Disappointments in love, even betrayals and losses, serve the soul at the very moment they seem in life to be tragedies. The soul is partly in time and partly in eternity. We might remember the part that resides in eternity when we feel despair over the part that is in life.

We need people in our lives with whom we can be as open as possible. To have real conversations with people may seem like such a simple, obvious suggestion, but it involves courage and risk.

I thought that the light-house looked lovely as hope,That star on life's tremulous ocean.

Besides, the story is ambivalent and mysterious in its ending. Is this Alkestis returning from down below? Why does she have a veil over her face? Could it be that when we forcefully bring back to life what has been lost through love what we get is only a shate of its former reality? Maybe we can never succeed fully in restoring the soul to life. Maybe she will always be veiled and at least partially shielded from the rigors of actual life. Love demands a submission that is total.

There's nothing half so sweet in life as love's young dream.

An eternal question about children is, how should we educate them? Politicians and educators consider more school days in a year, more science and math, the use of computers and other technology in the classroom, more exams and tests, more certification for teachers, and less money for art. All of these responses come from the place where we want to make the child into the best adult possible, not in the ancient Greek sense of virtuous and wise, but in the sense of one who is an efficient part of the machinery of society. But on all these counts, soul is neglected.

We have to start from the ground up and reconsider what education is. In my language, I'd like to see us educate the soul, and not just the mind. The result would be a person who could be in the world creatively, make good friendships, live in a place he loved, do work that is rewarding, and make a contribution to the community. People say that the word "educate" means to "draw out" a person's potential. But I like the "duc" - part in the middle of it. To be educated is to become a duke, a leader, a person of stature and color, a presence and a character.

Finding the right work is like discovering your own soul in the world.

In the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino put it as simply as possible. The mind, he said, tends to go off on its own so that it seems to have no relevance to the physical world. At the same time, the materialistic life can be so absorbing that we get caught in it and forget about spirituality. What we need, he said, is soul, in the middle, holding together mind and body, ideas and life, spirituality and the world.

A man or a woman can inspire such deep fantasy and emotion that through the lovemaking embrace of a partners body we make break through the limits of the human condition to touch upon another level of reality.

It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed

It may help us, in those times of trouble, to remember that love is not only about relationship, it is also an affair of the soul.

Renaissance philosophers often said that it is the soul that makes us human. We can turn that idea round and note that it is when we are most human that we have greatest access to the soul.

I’m interested in this humbler approach, one that is more accepting of human foibles, and indeed sees dignity and peace as emerging more from that acceptance than from any method of transcending the human condition.

Gnostic tales tell of the homesickness of the soul, its yearning for its own milieu…

Something deep in human make up needs and longs for a taste of eternity--a momentary release from the relentless pace of time.

We display outrageously and obsessively that which we do not possess or have deeply at our disposal. If we are displaying sex with unseemly exaggeration and preoccupation then we have not found the heart of sex.

A small amount of good literature can often teach more about the inner life than volumes of psychology.

Usually, the main problem with life conundrums is that we don't bring to them enough imagination

Love releases us into the realm of divine imagination, where the soul is expanded and reminded of its unearthly cravings and needs. We think that when a lover inflates his loved one he is failing to acknowledge her flaws - "Love is blind." But it may be the other way around. Love allows a person to see the true angelic nature of another person, the halo, the aureole of divinity. Certainly from the perspective of ordinary life this is madness and illusion. But if we let loose our hold on our philosophies and psychologies of enlightenment and reason, we might learn to appreciate the perspective of eternity that enters life as madness, Plato's divine frenzy.

Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,Which I gaze on so fondly to-day,Were to change by to-morrow, and fleet in my arms,Live fairy-gifts fading away,Thou wouldst still be adored, as this moment thou art,Let thy loveliness fade as it will,And around the dear ruin each wish of my heartWould entwine itself verdantly still.It is not while beauty and youth are thine own,And thy cheeks unprofaned by a tear,That the fervor and faith of a soul may be known,To which time will but make thee more dear!No, the heart that has truly loved never forgets,But as truly loves on to the close,As the sunflower turns on her god when he setsThe same look which she turned when he rose!

Oft in the stilly night,Ere Slumber's chain has bound me,Fond memory brings the lightOf other days around me; The smiles, the tears, Of boyhood years,The words of love then spoken; The eyes that shown Now dimmed and gone,The cheerful hearts now broken.(from When the Splendor Falls by Laurie McBain)

The devil...the prowde spirite...cannot endure to be mocked.

Any writer who puts his words and thoughts out into the public is going to be criticized.

The friendship that like live is warm; a love like friendship, steady.

Technologies of the soul tend to be simple, bodily, slow and related to the heart as much as the mind. Everything around us tells us we should be mechanically sophisticated, electronic, quick, and informational in our expressiveness - an exact antipode to the virtues of the soul. It is no wonder, then, that in an age of telecommunications - which, by the way, literally means "distant connections" - we suffer symptoms of the loss of soul. We are being urged from every side to become efficient rather than intimate.

Though the last glimpse of Erin with sorrow I see,Yet wherever thou art shall seem Erin to me;In exile thy bosom shall still be my home,And thine eyes make my climate wherever we roam.

The key to seeing the world's soul, and in the process wakening our own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination is illusion.

Love doesn't demand perfection, but it does ask you to give yourself with less reserve than you'd prefer.

It is in the nature of things to be drawn to the very experiences that will spoil our innocence, transform our lives, and give us necessary complexity and depth.

Music, oh, how faint, how weak,Language fades before thy spell!Why should Feeling ever speak,When thou canst breathe her soul so well?

... ongoing care for the soul rather than seek for a cure appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life.I sees every fall into ignorance and confusion as an opportunity to discover that the beast residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel.To approach this paradoxial point of tension where adjustment and abnormality meet is to move closer to the realization of our mystery-filled, star-born nature.It is a beast this thing that stirs in the core of our being, but it is also the star of our innermost nature.We have to care for this suffering with extreme reverence so that in our fear and anger at the beast, we do not overlock the star.~Thomas Moore *Care of the Soul*

Most of the people I know who are having trouble finding their life work are somewhat passive in style. They wait for something good to happen to them rather than make strong positive moves.

It's important to be heroic ambitious productive efficient creative and progressive but these qualities don't necessarily nurture the soul. The soul has different concerns of equal value: downtime for reflection conversation and reverie beauty that is captivating and pleasuring relatedness to the environs and to people and any animal's rhythm of rest and activity.

Soul appears when we make room for it.