Great Throughts Treasury

"If the body is only the vehicle by which the soul can access the experience of physical living, then there is no real physical me. The soul (or life force) is the only real me. If you and I (the souls) want to achieve the most from this earthly lifetime, the more varied the experiences we should seek. That said, it’s too easy for you and me to fall into a comfort zone and try to avoid change. To keep this from happening, the experiences change rapidly as a result of the body moving from infancy though old age. The physical changes help to enhance our learning curve, our ability to serve, and our chance to evolve." - Richard Smolowe, fully Richard Edward Smolowe

"Your body is a remarkable event. Look forward to its various stages and learn. And, follow the simple directions. Nourish it; enjoy it; give it some exercise; and keep it in good repair." - Richard Smolowe, fully Richard Edward Smolowe

"Order is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the state. As the beams to a house, as the bones to the microcosm of man, so is order to all things." - Robert Southey

"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body." - Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele

"When a man walks into the sea up to his knees or waist, he can see the water all around him. But when he dives into the water, he can no longer see anything outside, and he knows only that his whole body is in the water. This is what happens to those who plunge into the vision of God." - Symeon the New Theologian, fully Saint Symeon the New Theologian NULL

"The costliest thing on earth is the drunkard’s song. It costs ruin of body. It costs ruin of mind...The costliest thing on earth is sin. The most expensive of all music is the Song of the Drunkards. It is the highest tariff of nations - not a protective tariff, but a tariff of doom, a tariff of woe, an tariff of death." - Thomas De Witt Talmage

"The body is only a vehicle for a life form, and a temporary one at that." - Tauri NULL

"Falling requires letting go, as when we fall asleep or fall in love. If we refuse to fall, our body becomes rigid and our movements become premeditated." - Denise Taylor

"To be present with the sensations in our body is not an act of will. It is a kind of equanimity or grace. In such movements we feel our activity belonging to life." - Denise Taylor

"Lust is a captivity of the reason and an enraging of the passions. It hinders business and distracts counsel. It sins against the body and weakens the soul." - Jeremy Taylor

"A soft body makes for a soft mind." -

"You never expected justice from a company, did you? They have neither a soul to lose, nor a body to kick." - Lord Edward Thurlow, First Baron

"Did you expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned and no body to be kicked?" - Lord Edward Thurlow, First Baron

"The body has its end which it does not know; the mind its means of which it is unaware." - Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry

"Solitude is to the mind what fasting is to the body, fatal if it is too prolonged, and yet necessary." -

"I spit out the body." -

"A corporation cannot blush. It is a body, it is true; has certainly a head - a new one every year; arms it has and very long ones, for it can reach at anything... a throat to swallow the rights of the community, and a stomach to digest them! But who ever yet discovered, in the anatomy of any corporation, either bowels or a heart?" - Howel Walsh

"I have said that the soul is not more than the body, and I have said that the body is not more than the soul, and nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is, and whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud, and I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth, and to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times, and there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero, and there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel'd universe, and I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes. And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God, for I who am curious about each am not curious about God, (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death.) I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least, nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. Why should I wish to see God better than this day? I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then, in the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropt in the street, and everyone is sign'd by God's name, and I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go, others will punctually come for ever and ever. " - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"If any thing is sacred, the human body is sacred." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost, no birth, identity, form - no object of the world. Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing; appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain. Ample are time and space - ample the fields of Nature. The body, sluggish, aged, cold - the embers left from earlier fires, the sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual; to frozen clods ever the spring’s invisible law returns, with grass and flower and fruits and corn." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman

"The soul is born old, but it grows young; that is the comedy of life. The body is born young and grows old; that is life's tragedy." -

"Are you willing to think? Consider carefully, for the answer to that question will largely determine your success or failure in life. If you develop your judgment, use it. Exercise your power of judgment as often as you can, for the first rule of good judgment is practice. The functions of your mind, no less than the muscles of your body, receive their strength through repeated use." - John M. Wilson, fully John Moulder Wilson

"Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity." -

"The human body is the best picture of the human soul." -

"You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s bosom? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest. You ask me to dig for stones! Shall I dig under her skin for her bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich like white men, but how dare I cut my mother’s hair? I want my people to stay with me here. All the dead men will come to life again. Their spirits will come to their bodies again. We must wait here in the homes of our fathers and be ready to meet them in the bosom of our mother." - Wovoka, aka Jack Wilson NULL

"We often mistake a desire of the body for a yearning of the soul." - Harry Wolfson, fully Harry Austryn Wolfson

"The body is a servant of the mind. It obeys the operations of the mind. There is a mind/body connection that is powerful. As a healer, I am convinced disease and health, like circumstances, are rooted in thought. Sick thoughts express themselves through a sickly body. Thoughts of fear can kill a man. People who live in fear of disease are most likely the very people who get the disease. Conversely, if you would improve your body, guard your mind." - Greta Woodrew, Pseud. for Greta Andron Smolowe

"Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice." -

"The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented by the timepiece of the mind by one second." -

"From the body of one guilty deed a thousand ghostly fears and haunting thoughts proceed." - William Wordsworth

"The body charms because the soul is seen." - Edward Young

"To strengthen your intuitive ability, you need to become more sensitive to body signals such as stiff necks (which usually indicates your are locked into a power struggle and/or feel overwhelmed by too much to do), headaches, stomachaches, or sleeplessness… Intuition seems to come unbidden from external events… Slowing down and doing less is great for increasing your intuition." - Carol Adrienne

"Remember it is the heart and not the body, which strives to draw near to God. By heart I do not mean the flesh perceived by the senses, but that secret thing which is sometimes expressed by spirit, and sometimes by soul." - Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali

"The meaning of death is not the annihilation of the spirit, but its separation from the body, and that the resurrection and day of assembly do not mean a return to a new existence after annihilation, but the bestowal of a new form or frame to the spirit." - Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali

"It is a shameful thing for the soul to faint while the body still perseveres." -

"Pain is either an evil for the body - and if so, let the body state its case - or for the soul; but the soul can maintain its own unclouded calm, and refuse to view it as an evil." -

"What is to reach the heart must come from above, if it does not come thence, it will be nothing but notes - body without spirit." - Ludwig van Beethoven

"In the image of God there is no coercion, but rather free, eager service of love, just as a limb of the body or a branch of the tree gladly serves the other members." -

"There would be no place for hatred among wise men. For who but the foolish would hate good men? And there is no cause to hate bad men. Vice is as a disease of the mind, just as feebleness shows ill-health to the body." -

"There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible." - Book of Common Prayer, aka The Book of Common Prayer NULL

"It is through the strength of our physical body, the wisdom of our heart’s experience, and the purity of our intention that we determine the quality of our life." - Gregg Braden

"The way that we attune to our possible outcomes is through our viewpoint of life. From this perspective, every life-threatening condition of each body is already healed, peace is already present, and every child, woman, and man of our world is already fed. Now we are invited to choose the quality of thought, feeling, and emotion that allows us to “bend” the waves of time and bring these conditions into the focus of the present." - Gregg Braden

"Inward calm is needed for success! Inward calm cannot be maintained unless physical strength is constantly and intelligently replenished. Only if the body is reasonably nourished can undue strain on the mind be avoided." -

"The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, or not to anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly." -

"To keep the body in good health is a duty, for other wise we shall not be able to trim the lamp of wisdom, and keep our mind strong and clear. Water surrounds the lotus flower, but does not wet its petals." -

"When with deep and even-minded awareness one sees only the incessant arising and fading of body- and mind-states, one knows utter bliss. the discerning thus apprehend the Deathless." -

"Values change, just as the body of knowledge available to us changes, and it is imperative that we be not only open to the changes as they creep up on us but actually strive to play an important role in such valuational change." - Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter

"The sufferings of the mind are more severe than the pains of the body." -

"When I reflect on the nature of the soul, it seems to me by far more difficult and obscure to determine its character while it is in the body, a strange domicile, than to imagine what it is when it leaves it, and has arrived in the empyreal regions, in its own and proper home." -

"Is there any doctrine of immortality that can say anything more simple yet definitive about man’s fate after death? He has come from God and returns to God. From the very beginning, man is bound up with God; and this bond continues to exist, unaffected by death which befalls the body only. God’s creation of man’s spirit, then, must be understood as a principle whose consequence is immortality." - Hermann Cohen