Quotes on Spirit

There is always more spirit in attack than in defence.

Of all writings I love only that which is written with blood. Write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit.

What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak to the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind.

It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book and turn over the pages and for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.

All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within, their source was a fateful compulsion. What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself. I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out.

On the level of the Son there is no answer to the question of good and evil; there is only an incurable separation of the opposites. . . . It seems to me to be the Holy Spirit's task and charge to reconcile and reunite the opposites in the human individual through a special development of the human soul.

The world of gods and spirits is truly 'nothing but' the collective unconscious inside me.

Punning is an art of harmonious jingling upon words, which, passing in at the ears, excites a titillary motion in those parts; and this, being conveyed by the animal spirits into the muscles of the face, raises the cockles of the heart.

I try to photograph people's spirits and thoughts. As to the soul-taking by the photographer, I don't feel I take away, but rather that the sitter and I give to each other. It becomes an act of mutual participation.

A cheerful life is what the Muses love. A soaring spirit is their prime delight.

A woman artist could be one of those intuitive geniuses [who] have kept their childlike spirit and have added to it breadth of vision and experience.

It is easy - terribly easy - to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work.

I had to get my camera to register things that were more important than how poor they were--their pride, their strength, their spirit.

As a thinker I keep discovering that beauty itself is as much a fact, and a mystery...I consider nature's facts -- its beautiful and grotesque forms and events -- in terms of the import to thought and their impetus to the spirit. In nature I find grace tangled in a rapture with violence; I find an intricate landscape whose forms are fringed in death; I find mystery, newness, and a kind of exuberant, spendthrift energy.

There’s a level at which words are spirit and paper is skin. That’s the fascination of archives. There’s still a bodily trace.

The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.

I always try to balance the light with the heavy - a few tears of human spirit in with the sequins and the fringes.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

When I see and feel the life beat of Spirit in every object, I evolve to a higher level of transformation called consciousness

Depression moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.

A local spirit will infallibly prevail much more in the members of Congress than a national spirit will prevail in the legislatures of the particular States.