Paradox Of The Soul Quotes & Sayings

To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul's paradox of love. — A.W. Tozer

The paradox of soul-satisfaction is this: When I die to myself, my soul comes alive. God says the wrong approach to soul thirst is through human achievement and material wealth. So soul-satisfaction is not about acquiring the right things but about acquiring the right soul. It is not something you buy, but something you receive freely from God. Hear these great words of the prophet Isaiah: "Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and [your soul] will delight in the richest of fare." And it will be satisfied. — John Ortberg

Medicine's focus is narrow. Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet - and this is the painful paradox - we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days. For more than half a century now, we have treated the trials of sickness, aging, and mortality as medical concerns. It's been an experiment in social engineering, putting our fates in the hands of people valued more for their technical prowess than for their understanding of human needs. — Atul Gawande

One of the essential paradoxes of Advent: that while we wait for God, we are with God all along ,that while we need to be reassured of God's arrival, or the arrival of our homecoming, we are already at home. While we wait, we have to trust, to have faith, but it is God's grace that gives us that faith. As with all spiritual knowledge, two things are true, and equally true, at once. The mind can't grasp paradox; it is the knowledge of the soul. — Michelle Blake

You ever get the feeling the world's filling up with bastards? I do. What I want to know is what happens when all the bastards run out of people to crap on? What happens when all that's left in the world is bastards? ... The golden rule. Screw unto others before they screw unto you. — William Hoffman

The great paradox of the 21st century is that, in this age of powerful technology, the biggest problems we face internationally are problems of the human soul. — Ralph Peters

The Angel of Death took the woman's frail hand. "Don't be afraid." she said. "Life is your past. Death, on the other hand, is your soul preparing for a new beginning. A brand new adventure, if you like." An excerpt from Paradox - Equilibrium. Book 4 in the Paradox series (release date 2013) — Patti Roberts

All those who perish in the wrath of God
Here meet together out of every land;
And ready are they to pass o'er the river,
Because celestial Justice spurs them on,
So that their fear is turned into desire.
This way there never passes a good soul;
And hence if Charon doth complain of thee,
Well mayst thou know now what his speech imports. — Dante Alighieri

Of Dixie Doyle it is said that she could convince grown men of anything. While she is only a mediocre student and a wholly untalented tennis player, she possesses a quality of performed girlishness that turns sex into a ragged paradox for men beyond the age of thirty. She speaks with the hint of a babyish lisp, the pink end of her tongue frequently peeking out from between her teeth, but her eyes are implacable fields of gray that at any moment could conceal everything you imagine - or nothing at all. She might be an X-ray registering the skeleton of your soul, or, like Oscar Wilde's women, she might be a sphinx without a secret. — Joshua Gaylord

Some of you read with me 40 years ago a portion of Aristotle's Ethics, a selection of passages that describe his idea of happiness. You may not remember too well. — Charles Van Doren

Harry was bleeding. — J.K. Rowling

Modern literature is a north-east wind
a blight of the human soul. I take credit to myself for having helped to make it so. The way to produce fine fruit is to blight the flower. You call this a paradox. Marry, so be it. — Thomas Love Peacock

A paradox of the soul is that it is incapable of satisfying itself, but it is also incapable of living without satisfaction. You were made for soul-satisfaction, but you will only ever find it in God. The soul craves to be secure. The soul craves to be loved. The soul craves to be significant, and we find these only in God in a form that can satisfy us. That's why the psalmist says to God, "Because your love is better than life ... my soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods." Soul and appetite and satisfaction are dominant themes in the Bible - the soul craves because it is meant for God. "My soul, find rest in God. — John Ortberg

A poem must be authentic. It could be flowery, it could have the most brilliant metaphor, it could be bursting with onomatopoeia and alliteration, assonance and consonance, hyperbole and paradox, from every end, it could have daring syntax and clever cacophony, it could have a neat and ordered rhyme scheme ... but, if it loses its authenticity, its ability to convey the very heart and soul of the poet, then all the euphony and cacophony in the world cannot make up for the loss of its identity as a poem. And that is the true cacophony. — Gina Marinello-Sweeney

Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to ... my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go. — Salman Rushdie

We've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. — George Carlin

The paradox is that by being 'in love' we are in fact falling in love with ourselves, and we have an opportunity to see ourselves in the eyes of another. It is an ecstatic place to be, the dance of romantic love, and one that cannot be denied, for it is the place where we are most likely to experience a divine tango with our soul. Love and myth go hand in hand, for myth is the most exquisite mirror of all for the reflection of self. — Sarah Bartlett

War! It is purification, liberation, an enormous hope ... The victory of Germany will be a paradox, nay, a wonder: a victory of the soul over numbers ... The German soul is opposed to the pacifist ideal of civilization, for is not peace the element, of civil corruption? — Thomas Mann

Eternity: The interval between the time when a woman discovers that a man is in love with her and the time when he finds it out himself and tells her about it. — Helen Rowland

The crucial differences which distinguish human societies and human beings are not biological. They are cultural. — Ruth Benedict

Friendship exhibits a glorious "nearness by resemblance" to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah's vision are crying "Holy, Holy, Holy" to one another (Isaiah VI, 3). The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall all have. — C.S. Lewis

The two men were slowly pacing the terrace in front of Dr. Raymond's house. The sun still hung above the western mountain-line, but it shone with a dull red glow that cast no shadows, and all the air was quiet; a sweet breath came from the great wood on the hillside above, and with it, at intervals, the soft murmuring call of the wild doves. Below, in the long lovely valley, the river wound in and out between the lonely hills, and, as the sun hovered and vanished into the west, a faint mist, pure white, began to rise from the hills. Dr. Raymond turned sharply to his friend. Safe? Of course it is. In itself the operation is a perfectly simple one; any surgeon could do it. — Arthur Machen

Living with reality is a very good trick. It gives you tremendous freedom and it changes the structure of molecules of your soul by living through reality because you don't expect anything anymore, which is a weird paradox. — Anthony Hopkins

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

It's not human. It's not primal. So we don't understand it. It's a more recent mutation. The things we all have, love and hate and passion, and the need to eat and yell and screw, these are things every human has. But there's this new mutation, this ability to stand between a human being and some small measure of justice and blame it on some regulation. To say that the form was filled out incorrectly. — Dave Eggers

My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul. — Paulo Coelho

To still seek God after discovering Him may be a love paradox of the soul, as A.W. Tozer reminds us; but to earnestly continue to perceive God and make Him perceivable, is the quintessence of worship. — Tristan Sherwin

The problem with medicine and the institutions it has spawned for the care of the sick and the old is not that they have had an incorrect view of what makes life significant. The problem is that they have had almost no view at all. Medicine's focus is narrow. Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet - and this is the painful paradox - we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days. — Atul Gawande

As far as possible, Arianne realized, each soul had to be content alone before plunging into love, because one never knew when the other would move out of that love. It was the greatest paradox: Souls need each other, but they also need to not need each other. — Lauren Kate

Starbucks has kept me in the ministry. — Tommy Barnett

Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or THINK they have) gained. — Arundhati Roy

It is odd that the Bible says, 'God created man,' whereas it is the other way round: man has created God. It is odd that the Bible says, 'The body is mortal, the soul is immortal,' whereas even here the contrary is true: the body (its matter) is eternal; the soul (the form of the body) is transitory. — Bela Bartok

Throughout life, from childhood, from school until we die, we are taught to compare ourselves with another; yet when I compare myself with another I am destroying myself. — Jiddu Krishnamurti