with the phenomenal world … is a skill so deeply hidden in the human soul that we shall hardly guess the secret trick that Nature here employs.
—Immanuel Kant
He who has been smitten with the love of God & the wonder of the cross can never again be tolerant in things that touch his soul & the souls of his fellow men. He will live beside, be patient with, minister to, pray for & love anyone, but never will he compromise the truth
—Tozer
Felt an abasing sense of my own impurity and unholiness; and felt my soul melt and mourn, that I had abused and grieved a very gracious God, who was still kind to me, notwithstanding all my unworthiness.
—David Brainerd
The teaching of the New Testament is that God and spiritual things can be known finally only by a direct work of God within the soul. The true understanding of God must be by personal spiritual awareness. The Holy Spirit is indispensable.
—AW Tozer
In order for man to succeed in life, God provided him with two means, education and physical activity.
Not separately, one for the soul and the other for the body, but for the two together.
With these means, man can attain perfection.
—Plato
We might well pray for God to invade & conquer us, for until He does we remain in peril. The strength of our flesh is an ever present danger to our souls. Deliverance can come only by the defeat of our old life. Safety & peace come only after we have been forced to our knees.
There is one thing that I fear more than anything else, and that is the dead, cold formalism of the Church of God. So many of us are just sleeping and slumbering while souls are perishing. Some are beginning to rub our eyes and get them half-opened, but as a whole we are asleep.
—D. L. Moody
No sooner has a soul escaped than the great Adversary takes steps to ensnare it again. The fiercest attacks are made on the strongest forts, and the fiercer the battle the young believer is called on to wage, the surer evidence it is of the work of the Holy Spirit in his heart.
—D. L. Moody
We rowed with all our strength under the wise guidance of our father. We were hot from work and happy. Father sat with an oar in the stern – cheerful and strong. He felt like a savior of the drowning, a seafaring hero, Vasco da Gama. And although life sent him a puddle instead of an ocean, his soul was oceanic. And precisely because his soul would be enough for an entire ocean, Vasco da Gama sometimes could not stand this disproportion and sunk his ships in the tavern.
— Oleksandr Dovzhenko
I forgive everyone who has harmed me. I don't want to carry evil in my soul.
— Oleksandr Dovzhenko
“Oh that we may have such an estimate of the value of a single soul that we count whole days well spent to bring one fallen woman or one drunkard to the Saviour’s feet.”
Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.
—Plato
Just as all the water will flow out of a barrel if there’s so much as one little hole in it, so all the joy of love will drain out of your soul if in your soul there is enmity toward so much as a single person.
—Leo Tolstoy
“Behold our Lord and Master with divinely skilful art seeking after a single soul!”
– Charles Spurgeon
Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea.
And there is only one higher idea on earth, and it is the idea of the immortality of the human soul, for all other “higher” ideas of life by which humans might live derive from that idea alone.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
A soul doth never glorify or honour Christ upon a discovery or sense of the eternal redemption he hath purchased for him, but it is in him a peculiar effect of the Holy Ghost as our comforter.
—John Owen
Do what your body demands of you—attain glory, honor, wealth—and your life will be a hell. Do what your soul demands of you—attain humility, mercy, love—and you’ll have no need of any heaven. Heaven will be in your soul.
—Leo Tolstoy