Spirits Quotes

1. "This is the Tree of Forgetfulness. All the headmen here plant one of these trees in the village. They say ancestors stay inside it. If there is some sickness or if you are troubled by spirits, then you sit under the Tree of Forgetfulness and your ancestors will assist you with whatever is wrong'."
Author: Alexandra Fuller

2. "Let us call on M. de Monte Cristo; he is admirably adapted to revive one's spirits, because he never interrogates, and in my opinion those who ask no questions are the best comforters."
Author: Alexandre Dumas

3. "He who busies himself with things other than improvement of his own self becomes perplexed in darkness and entangled in ruin. His evil spirits immerse him deep in vices and make his bad actions seem handsome."
Author: Ali Ibn Abi Talib

4. "The death of self of which the great writers speak is no violent act. It is merely the joining of the great rock heart of the earth in its roll. It is merely the slow cessation of the will's spirits and the intellect's chatter: it is waiting like a hollow bell with a stilled tongue. Fuge, tace, quiesce. The waiting itself is the thing."
Author: Annie Dillard

5. "Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them."
Author: Barbara Deming

6. "I believe that secularism is not the enemy of spirituality. Our spirits are in fact secular and free. But the enemy of your spirit is materialism which produces legalism. People scramble for the "perfect law" in order fix everything, while failing to see that law only points towards what is material. And so, people find themselves going around in a circle that will never end. The key is to break away from that circle. You have to begin focusing your attention onto what is inside you and what is inside everybody else. This will in turn produce common sense, intuition, and understanding. Then comes strength."
Author: C. JoyBell C.

7. "I will live in the past, the present, and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me."
Author: Charles Dickens

8. "I doubt if I have made the best use of all my calamities. Soft, amiable natures they would have refined to saintliness; of strong, evil spirits they would have made demons; as for me, I have only been a woe-struck and selfish woman."
Author: Charlotte Brontë

9. "Do you believe in spirits? Or ghosts?...Yes, I do. I believe in ghosts....They're the ones who haunt us. The ones who have left us behind.""Vivian has come back to the idea that the people who matter in our lives stay with us, haunting our ordinary moments. They're with us in the grocery store, as we turn the corner, chat with a friend. They rise up through the pavement; we absorb them through our soles.""The things that matter stay with you, seep into your skin."
Author: Christina Baker Kline

10. "We are spirits clad in veils."
Author: Christopher Pearse Cranch

11. "You are suffering from an ailment that affects ladies of romantic imaginations. Symptoms include fainting, weariness, loss of appetite, low spirits. While on one level the crisis can be ascribed to wandering about in freezing rain without the benefit of adequate waterproofing, the deeper cause is more likely to be found in some emotional trauma. However, unlike the heroines of your favorite novels, your constitution has not been weakened by the privations of life in earlier, harsher centuries. No tuberculosis, no childhood polio, no unhygienic living conditions. You'll survive.' " pg. 303"
Author: Diane Setterfield

12. "It is not the job of writers to life our spirits. Books simply do what they do. They sometimes confirm the capricious drama of a childhood living room. When you think that you are in the grace of a dance you come upon something hard."
Author: Dionne Brand

13. "I am well aware that many will say that no one can possibly speak with spirits and angels so long as he lives in the body; and many will say that it is all fancy, others that I relate such things in order to gain credence, and others will make other objections."
Author: Emanuel Swedenborg

14. "You see spirits who talk to you in broad daylight, at night you see perfectly shaped, perfectly distinct phantoms, you think you remember having lived in other forms, you imagine you are growing very tall and that your head is touching the stars, the horizon of Saturn and Jupiter spreads before your eyes, bizarre creatures appear before you with all the characteristics of real beings . . . If the mind has to become completely unhinged in order to place us in communication with another world, it is clear that the mad will never be able to prove to the sane how blind they are, to say the very least!"
Author: Gérard De Nerval

15. "Yet for all your arroganceand your glance,I tell you this:such loss is no loss,such terror, such coils and strands and pitfallsof blacknesssuch terroris no loss;hell is no worse than your earthabove the earth,hell is no worse,no, nor your flowersnor your veins of lightnor your presence,a loss;my hell is no worse than yoursthough you pass among the flowers and speakwith the spirits above the earth."
Author: H.D.

16. "The dog appeals to cheap and facile emotions; the cat to the deepest founts of imagination and cosmic perception in the human mind. It is no accident that the contemplative Egyptians, together with such later poetic spirits as Poe, Gautier, Baudelaire, and Swinburne, were all sincere worshippers of the supple grimalkin."
Author: H.P. Lovecraft

17. "Life is either an adventure or nothing at all. To turn our faces Toward change and behave as free spirits is strength, undefeated."
Author: Hellen Keller

18. "How sweet it would be to treat men and things, for an hour, for just what they are! [...] When we are weary with travel, we lay down our load and rest by the wayside. So, when we are weary with the burden of life, why do we not lay down this load of falsehoods which we have volunteered to sustain, and be refreshed as never mortal was? Let the beautiful laws prevail. Let us not weary ourselves by resisting them. When we would rest our bodies we cease to support them; we recline on the lap of the earth. So, when we would rest our spirits, we must recline on the Great Spirit. Let things alone; let them weigh what they will; let them soar of fall."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

19. "You speak of Sorcery. It so happens that in the investigations leading first to my Conjectures concerning Light and later to my System of the World, I fell upon a pretty Proof that Wicked Spirits enjoy no essential Existence, being but Desires of the Mind."
Author: James K. Morrow

20. "Care for at a ball. They returned, therefore, in good spirits to Longbourn, the village where they lived, and of which"
Author: Jane Austen

21. "Flee and your bad behavior will be fixed in people's minds. Return, seem in goo spirits, and everyone will doubt their own memory of events."
Author: Jo Beverley

22. "She sincerely wishes success, for her new life, and intends that no failure of effort, temper, or spirits on her part will jeopardise it."
Author: Jude Morgan

23. "Even free spirits had to the face the music sometime."
Author: Kathleen Long

24. "I'm just saying it doesn't always have to be spirits and magic. Sometimes hauntings are in your mind. It doesn't make them less real."
Author: Kendare Blake

25. "Without an observer at a twenty three degree angle to the light being reflected off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty three degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and mind."
Author: Kim Stanley Robinson

26. "Some discussion of the nature and temperament of the fairies is necessary in view of its possible bearing on their origin. J. G. Campbell tells us that in the Highlands of Scotland they were regarded as "the counterparts of mankind, but substantial and unreal, outwardly invisible." They differ from mortals in the possession of magical power, but are strangely dependent in many ways on man. They are generally considered by the folk at large as of a nature between spirits and men. "They are," says Wentz, "a distinct race between our own and that of spirits."
Author: Lewis Spence

27. "Tea tempers the spirits and harmonizes the mind, dispels lassitude and relieves fatigue, awakens thought and prevents drowsiness, lightens or refreshes the body, and clears the perceptive faculties."
Author: Lu Yu

28. "When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas."
Author: M. H. Abrams

29. "Because of the tension and difficulty, I remember trying to do the silliest things when we weren't rolling cameras, anything to lift the spirits. But once on set, it was important to have full concentration."
Author: Madeleine Stowe

30. "I'll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It's the silence that scares me. It's the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment."
Author: Mark Lawrence

31. "When I got there it was all still and Sunday-like, and hot and sunshiny - the hands was gone to the fields; and there was them kind of faint dronings of bugs an flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and like everybody's dead and gone; and if a breeze fans along and quivers the leaves, it makes you feel mournful, because you feel like it's spirits whispering - spirits that's been dead ever so many years - and you always think they're talking about you."
Author: Mark Twain

32. "Of course. I was on the run from evil spirits that wanted to kill me and now, according to the local paper, the law. Yet Richard Smith, cemetery sexton and death deity scholar, had a book for me to read in all my copious spare time."
Author: Meg Cabot

33. "What he remembers with perfect clarity is sitting on a train headed for Madrid, feeling the sort of happiness he imagines spirits might feel, freed of their earthly bodies but still possessed of their essential selves."
Author: Michael Cunningham

34. "Maybe we were ghosts of a sort, spirits from the world that had died when the volcano erupted."
Author: Mike Mullin

35. "Sharper than a serpent's tooth is a daughter's ingratitude. Still, the proudest spirits can be broken, with love."
Author: Neil Gaiman

36. "For all that is good,For all that is ours,Thanks to the spirits,Thanks to the Powers! (blessing over a meal)"
Author: Nina Kiriki Hoffman

37. "...when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life's work."
Author: Pat Conroy

38. "Deceit is the game of petty spirits, and that is by nature a woman's quality."
Author: Pierre Corneille

39. "Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits."
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

40. "I walked slowly on, without envying my companions on horseback: for I could sit down upon an inviting spot, climb to the edge of a precipice, or trace a torrent by its sound. I descended at length into the Rheinthal, or Valley of the Rhine; the mountains of Tyrol, which yielded neither in height or in cragginess to those of Appenzel, rising before me. And here I found a remarkable difference: for although the ascending and descending was a work of some labor; yet the variety of the scenes had given me spirits, and I was not sensible of the least fatigue. But in the plain, notwithstanding the scenery was still beautiful and picturesque, I saw at once the whole way stretching before me, and had no room for fresh expectations: I was not therefore displeased when I arrived at Oberried, after a walk of about twelve miles, my coat flung upon my shoulder like a peripatetic by profession.-William Coxe"
Author: Robin Jarvis

41. "You'd think the sight of beautiful Place Vendôme would lift my spirits but oddly the arc of jewellery - so obviously beyond the means of a jobless person like me - only depresses me more. I plod on feeling confused, guilty even, that I should feel unhappy in a place that looks like paradise."
Author: Sarah Turnbull

42. "The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.' The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don't want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won't take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don't like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It's the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you'll keep it under control. If you don't make any noise, the bogeyman won't find you. But it's all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn."
Author: Sophie Scholl

43. "Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy."
Author: Sun Tzu

44. "Such speculation however, was of no interest to my father, who strongly objected to the possibility of spooks or spirits of any kind or even the use of these terms. ‘There is nothing in the attic', he explained to me. ‘its only the way that your head is interacting with the space of that attic. There are certain fields of forces that are everywhere. And these forces, for reasons unknown to me as yet, are potentiated in some places more than others. Do you understand? The attic is not haunting your head- your head is haunting the attic. Some heads are more haunted than others, whether they are haunted by ghosts or by gods or by creatures from outer space. These are not real things. Nonetheless, they are indicative of real forces, animating and even creative forces, which your head only conceives to be some kind of spook or who knows what"
Author: Thomas Ligotti

45. "When you hit a groove, it's not you; it's the spirit world. The spirits whisper the ideas in your brain and prod you along. They're the ones that are really happy."
Author: Tommy Chong

46. "Come, Spirits" she murmured; and was instantly fortified by a sense of the presence of the things that aren't there. There were the beautiful drowned statues, there were the glens and hills of an undiscovered country; there were divine musical notes, which, struck high up in the air, made one's heart beat with delight at the assurance that the world of things that aren't there was splendidly vigorous and far more real than the other. She felt that one never spoke of the things that mattered, but carried them about, until a note of music, or a sentence or a sight, joined hands with them."
Author: Virginia Woolf

47. "You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as ROBINSON CRUSOE never was written, and never will be written again. I have tried that book for years—generally in combination with a pipe of tobacco—and I have found it my friend in need in all the necessities of this mortal life. When my spirits are bad—ROBINSON CRUSOE. When I want advice—ROBINSON CRUSOE. In past times when my wife plagued me; in present times when I have had a drop too much—ROBINSON CRUSOE. I have worn out six stout ROBINSON CRUSOES with hard work in my service. On my lady's last birthday she gave me a seventh. I took a drop too much on the strength of it; and ROBINSON CRUSOE put me right again. Price four shillings and sixpence, bound in blue, with a picture into the bargain. "
Author: Wilkie Collins

48. "A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths."
Author: Will Durant

49. "The very hirelings of the press, whose trade it is to buoy up the spirits of the people. have uttered falsehoods so long, they have played off so many tricks, that their budget seems, at last, to be quite empty."
Author: William Cobbett

50. "Rome has been called the "Sacred City": - might not our Oxford be called so too? There is an air about it, resonant of joy and hope: it speaks with a thousand tongues to the heart: it waves its mighty shadow over the imagination: it stands in lowly sublimity, on the "hill of ages"; and points with prophetic fingers to the sky: it greets the eager gaze from afar, "with glistering spires and pinnacles adorned," that shine with an internal light as with the lustre of setting suns; and a dream and a glory hover round its head, as the spirits of former times, a throng of intellectual shapes, are seen retreating or advancing to the eye of memory: its streets are paved with the names of learning that can never wear out: its green quadrangles breathe the silence of thought."
Author: William Hazlitt

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