Thomas Moore Quotes & Sayings

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. — Thomas Moore

DOST thou not hear the silver bell,
Through yonder lime-trees ringing?
'Tis my lady's light gazelle.
To me her love thoughts bringing,
All the while that silver bell
Around his dark neck ringing. — Thomas Moore

From plants that wake when others sleep, from timid jasmine buds that keep their odour to themselves all day, but when the sunlight dies away let the delicious secret out to every breeze that roams about. — Thomas Moore

J. B. Jackson, a historian of landscapes, makes a crucial point about such things in his essay "The Necessity for Ruins." Things in decay, he says, express a theology of birth, death, and redemption. — Thomas Moore

A philosopher being asked what was the first thing necessary to win the love of a woman, answered, Opportunity! — Thomas Moore

Some early writing say that when people kiss, they exchange the soul, that it's between their mouths and tongues that the soul is exchanged. And so the kiss is more of a soulful connection maybe than intercourse and other ways of being together. A kiss asks a lot from you. I think it asks a lot from a person to really kiss. — Thomas Moore

The problem in narcissism is not the high ideals and ambitions, it's the difficulty one encounters when trying to give them body. — Thomas Moore

According to the normal view, happiness is the summum bonum towards which we're naturally impelled by virtue - which in their definition means following one's natural impulses, as God meant us to do. But this includes obeying the instinct to be reasonable in our likes and dislikes. And reason also teaches us, first to love and reverence Almighty God, to Whom we owe our existence and our potential happiness, and secondly to get through life as comfortably and cheerfully as we can , and help all other members of our species to do so too. — Thomas Moore

I said (while The moon's smile Played o'er a stream, in dimpling bliss,) "The moon looks "On many brooks, "The brook can see no moon but this;"[1] — Thomas Moore

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. — Thomas Moore

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. — Thomas Moore

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 heart
Would 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 sets
The same look which she turned when he rose! — Thomas Moore

Disguise our bondage as we will, 'Tis woman, woman, rules us still. — Thomas Moore

At this deep level of personal myth and innate constitution, spirituality and psychology overlap and conjoin. For that reason, paying close attention to dreams aids any spiritual activity, keeping it grounded and in contact with the elements that have shaped you. Dream work becomes as important as meditation, quiet reading, and prayer, and fits tightly into a developed spiritual way of life. — Thomas Moore

And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers
Is always the first to be touched by the thorns. — Thomas Moore

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

When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness. — Thomas Moore

You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang round it still. — Thomas Moore

A few moments of silence may be all the meditation we need at times. Our homes could have a little space for withdrawal and quiet, and even a small garden could offer some distance from noise. — Thomas Moore

Socrates and Jesus, two teachers of virtue and love, were executed because of the unsettling, threatening power of their souls, which was revealed in their personal lives and in their words. — Thomas Moore

How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets. — Thomas Moore

Although the making of a religion of one's own can be satisfying, it can progress further and faster with the aid of the spiritual traditions. Your own spiritual path risks being too personal and limited. What resources do you have compared to the traditions that have thought of things you will never consider? They have refined ideas and images and teachings and moral guidelines expressed in elegant and inspiring ways. They have produced spiritual beauty of a kind no single person could ever create. Read Emerson's journals and you find that he was reading Hafiz for months, and Thoreau's homespun spiritual insights come wrapped in references from the Western and Eastern traditions. — Thomas Moore

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. — Thomas Moore

Recognize what is before your eyes, and what is hidden will be revealed to you. THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS — Thomas Moore

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. — Thomas Moore

It's my conviction that slight shifts in imagination have more impact on living than major efforts at change ... deep changes in life follow movements in imagination. — Thomas Moore

Exercise could be more soulfully performed by emphasizing fantasy and imagination. Usually we are told how much time to spend at a certain exercise, what heart rate to aim for, and which muscle to focus on for toning. — Thomas Moore

I have plenty of machinery around me; what I really need is a more enchanting world in which to live and work. — Thomas Moore

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

Fond memory brings the light of other days around me. — Thomas Moore

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. — Thomas Moore

Rich and rare were the gems she wore, And a bright gold ring on her hand she bore. — Thomas Moore

The word passion means basically "to be affected," and passion is the essential energy of the soul. The poet Rilke describes this passive power in the imagery of the flower's structure, when he calls it a "muscle of infinite reception." We don't often think of the capacity to be affected as strength and as the work of a powerful muscle, and yet for the soul, as for the flower, this is its toughest work and its main role in our lives. Things — Thomas Moore

I have made many mistakes and done a lot of foolish things, but when I look back on the person I was, I feel affection for him and laugh at him. — Thomas Moore

When you sense that your dark night is one of pregnancy and oceanic return, you could react accordingly and be still. Watch and wonder. Take the human embryo as your model. Assume the fetal position, emotionally and intellectually. Be silent. Float in your darkness as if it were the waters of the womb, and give up trying to fight your way out or make sense of it. — Thomas Moore

What's important is finding out what works for you. — Thomas Moore

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. — Thomas Moore

The heart that has truly loved never forgets, But as truly loves on to the close. — Thomas Moore

A piece of the sky and a chunk of the earth lie lodged in the heart of every human being. — Thomas Moore

Come o'er the sea,
Maiden with me,
Mine through the sunshine, storms and snows;
Seasons may roll,
But the true soul
Burns the same, where'er it goes. — Thomas Moore

There are places in this world that are neither here nor there, neither up nor down, neither real nor imaginary ... — Thomas Moore

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

T'is the last rose of summer,
Left blooming alone. — Thomas Moore

Your first task is to find the place where your soul is at home. — Thomas Moore

Sex and religion are closer to each other that either might prefer. — Thomas Moore

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. — Thomas Moore

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. — Thomas Moore

Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities
that's training or instruction
but is rather a making visible what is hidden as a seed ...
To be educated, a person doesn't have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life ...
One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated. — Thomas Moore

Bastard Freedom waves Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves. — Thomas Moore

Writers are taught to "write what you know about." The same advice applies to the quest for the power of the soul: be good at what you're good at. Many of us spend time and energy trying to be something that we are not. But this is a move against soul, because individuality rises out of the soul as water rises out of the depths of the earth. We are who we are because of the special mix that makes up our soul. In spite of its archetypal, universal contents, for each individual the soul is highly idiosyncratic. Power begins in knowing this special soul, which may be entirely different from our fantasies about who we are or who we want to be. A — Thomas Moore

Go where we may, rest where we will,
Eternal London haunts us still. — Thomas Moore

Quote from CARE OF THE SOUL ... Thomas Moore ... to the soul, the most minute details and the most ordinary activities, carried out with mindfullness and art, have an effect far beyond their apparant insignificance. — Thomas Moore

Nicholas of Cusa said we have to be educated into our ignorance or else the full presence of the divine will be kept at bay. We have to arrive at that difficult point where we don't know what is going on or what we can do. That precise point is an opening to true faith. The — Thomas Moore

... 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* — Thomas Moore

You look until you see nothing tangible, and that is God. — Thomas Moore

It's important to be heroic, ambitious, productive, efficient, creative, and progressive, but these qualities don't necessarily nurture 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. — Thomas Moore

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. — Thomas Moore

The young May moon is beaming, love.
The glow-worm's lamp is gleaming, love.
How sweet to rove,
Through Morna's grove,
When the drowsy world is dreaming, love!
Then awake! - the heavens look bright, my dear,
'Tis never too late for delight, my dear,
And the best of all ways
To lengthen our days
Is to steal a few hours from the night, my dear! — Thomas Moore

Often care of the soul means not taking sides when there is a conflict at a deep level. It may be necessary to stretch the heart wide enough to embrace contradiction and paradox. — Thomas Moore

We let a river shower its banks with a spirit that invades the people living there, and we protect that river, knowing that without its blessings the people have no source of soul. — Thomas Moore

Most, if not all, problems brought to therapists are issues of love. It makes sense that the cure is also love. — Thomas Moore

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. — Thomas Moore

Faith is a gift of spirit that allows the soul to remain attached to its own unfolding. When faith is soulful, it is always planted in the soil of wonder and questioning. It isn't a defensive and anxious holding on to certain objects of belief, because doubt, as its shadow, can be brought into a faith that is fully mature. Imagine — Thomas Moore

Love is the means of entry and our guide. Love keeps us on the labyrinthine path. If we can honor love as it presents itself, taking shapes and directions we would never have predicted or desired, then we are on the way toward discovering the lower levels of soul, where meaning and value reveal themselves slowly and paradoxically. — Thomas Moore

Body exercise is incomplete if it focuses exclusively on muscle and is motivated by the ideal of a physique unspoiled by fat. — Thomas Moore

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

For great and horrible punishments be appointed for thieves, wheras much rather provision should have been made that there were some means they might get their living, so that no man should be driven to this necessity. — Thomas Moore

Soul is to be found in the vicinity of taboo. — Thomas Moore

The devil ... the prowde spirite ... cannot endure to be mocked. — Thomas Moore

The life of the soul, as the structure of dreams reveals, is a continual going over and over of the material of life. In — Thomas Moore

Silence is not an absence of sound but rather a shifting of attention toward sounds that speak to the soul. — Thomas Moore

Magine a trust in yourself, or another person, or in life itself, that doesn't need to be proved or demonstrated, that is able to contain uncertainty. People sometimes put their trust in a spiritual leader and are terribly betrayed if that person then fails to live up to ideals. But a real trust of faith would be to decide whether to trust someone, knowing that betrayal is inevitable because life and personality are never without shadow. The vulnerability that faith demands could be matched by an equal trust in oneself, the feeling that one can survive the pain of betrayal. — Thomas Moore

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. — Thomas Moore

It isn't comfortable to discover her place and her necessity. And yet what she has to offer is nothing less than the entire deep spiritual realm of the soul, the invisible, unchanging core. — Thomas Moore

An enchanted world is one that speaks to the soul, to the mysterious depths of the heart and imagination where we find value, love, and union with the world around us. As mystics of many religions have taught, that sense of rapturous union can give a sensation of fulfillment that makes life purposeful and vibrant ... — Thomas Moore

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. — Thomas Moore

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

Ask a woman's advice, and whatever she advises, Do the very reverse and you're sure to be wise. — Thomas Moore

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

Like the stain'd web that whitens in the sun, grow pure by being purely shone upon. — Thomas Moore

This wretched brain gave way, and I became a wreck at random driven, without one glimpse of reason or heaven. — Thomas Moore

It's the pausing and the stopping, perhaps going backward and losing some time, not being able to do everything we're supposed to do, that serves the soul. That's the enchantment that feeds the soul. — Thomas Moore

Gnostic tales tell of the homesickness of the soul, its yearning for its own milieu ... — Thomas Moore

Pythagoras asks that we not let a friend go lightly, for whatever reason. Instead, we should stay with a friend as long as we can, until we're compelled to abandon him completely against our will. It's a serious thing to toss away money, but to cast aside a person is even more serious. Nothing in human life is more rarely found, nothing more dearly possessed. No loss is more chilling or more dangerous than that of a friend. — Thomas Moore

You discover that when you are doing the right work, you are the right person. — Thomas Moore

Care of the soul may take the form of living in a fully embodied imagination, being an artist at home and at work. You don't have to be a professional in order to bring art into the care of your soul; anyone can have an art studio at home, for instance. — Thomas Moore

A calling is the sense that you are on this earth for a reason, that you have a destiny, no matter how great or small. — Thomas Moore

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. — Thomas Moore

Now is not the time to tolerate the religions of the world; it's time to seek them out and study them and be affected by them. — Thomas Moore

I feel like one
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garland's dead,
And all but he departed! — Thomas Moore

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. — Thomas Moore

When I speak of a religion of one's own, I'm not talking about a selfish, ego-centered, loosely patched together spiritual concoction. I'm recommending a courageous, deep-seated, fate-driven, informed, and intelligent life that has sublime and transcendent dimension. It can be shared in a community. It can be accomplished inside or outside a traditional religious organization. It is suitable for pious members of a religious group and for agnostics and atheists. To be religious even in a personal way, you have to wake up and find your own portals to wonder and transcendence. — Thomas Moore

40. "Wisdom and deep intelligence require an honest appreciation of mystery."~ — Thomas Moore

Don't take anything literally but always look deeper. For example, if you drink too much, what is your soul looking for in the alcohol? If you eat too much, what part of your soul is in need of nourishing? Think poetically and never respond on a surface level. 4. — Thomas Moore

Your challenge, then, is to create a religion of your own by being secular in a religious way, or religious in a secular way. You can learn how to see the secular from a religious angle, and vice versa. — Thomas Moore

A pretty wife is something for the fastidious vanity of a roue to retire upon. — Thomas Moore

All that's bright must fade, The brightest still the fleetest; All that's sweet was made But to be lost when sweetest. — Thomas Moore

The formal religions are often overdone, with useless formalities, immature psychological notions, and pompous authorities. — Thomas Moore

In her extraordinary book, Ordinarily Sacred, Lynda Sexson teaches us how to catch the appearance of the sacred in the most ordinary objects and circumstances. — Thomas Moore

There is no way to re-enchant our lives in a disenchanted culture except by becoming renegades from that culture and planting the seeds for a new one. — Thomas Moore