Thomas Moore

“Fight on my men,"says Sir Andrew Barton,I am hurt,but I am not slain;I'll lay me down and bleed a-while,And then I'll rise and fight again".”

“You discover that when you are doing the right work, you are the right person.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“But anyone who deliberately tries to get himself elected to a public office is permanently disqualified from holding one.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Sex and religion are closer to each other that either might prefer.”

“they wonder much to hear that gold, which in itself is so useless a thing, should be everywhere so much esteemed, that even men for whom it was made, and by whom it has its value, should yet be thought of less value than it is." - utopia”

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

“There are places in this world that are neither here nor there, neither up nor down, neither real nor imaginary...”

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

“Soul is to be found in the vicinity of taboo.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Good Demeter mothering keeps a child in the heat and passion of life which immortalize and establish soulfulness. Mothering involves not only physical survival and achievement—Demeter's grain and fruit—it is also concerned with guiding a child to his or her unknown depths and the mystery of fate.”

“A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul. ”

“A soul mate is someone to whom we feel profoundly connected, as though the communication and communing that take place between us were not the product of intentional efforts, but rather a divine grace. This kind of relationship is so important to the soul that many have said there is nothing more precious in life.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Go where we may, rest where we will,Eternal London haunts us still.”

“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 bellAround his dark neck ringing.”

“Come o'er the sea,Maiden with me,Mine through the sunshine, storms and snows;Seasons may roll,But the true soulBurns the same, where'er it goes.”

“Flight usually intensifies the very thing one flees and establishes a special intimacy with it.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“A piece of the sky and a chunk of the earth lie lodged in the heart of every human being.”

“I feel like oneWho treads aloneSome banquet-hall deserted,Whose lights are fled,Whose garland's dead,And all but he departed!”

“You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will,But the scent of the roses will hang round it still. ”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It is not while beautyAnd youth are thine ownAnd thy cheeksUnprofaned by a tearThat the ferver and faithOf a soul can be knownTo which time will but Make thee more dearNo the heart that has truly lovedNever forgetsBut as truly lovesOn to the closeAs the sunflower turnsOn her god when he setsThe same look whichShe'd turned when he rose.”

“The ordinary arts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest.”

“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.”