Spirit

"Spirits are not finely touched But to fine issues."

"...we hold beliefs beyond ourselves. When this spirit of citizenship is missing, no government program can replace it. When this spirit is present, no wrong can stand against it."

"The hearts wave would not foam up so beautifully and become spirit, if the ancient, mute rock, fate, did not stand opposed to it."

"Black spirits and white, Red spirits and grey, Mingle, mingle, mingle, You that mingle may."

"Hands of invisible spirits touch the strings Of that mysterious instrument, the soul, And play the prelude of our fate."

"I am the spirit of the morning sea, I am the awakening and the glad surprise."

"If that vital spark that we find in a grain of wheat can pass unchanged through countless deaths and resurrections, will the spirit of man be unable to pass from this body to another?"

"It may be that at this moment every battlement of heaven is alive with the redeemed. There is a sainted mother watching for her daughter. Have you no response to that long hushed voice which has prayed for you so often? And for you, young man, are there no voices there that have prayed for you? And are there none whom you promised once to meet again, if not on earth, in heaven?"

"The purity of the spirit is dependent upon truth. A spirit is pure when it makes clear-cut distinctions between great and little, good and bad; when it refuses to bend yes into no and no into yes, but keeps them undistorted by a straight either-or. This doesnt mean that with the resultant clarity the good is also already accomplished and the bad avoided; it means something much more elementary: that virtue is never called vice, and vice virtue. Purity of spirit lies at the beginning of things, there where the first stirrings set in, where conceptions of being and doing are formed. It is that initial authenticity in which the true meaning of words is grounded and their relation to each other is corrected, their edges are trimmed. Spirit becomes impure through essential dishonesty. When it attempts to call evil good, it becomes essentially corrupt. A lie is always evil, but worse than its conscious evil is loss of the fundamental sense of truth. The spirit that errs is not yet impure—for example when it judges facts falsely, uses words incorrectly, confuses images. It is impure when it is indifferent to truth; when it no longer desires to think cleanly or to measure by the standards of eternity, when it no longer knows that that the dignity and honor of truth are its own dignity and honor; when it besmudges the sense of words—which is the sense of things and of existence itself—robbing them of their austerity and nobility."

"Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never; Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams! Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit for ever; Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems! knoweth it exhaustless, self-sustained, Immortal, indestructible,—shall such Say, "I have killed a man, or caused to kill?" Nay, but as when one layeth His worn-out robes away, And, taking new ones, sayeth, "These will I wear to-day!" So putteth by the spirit Lightly its garb of flesh, And passeth to inherit A residence afresh."

"During the prehistoric age of mankind, spirit was presumed to exist everywhere and was not held in honor as a privilege of man. Because, on the contrary, ... one saw in the spirit that which unites us with nature, not that which sunders us from it."

"Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?"