c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
She turned and walked down the musty, dimly-lighted corridor, along a strip of carpeting that still clung together only out of sheer stubbornness of skeletal weave. Doors, dark, oblivious, inscrutable, sidling by; enough to give you the creeps just to look at them. All hope gone from them, and from those who passed in and out through them. Just one more row of stopped-up orifices in this giant honeycomb that was the city. Human beings shouldn't have to enter such doors, shouldn't have to stay behind them. No moon ever entered there, no stars, no anything at all. They were worse than the grave, for in the grave is absence of consciousness. And God, she reflected, ordered the grave, for all of us; but God didn't order such burrows in a third-class New York City hotel.
— Cornell Woolrich, Deadline at Dawn
Loneliness isn’t a lack of people. It is a lack of understanding and acceptance.
— Bronnie Ware
...and my loneliness, always my loneliness - that airless bubble of despair that is slowing stifling me.
— Tabitha Suzuma, Forbidden
Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.
— Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me
I can't shove the dark out of my way.
— Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
But in spite of my great desire for intimacy, I've always been a loner. Perhaps when the longing for connection is as strong as it is in me, when the desire is for something so deep and true, one knows better than to try. One sees that this is not the place for that.
— Elizabeth Berg, Never Change
Shall each man," cried he, "find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone? I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn. Man! You may hate, but beware! Your hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must ravish from you your happiness forever. Are you to be happy while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness? You can blast my other passions, but revenge remains—revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food! I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery. Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
Weight Watchers holds as a descriptive axiom the transparently true fact that for each of us the universe is deeply and sharply and completely divided into for example in my case, me, on one side, and everything else, on the other. This for each of us exhaustively defines the whole universe... And then they hold by a prescriptive axiom the undoubtedly equally true and inarguable fact that we each ought to desire our own universe to be as full as possible, that the Great Horror consists in an empty, rattling personal universe, one where one finds oneself with Self, on one hand, and vastly empty lonely spaces before Others begin to enter the picture at all, on the other. A non-full universe... The emptier one’s universe is, the worse it is... Weight Watchers perceives the problem as one involving the need to have as much Other around as possible, so that the relation is one of minimum Self to maximum Other... We each need a full universe. Weight Watchers and their allies would have us systematically decrease the Self-component of the universe, so that the great Other-set will be physically attracted to the now more physically attractive Self, and rush in to fill the void caused by that diminution of Self. Certainly not incorrect, but just as certainly only half of the range of valid solutions to the full-universe problem... Is my drift getting palpable? Just as in genetic engineering... There is always more than one solution... An autonomously full universe... Rather than diminishing Self to entice Other to fill our universe, we may also of course obviously choose to fill the universe with Self... Yes. I plan to grow to infinite size... There will of course eventually cease to be room for anyone else in the universe at all.
— David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System
Only worse thing than being cold, and too tired to defend yourself, is to be cold and alone. And I wouldn't ever wish that on nobody.
— Steven J. Carroll, The Road to Jericho
She spent the foggy day in endless, aimless walking, for it seemed to her that if she moved quickly enough she would escape the fear that hunted her. It was a vague and shadowy fear of something cruel and stupid that had caught her and would never let her go. She had always known that it was there - hidden under the more of less pleasant surface of things. Always. Ever since she was a child.You could argue about hunger or cold or loneliness, but with that fear you couldn't argue. It went too deep. You were too mysteriously sure of its terror. You could only walk very fast and try to leave it behind you.
— Jean Rhys, Quartet
When we are lonely we not only react more intensely to the negatives
—  we also experience less of a soothing uplift from the positives.
Real relief from loneliness requires the cooperation of at least one other person, and yet the more chronic our loneliness becomes, the less equipped we may be to entice such cooperation.
— John T. Cacioppo, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection
If you like, you can all think of it as my gift to you. I never had much else to give. You can get on and play your own lives as you like, while I just keep moving. This story of it all can be another gift. I’ve made an arrangement with Adam. When I’ve finished, which is almost now, I’m going to put the bundle of papers in the garden of the Old Fort, before I move on. Adam’s going to get them and take them to his father. And if you read it and don’t believe it’s real, so much the better. It will make another safeguard against Them.But you wouldn’t believe how lonely you get.
— Diana Wynne Jones, The Homeward Bounders
So remember those who win the gameLose the love they sought to gainIn debitures of quality and dubious integrityTheir small-town eyes will gape at youIn dull surprise when payment dueExceeds accounts received at seventeen
— Janis Ian
..snow gently settles like dust in a shaft - for one moment there is no one else - only the wind like the hiss of an ice skate ...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
But you haven't never loved God nor even nair person. You hard and tough as cowhide. But just the same I knows you. This afternoon you going to roam all over the place without never being satisfied. You going to traipse all around like you haves to find something lost. You going to work yourself up with excitement. Your heart going to beat hard enough to kill you because you don't love and don't have peace. And then some day you going to bust loose and be ruined.
— Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
There are extremes within any population, but on average, at least among young adults, those who feel lonely actually spend no more time alone than do those who feel more connected. They are no more or less physically attractive than average, and they do not differ, on average, from the non-lonely in terms of height, weight, age, education, or intelligence. Most important, when we look at the broad continuum (rather than just the extremes) of people who feel lonely, we find that they have the capacity to be just as socially adept as anyone else. Feeling lonely does not mean that we have deficient social skills.
— John T. Cacioppo, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection
This morning could have been perfect. The cruel truth is they have never been. Give us loneliness or give us death.
— Sean Gabler, Of Sad and Secret Creatures
A mystifying sensation of loneliness shook him. Arthur had been alone before, to be sure, but to be alone while surrounded by people, the one sane man in a mad place - that was loneliness.
— Graham Moore, The Sherlockian
A waltz begins, that floating, sweet rhythm. The fiddle is plaintive. A few minutes ago she was at least pleasantly contented. Now certain of the notes dip into her like ladles and come up full of loneliness. The people in the room recede. They are strangers, every one.
— Anna Keesey, Little Century
......and not out of fear or loneliness, but only to find myself again... for we have come too far my Life, to turn back now...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
...across the snowy field the barn light gleams - it's the loneliness of November twilight...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
She has that voraciousness about children. She swoops in on them. Even I, in public was a beloved child. She'd parade me into town, smiling and teasing me, tickling me as she spoke with people on the sidewalks. When we got home, she'd trail off to her room like an unfinished sentence, and I would sit outside with my face pressed against her door, and replay the day in my head, searching for clues to what I had done to displease her.I have one memory that catches in me like a nasty clump of blood. Marian was dead about two years, and my mother had a cluster of friends come over for afternoon drinks. For hours, the child was cooed over, smothered with red lipstick kisses, tidied up with tissues, then lipstick smacked again. I was suppose to be reading in my room, but I sat at the top of the stairs watching. My mother finally was handed the baby, and she cuddled it ferociously. Oh, how, wonderful it is to hold a baby again! Adora jiggled it on her knee, walked it around the rooms, whispered to it, and I looked down from above like a spiteful little god, the back of my hand placed against my face, imagining how it felt to be cheek to cheek with my mother.
— Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects
I had gotten so used to being alone, but never entirely used to it. Never used to it enough to stop wanting the alternative.
— David Levithan, Every You, Every Me
Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
— Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing
It's not the job of this town to make me feel happy. It's not this town´s fault that I don't feel I fit in. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, because it's about where you are in your head. It's about the other world I inhabit. The world of dreams, hope, imagination, and memories. I'm happy up here, and because of that I'm happy up there too
— Cecelia Ahern, If You Could See Me Now
I now understood that real secrets were lonely. They planted themselves inside of you and expanded, until you felt like that was all you were-a lonely little secret, isolated in your experiences.
— Yvonne Woon, Life Eternal
When we learn to speak, we learn to translate.
— Octavio Paz
You’re lost in your own world, in the things that happen there, and you’ve locked all the doors. Sometimes I look at you sleeping. I wake up and look at you and I feel closer to you when you’re like that, unguarded, than when you’re awake. When you’re awake you’re like someone with her eyes closed, watching a movie on the inside of your eyelids. I can’t reach you anymore. Once upon a time I could, but not now, and not for a long time.
— Nicole Krauss, Great House
I stood lonely enough, but to that feeling of isolation I was accustomed: it did not oppress me much.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
I don’t think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you consider other people’s lives, makes you more polite to those you deal with in passing, dampens irony and cynicism. The interior of the Fold is, of course, the place of ultimate loneliness, and I like it there. But there are times when the wish for others’ voices, for friendliness returned, reaches unpleasant levels, and becomes a kind of immobilizing pain. That was how it felt as I finished packing up the box of sex machines.
— Nicholson Baker, The Fermata
I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact," not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why.
— Jack Kerouac
I have become convinced that the more wealth a country accumulates, the more isolated and lonely its people become. The loneliest are usually the children and the elderly. Children learn what they live, and isolation in the ‘village’ is one of the most destructive messages we daily write on the tablets of their hearts.
— Wess Stafford
There is a horrifying loneliness at work in this time. No, listen to me. We lived six and seven to a room in those days, when I was still among the living. The city streets were seas of humanity; and now in these high buildings dim-witted souls hover in luxurious privacy, gazing through the television window at a faraway world of kissing and touching. It is bound to produce some great fund of common knowledge, some new level of human awareness, a curious skepticism, to be so alone.
— Anne Rice, The Queen of the Damned
When you're young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close-as close as you can get-to another person only makes it clear the impassable distance between you.
— Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room
Loneliness can make you feel that you have a kingdom in darkness.
— MRK ONTIM
A woman's voice answered, "Hello?"Walter cried back at her, "Hello, oh Lord, hello!""This is a recording," recited the woman's voice. "Miss Helen Arasumian is not home. Will you leave a message on the wire spool so she may call you when she returns? Hello? This is a recording. Miss Helen Arasumian is not home. Will you leave a message -"He hung up.He sat with his mouth twitching.On second thought he redialed that number."When Miss Helen Arasumian comes home," he said, "tell her to go to hell.
— Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
Loneliness is a crowded room
— Bryan Ferry
At times I feel like a socket that remembers its tooth.
— Saul Bellow
I invented adventures for myself and made up a life, so as at least to live in some way.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
How was it possible to be with someone and yet feel so utterly alone? How was it possible to be with someone as wonderful, warm and kind as Andrew and yet still wonder if love would ever find you?
— Chris Manby, Getting Personal
So this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.
— Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water
The last thing Farinoush did on several nights just before she went to bed was to rummage through her cardboard box of old things looking for him. And there he invariably remained, nestled forever between a copy of ‘Jana Aranya’ and ‘The Hours’. She read about thirty pages of his still incomprehensible stage-directions before passing out from exhaustion and hoping that the morning would bring him back to her; yearning to be yanked out of bed by him, devoured by him again. But he never returned.
— Kunal  Sen, Left from Dhakeshwari
My fear of loneliness is like a disease.
— Irene Tomkinson, Not Like My Mother: Becoming a Sane Parent After Growing Up in a Crazy Family
In those hours when the night is still dark and cold, we see Alokananda waking up to the faint sound of stifled sobs. The sheets besides her are creaseless, sleepless. She gets up silently, her body: blank, a patchwork of frugal impulses. She gathers the warmth of her Pashmina shawl around her, the shawl that she knows still hides threads from a shirt or two of his: remnants of embraces, once feisty and long forgotten.’('Left from Dhakeshwari')
— Kunal  Sen
how much he loved being alone except when he didn't, except when it got to be too much?
— Elizabeth Graver, The Honey Thief
This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
Outside the hospital, I squinted in the harsh morning sunlight. I could hear birds chirping in the tree, but even though I searched for them, they remained hidden from me.
— Nicholas Sparks, Dear John
If our greatest fear is to sink away alone and unremembered, the brutality that time will inflict upon each of us will always run stronger than any river's murky waves.
— Miguel Syjuco
I feel there's a funny little hole in me that wasn't there before, like a splinter in your finger, but this is somewhere above my stomach.
— Louise Fitzhugh
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
— Albert Einstein
My spirit. This is a new thought. I'm not sure exactly what it means, but it suggests I'm a fighter. In a sort of brave way. It's not as if I'm never friendly. Okay, maybe I don't go around loving everybody I meet, maybe my smiles are hard to come by, but i do care for some people.
— Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
As I grow older, much older, I will experience many things, and I will hit rock bottom again and again. Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I won't let my spirit be destroyed.
— Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen
Humans are amphibians...half spirit and half animal...as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time, means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation--the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.
— C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
If you let people break your spirit and detour you from your path, then you have not been true to yourself or those you're here to touch, those who believe in you.
— Allison DuBois
You praise man who has the ability to perform great actions.I admire man who can deal with great pain and knows no despair.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Connecting with those you know love, like and appreciate you restores the spirit and give you energy to keep moving forward in this life.
— Deborah Day, BE HAPPY NOW!
Let each man take the path according to his capacity, understanding and temperament. His true guru will meet him along that path.
— Sivananda Saraswati
An evil man is a saint of the future. See good in everything. Destroy the evil-finding quality. Develop the good-finding quality. Rise above good and evil.
— Sivananda Saraswati
I live for those who love me, for those who know me true; for the heaven that smiles above me and awaits my spirit too. For the cause that lacks assistance, for the wrong that needs resistance, for the future in the distance, and the good that I can do.
— George Linnaeus Banks
Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe
We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.
— Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods
The spirit of arrogance most definitely makes you shine. It paints a bright red target on your own forehead.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Industry, technology, and commerce can thrive only as long as an idealistic national community offers the necessary preconditions. And these do not lie in material egoism, but in a spirit of sacrifice and joyful renunciation.
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
So think as if your every thought were to be etched in fire upon the sky for all and everything to see. For so, in truth, it is.
— Mikhail Naimy, The Book of Mirdad: The Strange Story of a Monastery Which Was Once Called the Ark
From my spirit's gray defeat, From my pulse's flagging beat, From my hopes that turned to sand Sifting through my close-clenched hand, From my own fault's slavery, If I can sing, I still am free.For with my singing I can make A refuge for my spirit's sake, A house of shining words, to be My fragile immortality.
— Sara Teasdale
He might as well plant an oak in a flowerpot, and expect it to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his shallow cares!
— Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
The more elaborate his labyrinths, the further from the Sun his face.
— Mikhail Naimy, The Book of Mirdad: The Strange Story of a Monastery Which Was Once Called the Ark
A tornado of thought is unleashed after each new insight. This in turn results in an earthquake of assumptions. These are natural disasters that re-shape the spirit.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
Life is messy. Grit and grace come at us fast, side by side. Sometimes the grit becomes overwhelming and diminishes our spirit. What’s good seems lost and gone forever. This is a story about the pathway back to what’s beautiful, when the way back seems impossible.
— Sharon E. Rainey, Making a Pearl from the Grit of Life
It is rooted deep in your bones
—  the water calls out to you until it causes you physical pain unless you come to it.
Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe
The modern spirit is a hesitant one. Spontaneity has given way to cautious legalisms, and the age of heroes has been superseded by a cult of specialization. We have no more giants; only obedient ants.
— Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist
A poor man is not disposed to quick and high resentment when he is among the rich: he is apt to yield to others, for he knows others are above him: he is not stiff and self-willed; he is patient with hard fare; he expects no other than to be despised, and takes it patiently; he does not take it heinously that he overlooked and but little regarded; he is prepared to be in a lowly place; he readily honours his superiors; he takes reproofs quietly; he readily honours others as above him; he easily yields to be taught, and does not claim much to his understanding and judgment; he is not over nice or humoursome, and has his spirit subdued to hard things; he is not assuming, nor apt to take much upon him, but it is natural for him to be subject to others. Thus it is with the humble Christian.
— Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections
When you are attracted to, and eat, fruits, occasionally a seed will be carried within you to a fertile ground.
— David Wolfe, The Sunfood Diet Success System
She was a coquette; he was sure she had a spirit of her own; but in her bright, sweet, superficial little visage there was no mockery, no irony. Before long it became obvious that she was much disposed towards conversation.
— Henry James
Toxic relationships are dangerous to your health; they will literally kill you. Stress shortens your lifespan. Even a broken heart can kill you. There is an undeniable mind-body connection. Your arguments and hateful talk can land you in the emergency room or in the morgue. You were not meant to live in a fever of anxiety; screaming yourself hoarse in a frenzy of dreadful, panicked fight-or-flight that leaves you exhausted and numb with grief. You were not meant to live like animals tearing one another to shreds. Don't turn your hair gray. Don't carve a roadmap of pain into the sweet wrinkles on your face. Don't lay in the quiet with your heart pounding like a trapped, frightened creature. For your own precious and beautiful life, and for those around you — seek help or get out before it is too late. This is your wake-up call!
— Bryant McGill
The spirit finds a way to be born. Instinct seeks for ways to survive.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
And I knew that the Spirit that had gone forth to shape the world and make it live was still alive in it. I just had no doubt. I could see that I lived in the created world, and it was still being created. I would be part of it forever. There was no escape. The Spirit that made it was in it, shaping it and reshaping it, sometimes lying at rest, sometimes standing up and shaking itself, like a muddy horse, and letting the pieces fly.
— Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
Everything has a spirit and it's all connected. If you think about that, if you live your life by it, then you're less likely to cause any hurt. It's like how our bodies go back into the ground when we die, so that connects us to the earth. If you dump trash, you're dumping it on your and my ancestors. Or to bring it down to its simplest level: treat everything and everybody the way you want to be treated, because when you hurt someone, you're only hurting yourself.
— Charles de Lint, The Onion Girl
The faerie represent the beauty we don't see, or even choose to ignore. That's why I'll paint them in junkyards, or fluttering around a sleeping wino. No place or person is immune to spirit. Look hard enough, and everything has a story. Everybody is important."- Jilly Coppercorn
— Charles de Lint, The Onion Girl
The eastern sky above the firs was flushed faintly pink from the reflection of the west, and Anne was wondering dreamily if the spirit of color looked like that…
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Water is sufficient...the spirit moves over water.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
The sedentary life...is the real sin against the holy spirit.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
He was himself a case in point, and perhaps not a rare one, for his spirit, it seemed, had been burned out of him but he was yet walking.
— Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
Man is better off without the confusion and fear of psychic experience and his progress will be faster.' If telepathy ever becomes a possibility he was not sure it would be a good thing, '...for it may put us back in contact with the spirits of the dead and progress does not lie in that direction.
— H. Russell Wakefield
Don't make the body do what the spirit does best, and don't put a big load on the spirit that the body could easily carry.
— Jalaluddin Rumi, The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing
Spirit is like the wind, in that we can't see it but can see its effects, which are profound.
— Jimmy Carter
Then came nightthat was like falling water.At times, for hours,a bird spirit,half buzzard, half swan,just above the rushesfrom which a snow-storm howls.
— Peter Huchel
An appeal to fear never finds an echo in German hearts.
— Otto von Bismarck
By the Hospital Lane goes the 'Faeries Path.' Every evening they travel from the hill to the sea, from the sea to the hill. At the sea end of their path stands a cottage. One night Mrs. Arbunathy, who lived there, left her door open, as she was expecting her son. Her husband was asleep by the fire; a tall man came in and sat beside him. After he had been sitting there for a while, the woman said, 'In the name of God, who are you?' He got up and went out, saying, 'Never leave the door open at this hour, or evil may come to you.' She woke her husband and told him. 'One of the good people has been with us,' said he. ("Village Ghosts")
— W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore
What matters most:"What he had yearned to embrace was not the flesh but a downy spirit, a spark, the impalpable angel that inhabits the flesh."Wind, Sand and Stars.
— Richard Bach
The flesh covers the bones, and makes the spirit naked.
— Anthony Liccione
The spirit partly lies in physical body,the rest of it is still waiting to be refitted.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
My father,' I replied, 'I am fond of action. I like to succour the afflicted, and make people happy. Command that there be built for me a tower, from whose top I can see the whole earth, and thus discover the places where my help would be of most avai1.''To do good, without ceasing, to mankind, a race at once flighty and ungrateful, is a more painful task than you imagine,' said Asfendarmod. ------After saying these words, my father motioned to us to retire; and immediately I found myself in a tower, built on the summit of Mount Caf - a tower whose outer walls were lined with numberless mirrors that reflected, though hazily and as in a kind of dream, a thousand varied scenes then being enacted on the earth. Asfendarmod's power had indeed annihilated space, and brought me not only within sight of all the beings thus reflected in the mirrors, but also within sound of their voices and of the very words they uttered. (“The Story of The Peri Homaiouna”)
— William Beckford, The Episodes of Vathek
I fell like a celibate hustlerA stained & sullied spirit...Halfway between freaky and holy
— Neil Mach, The Bedevilment of Bertie Lunn
Everytime you’re denying the flesh, you’re feeding and making the spirit stronger.
— Jeanette Coron
How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect. If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one's entire life.
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Perhaps true weakness is weakness of the spirit
— Renee Ahdieh, Flame in the Mist
He who rules his spirit, shall conquer himself.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Here all great emotions decay: here only little, dry emotions may rattle!Do you not smell already the slaughter-houses and cook-shops of the spirit? Does this city not reek of the fumes of slaughtered spirit?Do you not see the souls hanging like dirty, limp rags? – And they also make newspapers from these rags!Have you not heard how the spirit has here become a play with words? It vomits our repulsive verbal swill! – And they also make newspapers from this verbal swill.They pursue one another and do not know where. They inflame one another, and do not know why. They rattle their tins, they jingle their gold.They are cold and seek warmth in distilled waters; they are inflamed and seek coolness in frozen spirits; they are all ill and diseased with public opinion.All lusts and vices are at home here; but there are virtuous people here, too, there are many adroit, useful virtues.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Kindle the flame of fire in your spirit.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
A Christian who is willing to take up arms against another Christian is a Christian who has traded in his membership in the post-Babel communion of saints for membership in a nation governed by refurbished stoicheic values. They have traded in their loyalty to the temple of the Spirit for loyalty to the flesh. Christians who make war against other Christians are Galatians, bewitched by the lure of patriotism, which is simply the lure of flesh. They are no longer in the ranks of the Spirit.
— Peter Leithart
So you say there is no Father Christmas,                                                                          You say there is no Santa Claus                                                                                         Reindeer cannot fly, it's all a grown-up lie...
— M.C. Frank, No Ordinary Star
It will be seen how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and suffering, only lose their antithetical character, and thus their existence, as such antitheses in the social condition; it will be seen how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of men. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of knowledge, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one.
— Robert C. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader
One humid summer afternoon, Remy got to missing his dad, who was in Japan doing fieldwork. After searching around the house, I found him in the backyard sitting on a rock and crying tears that were so sincere and alone that I immediately cried right along with him--out of both empathy and also a sense of joy that he, after a mere five years on this earth, was able to feel so deeply for someone else.Because I was crying, I was short on words, but I carried him inside to an overstuffed chair and let his little heaving body fill in every space on my stomach and chest. We stayed there for a long time without speaking while he calmed--he seemed to want to melt right into me until any hurt he felt was gone. I had already been thinking a lot about bodies and the spirit, but that moment brought new clarity to my abstract ideas and tentative conclusions. My body is home to my children. I lie between my children each night while they fall asleep, and they reach out in the dark and stroke my face or reach for my hand. It's like the reaffirmation of both their place in the world and their place in a larger plan, as they run their tiny hands across the familiar and tangible landscape of my body. My body for them is a manifestation of home, and home is what the spirit has always felt like for me.There have been times in my life, more than I'd like to admit, that I've spent copious amounts of thought and energy trying to rearrange the home of my body. Roughly pushing furniture around with dissatisfaction, barging in with the latest trend, sitting at the window wishing my home was anything other than what it was. I think, like many, I've been harsh to my body, spoken unkindly to and about it. Watching Thea move through the world with almost comical confidence has shifted my paradigm. Since she has been around, I slowly, one step and one day at a time, began reclaiming confidence in my body. I feel fierce in protecting her confidence, and I've learned in order to do that I have to protect my own. I've learned that in order to be an efficacious woman with any sort of spiritual power, I first have to love my body.
— Ashley Mae Hoiland, One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly: The Art of Seeking God
Bitterness is a broken spirit.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Hegel represents history as the self-realization of spirit (Geist) or God. The fundamental scheme of his theory is as follows. Spirit is self-creative energy imbued with a drive to become fully conscious of itself as spirit. Nature is spirit in its self-objectification in space; history is spirit in its self-objectification as culture—the succession of world-dominant civilizations from the ancient Orient to modern Europe. Spirit actualizes its nature as self-conscious being by the process of knowing. Through the mind of man, philosophical man in particular, the world achieves consciousness of itself as spirit. This process involves the repeated overcoming of spirit's alienation (Entfremdung) from itself, which takes place when spirit as the knowing mind confronts a world that appears, albeit falsely, as objective, i.e. as other than spirit. Knowing is recognition, whereby spirit destroys the illusory otherness of the objective world and recognizes it as actually subjective or selbstisch. The process terminates at the stage of "absolute knowledge," when spirit is finally and fully "at home with itself in its otherness," having recognized the whole of creation as spirit—Hegelianism itself being the scientific form of this ultimate self-knowledge on spirit's part.
— Robert C. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader
How does something so invisible make one so invincible?
— Juliet Castle, The Silent Partner And Other Stories Of Truth
Your spirit knows your purpose launch yourself into a highest virtues from within.
— Napz Cherub Pellazo
No more the victory of spirit over matter and definitely not the victory of matter over spirit – the next stage is not one overcoming the other, but a merge.
— Shai Tubali, The Mystical Enlightenment of Friedrich Nietzsche: On the Death of God and the God Within
Truth in spirit, not truth to the letter, is the true veracity,
— Robert Louis Stevenson
Listen to 'The Voice', not the choice
— T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"
How now, spirit, whither wander you?
— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream: Readers' Edition
Darkness is not forever, eventually there will be stars.
— David Paul Kirkpatrick
frThe Spirit comes gently and makes himself known by his fragrance. He is not felt as a burden for God is light, very light. Rays of light and knowledge stream before him as the Spirit approaches. The Spirit comes with the tenderness of a true friend to save, to heal, to teach, to counsel, to strengthen, and to console.
— Cyril of Jerusalem
Highly evolved people have their own conscience as pure law.
— Lao Tzu
God is spirit
— Sunday Adelaja
God is spirit and in order to do works on earth, He needs a man, who has a spirit and a body
— Sunday Adelaja
God gives us His spirit , while we give Him our bodies by fully submitting to Him and doing His will
— Sunday Adelaja
The more time you spend with the Lord, the stronger your spirit becomes. This way you get authority not just on earth but also before the Heavens
— Sunday Adelaja
The principles of kingdom of God are imprinted on human spirit
— Sunday Adelaja
To open door to hatred is to open one’s spirit to misery
— Sunday Adelaja
People up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.
— Langston Hughes
To be poor in spirit is to recognize one’s need to receive help
— Sunday Adelaja
To be poor in spirit is an attitude of humility that is willing to turn from personal pursuits to seek God’s righteousness
— Sunday Adelaja
Religious traditions and selfish agenda are laid aside when we are poor in spirit
— Sunday Adelaja
don't let what other people think, stop you from doing the things you love
— Adolf Hitler
The Holy Scripture is the Spirit of Holy One.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
A bird with a broken wing cannot survive nor will a man with a broken spirit endure.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The spirit gone, man is garbage.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Messengers often come when you struggle with a decision, need support or are trying to find your balance. They can come as animals like coyote and lizard appeared for Kate and for me. They can be spirit guides, angels, family members, ancestors and friends. A messenger can even be me! Many of them you will not notice because you are too preoccupied to see them. There may come a time, however, when you might sense the millions of angels too small to be witnessed, like fairies that live in the curve of a leaf or who sleep under the tiniest rose petal.
— Kate McGahan, Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge
We all know what we have to do what the inkling provokes us. We have to do the right thing. We have to make that extra push out of bed, or off the sofa. We must just do it.
— Mark Andrew Poe, Showdown on Nightingale Lane
When there's Christmas in hell. that's what i call real Christmas!
— Nadun Lokuliyanage
The intellect is the earth, the emotions are the sky and the spirit is the universe beyond.
— R. A. Delmonico
You don't have to look for trouble. It will find you. And when that happens"--Luna disappeared, but her voice continued--"keep up that great spirit and make a plan, because nine lives is just a state of mind.
— Chris Kurtz, The Adventures of a South Pole Pig: A novel of snow and courage
SpyThough at the moment I am a prisoner, my spirit remains free. While everyone is fighting a never-ending battle to see who will survive amid so much bloodshed, I don't need to fight anymore, only wait for people I've never met to decide who I am.
— Paulo Coelho
Human on human crimes should never be forgotten, or dismissed by time. We are all related here and are linked by spirit.
— Gayle Wray
O Lord gives me a loyal spirit.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Repent heart rekindles the spirit.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The redundancy of flesh, he thinks, the helplessness of meat, how can we conjure spirit from a bone?
— Ian McGuire, The North Water
I have a transgressive spirit, and Pop is transgression's best friend.
— Nuno Roque
Well, I must do’t. Away, my disposition, and possess me Some harlot’s spirit! My throat of war be turn’d, Which quier’d with my drum, into a pipe Small as an eunuch, or the virgin voice That babies lull asleep! The smiles of knaves Tent in my cheeks, and schoolboys’ tears take up The glasses of my sight! A beggar’s tongue Make motion through my lips, and my arm’d knees, Who bow’d but in my stirrup, bend like his That hath receiv’d an alms! I will not do’t, Lest I surcease to honor mine own truth, And by my body’s action teach my mind A most inherent baseness.
— William Shakespeare, Coriolanus
We can give away all that He entrusts to us in the same spirit of generosity.
— Craig Groeschel, Weird: Because Normal Isn't Working
The influence of the iniquitous system necessarily fosters an unfeeling and cruel spirit, even in the bosoms of those who, among their equals, are regarded as humane and generous.
— Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave
It is not possible for a house to own a spirit without owning windows with flowers!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Look at yourself and look into the eyes you've been looking at your entire life. Recognize your SPIRIT. You are the reflection of life.
— Karen A. Baquiran
The human spirit, padded in ignorance, is a wondrous thing. They move within their own orbits- each of the seemingly lost, or intentionally lost in his or her own endeavors- while shifting into and out of one another's lives.
— Lorna Jane Cook, Outside Wonderland
Twilight …Not just a metaphorThe metaphor of the ‘spirit’The confluence of life and deathThe celestial dance of existential and essential(Page 75)
— Neena Verma, A Mother's Cry... A Mother's Celebration
The urge to fight, to maul, to murder: it is the greatest cancer that afflicts mankind. It obliterates the body of the victim, and the spirit of the the one who strikes the blow. I have seen it...
— Garth Ennis, The Boys, Volume 6: The Self-Preservation Society
When seen with imagination, all things shift toward meaning, releasing energies that are hidden within appearances, releasing the inner wings of spirit, opening wide the doors to healing and wholeness.
— Michael Meade, The Genius Myth
Every day the choice is presented to us, in a thousand different ways, to live up to the spirit which is in us or to deny it. Whenever we talk about right and wrong we are turning the light of scrutiny upon our neighbors instead of upon ourselves. We judge in order not to be judged. We uphold the law, because it is easier than to defy it. We are all lawbreakers, all criminals, all murderers, at heart. It is not our business to get after the murderers, but to get after the murderer which exists in each and every one of us. And I mean by murder the supreme kind which consists in murdering the spirit.
— Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
Just because the rose died on the vine, doesn't mean it lied to you when it was in bloom.
— Michael Clifford
I understood that the law of the world was strife; an inexorable, murderous law, which was not content with arming nation against nation but which hurled against one another the children of the same race, the same family, the same womb. I found none of the lofty abstractions of honor, justice, charity, patriotism of which our standard books are so full, on which we are brought up, with which we are lulled to sleep, through which they hypnotize us in order the better to deceive the kind little folk, to enslave them the more easily, to butcher them the more foully.
— Octave Mirbeau
The only time they ever throw anything away is when it's really and truly broken, and then they make a big deal about it. They save up all their bent pins and broken sewing needles and once a year they do a whole memorial service for them, chanting and then sticking them into a block of tofu so they will have a nice soft place to rest. Jiko says that everything has a spirit, even if it is old and useless, and we must console and honor the things that have served us well.
— Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
Our mind can move directly and aggressively on impulse, while our spirit moves gently and calmly on our intuition.
— Michael Thomas Sunnarborg, Balancing Work, Relationships & Life in Three Simple Steps
I don’t talk much because talking without thought is not talking at all,
— Zach Merrick
Do what feel is right, and back yourself up. Live the life you want to live,
— Jack Barakat
The spiritual world of a Volk is not its cultural superstructure, just as little as it is its arsenal of useful knowledge [Kenntnisse] and values; rather, it is the power that comes from preserving at the most profound level the forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of a Volk, the power to arouse most inwardly and to shake most extensively the Volk's existence.
— Martin Heidegger, The Self-Assertion of the German University
Asking the question of being is one of the essential and fundamental conditions for the awakening of spirit and hence for an originary world of historical Dasein. It is indispensable if the peril of world-darkening [Weltverdüsterung] is to be forestalled and if our Volk at the center of the West is to take on its historical mission.
— Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics
You are the most important person in the world. Every single of you. Don’t let anybody tell you differently, okay?,
— Alex Gaskarth
Your mother contained a good spirit. A loving spirit. A spirit that will not cease to exist.Eva looked at him, her brows furrowed.Rovender placed his arm around Eva's shoulders. "You see, she lives within you now, in all of the lessons that she taught you. Lessons you will never forget. Lessons you will always carry with you... and will one day pass on.
— Tony DiTerlizzi, The Search for WondLa
I know you’re tired…but this is your time, Laney. Claim your power. Make everything…from the beginning until the end…make it all count.
— R. W. Patterson
The true voice is a good spirit.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
I be wanting to speak on stuff sometimes, but Spirit be like, "Leave that shit alone, hear?" And I be like, "Yes, ma'am.
— Trelani Michelle, Women Who Ain't Afraid to Curse When Communicating with God: 31-Day Self-Study Guide to Spiritual Liberation
Be strong in spirit, you can conquer every circumstance.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
A free spirit is the master of its own universe.
— Theodore Volgoff, The Backpack
Awaken my spirit.Awaken my soul.Awaken my strength.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Beware of wolves in sheep's clothing, for they will feed you delicious morsels that they may later feast upon your tender flesh.
— Michele Faison
Good heart, good spirit.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Love is enduring spirit.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
You can either be a person who is a coward, afraid, ready to submit, surrender, a person who has himself no dignity, no respect for his own being—or you can be fearless. But then you are going to be a rebel, you cannot avoid that. Either you can be a man of faith or you are going to be a rebellious spirit.
— Osho, Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously