100 Soulful Quotes

In a world that often rushes by, there's immense value in taking a moment to pause and reflect on the deeper aspects of life. One way to do this is through the timeless wisdom encapsulated in soulful quotes. These carefully curated gems serve as poignant reminders of love, resilience, and inner peace, offering timeless truths that resonate with our innermost feelings. Whether you’re seeking inspiration, comfort, or a gentle nudge to see the beauty around you, our collection of the top 100 soulful quotes is sure to touch your heart and feed your soul. Join us on this journey of reflection and let these powerful words enrich your spirit.

1. “What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul” - Victor Hugo

2. “--> - Walt Whitman

3. “Every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history.” - Nikolai Berdyaev

4. “I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.” - Leo Tolstoy

5. “I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.” - Tom Stoppard

6. “Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.” - Walt Whitman

7. “And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.” - C.S. Lewis

8. “The great majority of us are required to live a constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected by it if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what bring brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like teeth in our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.” - Boris Pasternak

9. “Besides this I place another equally obvious confirmation of my view that opera is based on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the birth of the theoretical man, the critical layman, not of the artist: one of the most surprising facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of throughly unmusical hearers that before everything else the words must be understood, so that according to them a rebirth of music is to be expected only when some mode of singing has been discovered in which textword lords it over counterpoint like master over servant: For the words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic system as the soul is nobler than the body.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

10. “The Portuguese call it saudade: a longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable. Love affairs, miseries of life, the way things were, people already dead, those who left and the ocean that tossed them on the shores of a different land — all things born of the soul that can only be felt.” - Anthony De Sa

11. “Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul.” - Dave Pelzer

12. “I was asking if unwinding kills you, or if it leaves you alive somehow. C'mon—it's not like we haven't thought about it." (...)What do you think, Connor?" asks Hayden. "What hap­pens to your soul when you get unwound?"Who says I even got one?"For the sake of argument, let's say you do."Who says I want an argument?” - Neal Shusterman

13. “To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?” - Ayn Rand

14. “I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.” - Charles Dickens

15. “The soul is an irrational, indivisible equation that perfectly expresses one thing: you. The soul would be no good to the devil if it could be destroyed. And it is not lost when placed in Satan's care, as is so often said. He always know exactly how to put his finger on it.” - Joe Hill

16. “But hurry, let's entwine ourselves as one, our mouth broken, our soul bitten by love, so time discovers us safely destroyed.” - Federico García-Lorca

17. “I saw how greatly he suffered the requirement of being clever. It separated him from his soul, and it didn’t get him anything other than a living.” - Mark Helprin

18. “The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen.” - Steven Pinker

19. “What keeps life fascinating is the constant creativity of the soul.” - Deepak Chopra

20. “The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.” - G.K. Chesterton

21. “for it is often to be observed of the shallower men, that they are the very last to despond. It is the glory of the bladder that nothing can sink it; it is the reproach of a box of treasure, that once overboard it must drown” - Herman Melville

22. “A woman made of parts is a dangerous thing. You never know when she'll throw away a piece you may need.” - Heidi W. Durrow

23. “We drive down the road in complete silence for a few miles listening to 50 Cent. As soon as he tells us that he's into having sex, he ain't into making love, Casey turns the volume down and begins telling me the following information: " I love you so much. We're going to have the best life together. I can't wait." Every word she says makes me feel a little more like faking a stroke and pretending to lose all memory of who I was, but it's not until she looks me in the eye and says in all seriousness, "You're my soul mate," that I realize I am not going to marry her.” - Chad Kultgen

24. “One reason might be that if I hadn't tripped, I'd have been hamburger.When this sort of thing occurs, people often say that there was some power greater than themselves at work. This sounds reasonable. I am just suggesting that it is not necessary to equate "greater than ourselves" with "stretched across the heavenly vault." It could mean "just slightly greater." A cocoon of energy that we carry with us, that is capable, under some conditions, of affecting physicality. Furthermore, I conjecture that the totality of all these souls is what constitutes the Godhead. I mean this in the same sense as the "Leviathan" of Thomas Hobbes, whereby man, that is everyone together, creates "that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth or State, which is but an artificial man, though of greater statute and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was created."And that leads me to my Insight: God was not there at the beginning of evolution; God is what lies at the end of it.” - Paul Quarrington

25. “The final hour when we cease to exist does not itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way.” - seneca

26. “A great song should lift your heart, warm the soul and make you feel good.” - Colbie Caillat

27. “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! - I have as much soul as you, - and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you!” - Charlotte Brontë

28. “There is emotion in the hug, and there is respect and a form of love. Emotion that comes from honesty, respect that comes from challenge, and the form of love that exists between people whose minds have touched, whose hearts have touched, whose souls have touched. Our minds touched. Our hearts touched. Our souls touched.We separate.” - james frey

29. “By writing quotes...I mark a trail of my soul's journey in this realm.” - Toba Beta

30. “If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.” - James Herriot

31. “Have you got any soul?" a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I've got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can't seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn't be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues.” - Nick Hornby

32. “Song of myselfA child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.” - Walt Whitman

33. “The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.” - Annie Dillard

34. “The Wrong we have Done, Thought, or Intended Will wreak its Vengeance onOur SOULS.” - Carl Gustav Jung

35. “Soul is not even that Crackerjack prize that God and Satan scuffle over after the worms have all licked our bones. That's why, when we ponder--as sooner or later each of us must--exactly what we ought to be doing about our soul, religion is the wrong, if conventional, place to turn. Religion is little more than a transaction in which troubled people trade their souls for temporary and wholly illusionary psychological comfort--the old give-it-up-in-order-to-save-it routine. Religions lead us to believe that the soul is the ultimate family jewel and that in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in their vaults, or at least insure it against fire theft. They are mistaken.” - Tom Robbins

36. “But don't forget who you really are. And I'm not talking about your so-called real name. All names are made up by someone else, even the one your parents gave you.   You know who you really are. When you're alone at night, looking up at the stars, or maybe lying in your bed in total darkness, you know that nameless person inside you.   Your life is about to be ripped apart. You will be turned into a digging machine. Your muscles will toughen. So will your heart and soul. That's necessary for survival. But don't lose touch with that person deep inside you, or else you won't really have survived at all.” - Louis Sachar

37. “...and the vessel was not full, his intellect was not satisfied, his soul was not at peace, his heart was not still.” - Hermann Hesse

38. “On this material plane, each living being is like a street lantern lamp with a dirty lampshade.The inside flame burns evenly and is of the same quality as all the rest—hence all of us are equal in the absolute sense, the essence, in the quality of our energy.However, some of the lamps are “turned down” and having less light in them, burn fainter, (the beings have a less defined individuality, are less in tune with the universal All which is the same as the Will)—hence all of us are unequal in a relative sense, some of us being more aware (human beings), and others being less aware (animal beings), with small wills and small flames.The lampshades of all are stained with the clutter of the material reality or the physical world.As a result, it is difficult for the light of each lamp to shine through to the outside and it is also difficult to see what is on the other side of the lampshade that represents the external world (a great thick muddy ocean of fog), and hence to “feel” a connection with the other lantern lamps (other beings).The lampshade is the physical body immersed in the ocean of the material world, and the limiting host of senses that it comes with.The dirt of the lampshade results from the cluttering bulk of life experience accumulated without a specific goal or purpose.The dirtier the lampshade, the less connection each soul has to the rest of the universe—and this includes its sense of connection to other beings, its sense of dual presence in the material world and the metaphysical world, and the thin connection line to the wick of fuel or the flow of electricity that resides beyond the material plane and is the universal energy.To remain “lit” each lantern lamp must tap into the universal Source of energy.If the link is weak, depression and-or illness sets in.If the link is strong, life persists.This metaphor to me best illustrates the universe.” - Vera Nazarian

39. “My art is that of the 35mm kind; my poetry is of the lead and ink kind; my happiness is of the product of both; and my legacy is of the story of my soul, that my life left behind” - Jeremy Aldana

40. “Explore me,' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I’m free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon’s wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.” - Jeanette Winterson

41. “It would be dreadfullyironic, I mused, if once I earned a soul, I forgot everything about being fey, including all my memories of her. That sort of ending seemedappropriately tragic; the smitten fey creature becomes human but forgets why he wanted to in the first place. Old fairy tales loved that sort of irony.” - Julie Kagawa

42. “Their screams would echo through the house and reverberate against my eardrums until my mind would fracture. Years went by and with each fracture; I lost a piece of my soul until I became lost and empty inside.” - J.D. Stroube

43. “While fear depletes power, faith gives wings for the soul’s elevation.” - T.F. Hodge

44. “Breathe next to me. And I will capture a piece of your soul along with mine.” - Marikit dR. Camba

45. “Anybody is liable to rheumatism in her legs, Anne. It's only old people who should have rheumatism in their souls, though. Thanks goodness, I never have. When you get rheumatism in your soul you might as well go and pick out your coffin.” - L.M. Montgomery

46. “We cannot face up to what lies ahead, without facing up to what lies within.” - Eleesha

47. “I believe that the measure of my soul is my capacity to love imperfect people.” - Joseph Grenny

48. “She felt like parts of her soul were missing, had left her body long ago. It had happened not in Greece three months ago, but long before that. It was in Greece that she'd realized those parts had left her and were not coming back.” - Ann Brashares

49. “Don't tell them too much about your soul. They're waiting for just that.” - Jack Kerouac

50. “I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.” - Sylvia Plath

51. “I could see her will leaving and death seeping through her skin to skewer her soul.” - J.D. Stroube

52. “Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?” - Ursula K. Le Guin

53. “The souls of heroes are forged by the gods and tempered with the pain of life.” - Brian Rathbone

54. “...a butterfly is like the soul of a person, it dries out in captivity.” - Marlene Van Niekerk

55. “Many of the most deeply spiritual moments of my life haven't happened just in my mind or in my soul. They happened while holding my son in the middle of the night, or watching the water break along the shore, or around my table, watching the people I love feel nourished in all sorts of ways.” - Shauna Niequist

56. “Write from the soul, not from some notion about what you think the marketplace wants.The market is fickle; the soul is eternal'.” - Jeffrey Carver

57. “But that did not stop her heart from shattering into countless pieces or her soul from shredding into slivers.” - Farrah Naseem

58. “If her soul ever leaks, I want it to land on me.” - Markus Zusak

59. “Some people say they will not believe in anything they can't see. What a catastrophe to not have any faith at all! You live only less than a half of life, if you will only believe in the things that you can see. Life is lived by those who have much faith and believe in many unseen things. If you believe in nothing that you cannot see, think about how much there is that you choose to turn your face away from! You can't see your soul and you cannot prove that it exists, therefore if you call yourself one who believes in nothing unseen, then you will forever deny your soul its existence, for the existence of the soul dwells in love, trust, anger, passion, faith, belief, strength; the soul is forever nourished by things that are unseen! And so we have too many empty bodies walking around! Bodies with souls inside that are half-dead and dying.” - C. JoyBell C.

60. “There are souls that can't encounter to each other.” - Toba Beta

61. “For I need this scar over my heart to remind me. Crazy as it sounds, if I can bear the wound on my body, it lessens what I must carry on my soul. How he knew that about me, I cannot fathom.” - Ann Aguirre

62. “The potential for loss of soul--to one degree or another--is the affliction of a society that as a collective has lost its sense of the holy, of a culture that values everything else above the spiritual. We live in such a spiritually impoverished culture--and in such a time. Loss of soul, to one degree or another, is a constant teasing possibility. We are invited at every corner to hedge on the truth, indulge outselves, act as if our words and actions have no ultimate consequence, make an absolute of the material world, and treat the spiritual world as if it were some kind of frothy, angelic fantasy. In such a world the soul struggles for survival; in such a world a man can lose his own soul and have the whole culture support him, and in such a world, conversely, the light of a single, great soul that lives in integrity can truly illumine the world.” - Daphne Rose Kingma

63. “Whether consciousness is implanted in us by something divine, or whether it is created by the efforts of our brains, the end result is the same. We are.” - Neal Shusterman

64. “God is taking a nap within my soul. I ponder whether to wake Him or not.” - Harley King

65. “Poor Martin. Geek or no, committing his soul to eternal damnation was a helluva price to pay for six minutes.” - Richelle Mead

66. “If I imagine my soul, as I do when I pray, it's shaped like Stapafel. No change of place or religion can alter that. I lived beneath Stapafel from the hour I was born until I was sixteen. I've never seen it since, but that doesn't matter. My soul is in the likeness of a jagged peak with a rock like a man standing on its summit, and snags of rock shaped like trolls along its spine. Screes defend it, although it's not quite inaccessible if you know the way up.” - Margaret Elphinstone

67. “I preach that odd defiant melancholy that sees the dreadful loneliness of the human soul and the pitiful disaster of human life as ever redeemable and redeemed by compassion, friendship and love.” - John Derbyshire

68. “I feel like a real dead one: having neither blood to bleed nor any flesh or bone to feel the scars; yet I want to hold on to my spirit.” - Munia Khan

69. “...I'm innocent still -inside me are stained glass windows that have never been broken- and when I see your light it stains my soul with color ...” - John Geddes

70. “The inner light actually comes from the soul; it is already inside us. The moment we can have free access to our soul, we will see that this light is coming to the fore to permeate our whole outer existence.” - Sri Chinmoy

71. “Понякога се пробуждах посред нощ, с пресъхнала уста, и преди още да изплувам от съня, нещо ми пошушваше да заспя пак, да се гмурна обратно в топлината, в безсъзнателността като в единствено затишие. Но вече си казвах: „Просто съм жадна, достатъчно е да се изправя, да ида до умивалника, да пия вода и пак да заспя”. Ала щом станех, щом видех в огледалото собствения си образ, смътно осветен от уличната лампа, щом хладката вода започнеше да се стича в гърлото ми, тогава отчаянието ме завладяваше и с истинско усещане за физическа болка си лягах отново, зъзнейки. Просвах се по корем, обхванала глава в ръце, и притисках тяло о кревата, сякаш любовта ми към Люк бе горещо и смъртоносно животинче, което в бунта си бих могла да премажа между кожата си и чаршафите. И битката се разразяваше. Паметта, въображението се превръщаха в жестоки врагове. Лицето на Люк, Кан, какво е било и какво би могло да бъде. И неспир отпорът на тялото ми, което бе сънено, на разума ми, който бе отвратен. Вирвах глава, съставях уравнения:”Аз съм аз, Доминик. Обичам Люк, който не ме обича. Несподелена любов, задължителна мъка. Точка.” - Françoise Sagan

72. “No matter how ugly the manner in which a man dies, it’s only the presence of a suffering human soul that is horrifying, once gone, what is left is only an object.” - Diana Gabaldon

73. “He’s like a hero come back from thewar, a poor maimed bastard living out the reality of his dreams.Wherever he sits himself the chair collapses; whatever door heenters the room is empty: whatever he puts in his mouth leaves abad taste. Everything is just the same as it was before; theelements are unchanged, the dream is no different than the reality.Only, between the time he went to sleep and the time he woke up,his body was stolen.” - Henry Miller

74. “My soul, be satisfied with flowers,With fruit, with weeds even; but gather themIn the one garden you may call your own.” - Edmond Rostand

75. “The truth is that solitude is the creative condition of genius, religious or secular, and the ultimate sterilising of it. No human soul can long ignore "the giant agony of the world" and live, except indeed the mollusc life, a barnacle upon eternity.” - Helen Waddell

76. “Reading feeds the soul, writing nourishes it!” - Joanne McClean

77. “No matter our talent, we all know in the midnight of our souls that 90 percent of what we do is less than our best.” - Robert McKee

78. “Ladies, most of you have no idea how beautiful you are. Don't let mean words from an insecure soul blind you from the truth of your beauty. You are beautiful by design... just the way you are.” - Steve Maraboli

79. “It's what's buried deep inside that frightens me because it's broken, like a shattered mirror.” - Jessica Sorensen

80. “I was girly and friendly and my family life was happy but many days I felt like I was on the inside what Chase was on the outside. I always believed I was a happy person with a sad soul. I felt like I had had tragedy in my life when I hadn’t. Somehow, without having experienced what he had, his scars resonated with me.” - Kimberly Novosel

81. “Entering a cell, penetrating deep as a flying saucer to find a new galaxy would be an honorable task for a new scientist interested more in the inner state of the soul than in outer space.” - Dejan Stojanovic

82. “There is a prospect greater than the sea, and that is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.” - Victor Hugo

83. “The only thing that I am completely certain of after this experience is that I am no longer afraid of death.” - Michael Blain

84. “I am the soul in limbo.” - André Breton

85. “You can't judge people and touch their souls at the same time.” - Tama Kieves

86. “...Again she did not seem to hear, still looking into Cale’s eyes. Then slowly, hopelessly, she dropped her gaze. “I understand,” she said. It was that, of course, that pierced him as if she had stabbed him through the heart. To him it was the sound of lost faith and it was unendurable. He felt he’d become a kind of god in her eyes, and it was simply impossible to give up her adoration.” - Paul Hoffman

87. “...this refinement and delicacy were what Cale adored; but Cale had been beaten into shape, hammered in dreadful fires of fear and pain. How could she be with him for long? A secret part of Arbell had been searching for some time for a way to leave her lover—although she was unaware of this, it is only fair to record. And so as Cale waited for her to save him while he worked out a way of saving her, she had already chosen the bitter but reasonable path of the good, of the many over the one...” - Paul Hoffman

88. “Injured SoulFainted EyesReturningfrom where?Weary feetWeak armsTreadingtoward where?Struggledin vain battlesFightingdelusive enemiesErred bya deceptionThe ancient deception” - Rixa White

89. “The soul that loves and suffers is in the sublime state.” - Victor Hugo

90. “You show me what someone listens to, I’ll tell you everything you want to know about his soul. (For instance, a bunch of Nickelback albums would have indicated he never had a soul in the first place.)” - Tad Williams

91. “your soul is like a compass, tells you where to go, but not how to get there” - archie bunker

92. “...when I think of you it's with tears, because no one else has such delicate hands that can reach into my soul and calm my fears...” - John Geddes

93. “Humanity cannot lift itself by its own bootstraps; there is no such thing as spontaneous generation; life does not come from crystals; poetry does not come from donkeys; international peace does not come from wars; social justice does not come from selfishness. With all our knowledge of chemistry we cannot make a human life in our laboratories because we lack the unifying, vivifying principal of a soul which comes only from God. Life is not a push from below; it is a gift from above. It is not the result of the necessary ascent of man but the loving descent of God.” - Fulton J. Sheen

94. “Waking up in a room with no natural light does something to a man. no windows. I’m almost afraid to die. I fear my soul won’t make it out.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

95. “A Seed for Contemplation:Creative people who cherish the gift of life often slip into the secret chambers of the creative mind. Their solutions are well-rounded, more sensible than those of people who rely solely upon reason as their mainstay. Gratitude unseals fountains of creativity, because a grateful person is relaxed. This allows him to take stock of his circumstances with an objective mind. A creative person often gets three-dimensional answers to his problems. — ,” - Harold Klemp

96. “We [artists] aren't people, not the way most people are. We're just...carriers. Little boats bringing goods from foreign lands.” - Sam Starbuck

97. “The Memory Of You Is Like A Drug To Me” - Jeremy Aldana

98. “ In the privacy of my dreams, I'm a warrior.” - Kimberly Derting

99. “[...] the body is what we lean toward,tensing as it darts, dancing away.but it's the voice that enters us. evensaying nothing. even saying nothingover and over absently to itself” - Tracy K. Smith

100. “Old age. All the facial detail is visible; all the traces life has left there are to be seen. The face is furrowed, wrinkled, sagging, ravaged by time. But the eyes are bright and, if not young, then somehow transcend the time that otherwise marks the face. It is as though someone else is looking at us, from somewhere inside the face, where everything is different. One can hardly be closer to another human soul.” - Karl Ove Knausgård